“The Church Building Program….schools and houses of worship rising on enchanting isles…Hawaii, Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, Tahiti, Cook Islands, besides New Zealand and Australia. The scope of the program parallels the far-flung area it embraces: a temple, five large and several small schools, a hundred and fifty chapels or more, numerous dwellings for teachers and missionaries and several mission homes. Costing millions of dollars, the Program is an operational triumph.
“But the tangible results are by no means the total accomplishment. The Program has proved to be a wellspring of spiritual values which vitally benefit the Church.
“It has called hundreds of Maori, Samoan, Tongan, Fijian, Tahitian, and Hawaiian boys on a special mission, with experienced builders from the center stakes as their teachers and guides. It has taught many of them English and all of them a trade. Their mission finished, they have returned home qualified for religious and community leadership, with a potential for good that is incalculable…”
“Yes, the Building Program is more than a construction operation—it is a spiritual phenomenon. It reflects a genius for organization and administration which has done marvels with unpaid, untrained labor. It is a far-flung force, guided by divine inspiration and powered by the humble, steadfast, indomitable faith of the selfless men and women who carry it on.”
“The Program has produced a network of new chapels and mission buildings integrated with a system of modern schools. Coordination them, it merges education and religion into a spiritual force of immeasurable scope and power.
“It reaches into primitive villages where otherwise there would be no schooling, and where Latter-day Saints have hitherto had to worship in huts. It has also entered great metropolitan cities, replacing antiquated structures and setting new and original standards of religious architecture that even the most sophisticated view with surprise and praise…”
“It clears pathways for the youth of these islands the undreamed heights. A boy from a Samoan village can start in grade school, go through to high school and earn a four-year college degree, bulwarked by an advanced testimony of the gospel. He can do it within the Mormon axis of the Pacific under the inspired guidance of the priesthood and in the sanctified atmosphere of Church institutions…”
“Never will the luster of that initial triumph be dimmed. As long as gospel lessons are taught and Christ’s ideals are cherished, as long as priesthood functions for the salvation of the living and the dead, as long as the Church endures, the glory of the original Building Program of the Pacific will shine, a splendid achievement of the human spirit, an Elias of eternal truth—mighty missionary of the Pacific.”
