Latest from Saturday’s LDS General Conference: Apostle Holland recounts near-death trial; women’s leader stresses wearing garments

On April 6, 1830, Joseph Smith and five colleagues gathered before a small congregation of 40 or so family members, friends and followers near Fayette, New York, and formed a new religion.

On Saturday, 194 years to the day since that initial meeting, Smith’s then-fledgling faith, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, will convene yet another General Conference before a vast audience of thousands in the Conference Center in downtown Salt Lake City and stream the services to millions more around the world.

Smith’s latest successor as prophet–president, Russell M. Nelson, did not attend Saturday morning’s session in person. The 99-year-old leader, who took the church’s helm more than six years ago and has become the oldest ever to hold the top spot, hinted in a social media post Thursday that he may watch the two-day proceedings remotely and deliver — as he did last autumn while recuperating from a fall — his remarks in a recorded message.

With Nelson’s red velvet chair empty, his right-hand man, 91-year-old apostle Dallin H. Oaks, first counselor in the three-member governing First Presidency and next in line to lead the global faith of 17-plus million members, presided.

Oaks also conducted the first session and noted that, in a not-unprecedented departure from tradition, members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles would be conducting some of the other sessions.

Like Oaks, the other member of the First Presidency, Henry B. Eyring, at 90, is also a nonagenarian.

In the first order of business Saturday morning, Oaks conducted a “sustaining” in which members express their support for the faith’s top brass.

Afterward, Jared B. Larson, managing director of the church’s Auditing Department, followed the same pattern as in previous conferences, stating that “in all material respects, contributions received, expenditures made, and assets of the church … have been recorded and administered in accordance with church-approved budgets, accounting practices and policies.”

Larson pointed out that the Utah-based faith “follows the practices taught to its members of living within a budget, avoiding debt, and saving against a time of need.”

It was — as tradition has held for six decades — devoid of any dollar figures, coming at a time of increased scrutiny of the global church’s wealth and financial practices.

Latter-day Saints around the world tune in via TV, radio and the internet to these twice-yearly gatherings to receive counsel and inspiration from their top leaders. These celebrations of sermons, songs, prayers and pronouncements are the highlight of the church’s calendar and become the topic of Sunday speeches and lessons until the next conference rolls around in six months.

Here are the latest updates on talks and announcements from Saturday’s three sessions:

Apostle Ulisses Soares: Temple attendance is the ‘pinnacle of our divine connection with God’

Going to the temple “fortifies our ability to love and serve others,” apostle Ulisses Soares said, “and strengthens our souls to live in an unholy world that is increasingly dark and discouraging.”

Temple attendance is “the pinnacle of our divine connection with God,” he said, adding that it “empowers us to overcome the seeds of doubt and despair, fear and frustration, heartache and hopelessness that the enemy tries to drive deep into our hearts, especially when life is hard, trials are long or circumstances are difficult.”

Soares told church members that they can gain confidence in Jesus Christ “through humility, centering our lives on the Savior, living by the principles of the gospel of Jesus Christ, receiving the ordinances of salvation and exaltation and honoring the covenants we make with God in his holy house.”

He counseled that “all of us should” have “our next appointment scheduled with the Lord in his holy house, whether the temple is near or far away. … I assure you that having the spirit of the Lord’s house in us changes us completely.”

As the number of temples continues to swell, Soares said, it is “more important” that members “change our experience in the temple, which will transform our lives outside of the temple.”

Seventy Alexander Dushku: Not everyone will experience a ‘pillar of light’

General authority Seventy Alexander Dushku recounted the story of Joseph Smith’s “First Vision” — when the church founder said that, as a 14-year-old boy, he had a vision of God and Jesus Christ speaking to him — saying Latter-day Saints “must be wary of a spiritual trap” of expecting the same sort of experience.

“Sometimes faithful church members become discouraged and even drift away because they haven’t had overwhelming spiritual experience — because they haven’t experienced their own pillar of light,” Dushku said. “…Rather than sending us a pillar of light, the Lord sends us a ray of light, and then another, and another.”

Everyone’s experiences are different, he said. “No two people experience God’s light and truth in exactly the same way,” from “bursts of light and testimony” to “a still, small voice.”

Relief Society leader J. Anette Dennis: ‘A sacred obligation and a sacred privilege’

The wearing of sacred underwear by Latter-day Saint men and women “is both a sacred obligation and a sacred privilege,” said J. Anette Dennis, first counselor in the worldwide women’s Relief Society presidency. The “garment” (as this underclothing is known) “is deeply symbolic and points to the Savior.”

Members wear “the garment of the holy priesthood, both during temple worship and in our everyday lives,” Dennis said Saturday morning. The holy underclothing “reminds us that the Savior and the blessings of his Atonement cover us throughout our lives. As we put [it] on …. that beautiful symbol becomes a part of us.”

Some leaders have worried publicly about Latter-day Saints who don their garments only on Sunday and to the temple, rather than every day.

Dennis declared that her “willingness to wear the holy garment becomes my symbol to [Christ]. It is my own personal sign to God, not a sign to others,” she said, and expresses her “love and gratitude for my Savior, Jesus Christ, and my desire to have him with me always.”

The garment is a reminder of her covenants with God, she said. “I have symbolically put on Christ, who himself is an armor of light.”

Apostle Jeffrey Holland returns to conference, speaks of his health trials

Apostle Jeffrey R. Holland, acting president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, spoke at General Conference for the first time since October 2022 and joked about learning a “painful lesson” from that.

“That lesson is — if you don’t give an acceptable talk, you can be banned from the next several conferences,” he said. “You can see I am assigned early in the first session of this one. What you can’t see is that I am positioned on a trapdoor with a very delicate latch. If this talk doesn’t go well, I am gone again.”

Holland, 83, who spoked seated as he delivered the first talk Saturday morning, was hospitalized for six weeks this past summer, entering the hospital just after the death of his wife, Pat. He said he spent “the first four weeks of a six-week stay in and out of the intensive care unit and in and out of consciousness.”

Holland said that during the near-death encounter, he “received … an admonition to return to my ministry with more urgency, more consecration, more focus on the Savior and more faith in his word… Since that experience, I have tried to take up my cross more earnestly, with more resolve to find where I can raise an apostolic voice of both warmth and warning in the morning, during the day and into the night.

The apostle said these past months of loss and illness have filled him with “endless gratitude for the efficacy of resolute prayers — your prayers — of which I have been the beneficiary.”

He told church members that “God hears every prayer we offer and responds to each of them according to the path he has outlined for our perfection. … We should pray individually, in our families, and in congregations of all sizes.”