Pair reflect LDS Nigerians' faith

With an underlying peace and dignity that ground them to the gospel of Christ, Elder Christopher N. Chukwurah and his wife, Florence, are literally as far from home as they can get, yet the embrace of fellow believers has provided a home for them in Salt Lake City.

Busy this week with responsibilities connected to the 173rd Semiannual General Conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which begins today at 10 a.m. in the Conference Center, the couple embody the rapid spread of the faith in their native Nigeria. They are among a new generation of leaders, many of them first-generation Latter-day Saints, who are taking on increasing responsibilities and helping to bridge cultures in a church whose "greatest challenge — and greatest blessing," according to President Gordon B. Hinckley, is growth.

Elder Chukwurah was sustained as an area authority seventy in 1997, and Sister Chukwurah was recently named to the Relief Society General Board — the first African woman to be so appointed.

While their service to the world-wide church has taken them temporarily away from home, the couple are well aware of the fellow church members they will one day return to. There are now more than 70,000 Latter-day Saints in Nigeria, comprising 14 stakes, 11 districts and five missions. Elder Chukwurah said he spoke Thursday with a friend who had just arrived in Salt Lake City from Aba, Nigeria, who told him the church's temple there "is at the roofing stage" now and that the projected completion date is the third quarter of 2004.

Announced during General Conference in April 2000, the building and its sister temple in Accra, Ghana — announced in February 1998 — have been long awaited by West African members, who now comprise less than one percent of the population in the region. Yet the church is "very well known in most places" there, Elder Chukwurah said. "They see our buildings because they stand out.

"It's not difficult to introduce the church to people in our part of Nigeria because it's already well-known" for the quality of its facilities and the rising temple, he said.

Yet it was not always so.

In fact, a little more than 30 years ago small groups of Nigerians had independently organized themselves into unofficial "branches" of the church after LDS literature had convinced several thousand of the faith's truthfulness. Letters from the "unofficial Saints" had been written to LDS headquarters, beginning as early as the mid 1940s, requesting that missionaries and additional resources be sent to various areas of West Africa.

'Unofficial Saints'