D&C 109: Breaking Off Yokes of Oppression

Kyivskaya Street is a major road that cuts through Simferopol—the city I lived in for the duration of my mission (never transferred). It’s also the setting for Part One of what I believe, without concrete evidence, is a two-part story.

Simferopol is the capital city of the Crimea, and although the entire peninsula is an East Europe tourist hub during the summer, the landlocked capital doesn’t attract as much traffic as beach resorts like Sevastopol, Yalta, and Sudak. Summers, then, meant hard work for LDS missionaries. The folks we were teaching left town for vacations; the folks we met on the streets wouldn’t be in town long; and with peak temperatures and humidity, some days there weren’t even that many folks on the streets to begin with. It was all we could do, some days, to have full conversations with anyone other than fellow missionaries.

One hot, sticky Sunday, my companions and I passed hours attempting to find anyone to speak with. We kept to the main roads, hoping they’d have more foot traffic, and passed out one or two vizitki—small cards listing the Church’s name, plus the times and address of local worship services and English classes. On the back of each vizitka we had scrawled our names and phone number. On good days we could hand out stacks of vizitki; that day was not a good day.

Exhausted, but trying to keep the faith, I saw a pedestrian yards ahead on Kyivskaya Street. I silently promised God that if the woman didn’t cross the street before we crossed paths, I would invite her to church. I slipped a vizitka into my hand and watched the woman’s figure as she approached.

When she was still a bit ahead of me, I launched into my spiel. “Hello,” I called, already extending my hand with the card. But just as the words, “We would like to invite you . . .” came out of my mouth, I lost the air in my lungs, and my knees buckled.

Now that the woman was close enough to see clearly, I noticed blood—lots of blood—flecked across her face and her forearms and her clothes and her hair. Her eyes were blank, even though she stopped and turned toward me. I almost couldn’t speak, but somehow whispered, “We would like to invite you to worship with us on Sundays,” and held the card toward her. The words felt wrong. Surely this woman needed something besides this card and this invitation. Should I ask if she needed medical assistance? Should I call the police?

But my mind froze, and inviting her to church was all I could manage. She took the card silently, and shuffled away. As she left, I turned to a nearby tree and leaned against it, too shaken to walk, too heartbroken for the dead-eyed, bloodied woman I couldn’t actually help.

Like many Utah-born Latter-day Saint missionaries, I had not previously encountered poverty, corruption, and want like what I saw on my mission. There was cultural richness, strength, and kindness too, to be sure, but like any city, Simferopol had haves and have nots—and in some ways the contrast was starker than it is in many American cities. A woman we visited monthly had lost a son to mafia crossfire. Another woman instructed us only to walk on certain floorboards because the others were broken and we’d fall to the basement (which we could see through large holes). Yet another woman lived in such filth that we couldn’t eat the jarred preserves she lovingly brought us each week.

Each time I heard a woman share stories of domestic abuse, or starvation, or homelessness, I questioned my mission. What could I, a middle-class, twenty-one-year-old American, possibly offer these women? Yes, I believed the gospel, and yes, I believed that it could bring people peace. But these women needed concrete assistance—financial support, therapy programs, housing, clothes, food. I couldn’t supply any of that.

And although I sometimes joined missionary service projects to paint orphanage playgrounds, or patch threadbare clothes, or deliver wheelchairs, I also began to question why the Church, writ large, wasn’t supplying more concrete aid either.

What’s the purpose of spiritual support when physical needs are so urgent?

Christians all over have faced the same kinds of questions I wrestled with on my mission—and most have tackled the complexities much better than I ever could. Social gospelers like Walter Rauschenbusch and Frances Willard, activists like Martin Luther King Jr. and Dorothy Day, and theologians like Gustavo Gutiérrez and Emilie Townes have insisted that Christianity must account for the poor and the oppressed. “The very name of ‘Christian,’” Rauschenbusch wrote, “would turn into an indictment if [the church] did not concern itself in the situation [of poverty] in some way.”

Alight with the drive to address social inequalities, many Christian leaders have—unwittingly—shaped a growing demographic divide. Philip Jenkins’s The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity is a must-read (and his 2007 BYU speech is a good summary) that explores the kinds of Christianity that are exploding across the world, and grapples with the reality that believers in some of the poorest places in the world do not always frame liberation the same way that Western Christians tend to. Jenkins notes that “Western Christians have since the 1960s expected that the religion of their Third World brethren would be fervently liberal, activist, and even revolutionary.”

Imagine the shock, then, when pentecostal and charismatic expressions of Christianity exploded across the Global South.¹ While many (of course not all) Western Christian thinkers were “urg[ing] the church . . . to become relevant by abandoning outmoded supernatural doctrines and moral assumptions,” demographic data indicate that “for the foreseeable future . . . the dominant theological tone of emerging world Christianity is traditionalist, orthodox, and supernatural.”

But Jenkins stresses an important point: Despite the otherworldly thrust of charismatic Christianity, “Southern World Christians [do] not avoid political activism, but they . . . become involved strictly on their own terms. While many [espouse] political liberation, they [make] it inseparable from deliverance from supernatural evil.”

There are divisions in thought, interpretations, and priorities between many of the Christians of Europe and America and the Christians of emerging churches in the Majority World. I sense that similar divisions exist within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as well. Take, for instance, debates about Church temple building. LDS temples serve tiny fractions of the world’s population, yet cost billions of dollars to build and maintain. And the service the temples provide is spiritual—not temporal—in nature. Many of the places where the Church has announced new temples have high rates of poverty, famine, and instability. Shouldn’t Church funds go toward food and shelter for all, before going to granite and stained glass for a few?

These questions are warranted. They’re urgent.

But in the wrestle that must accompany questions about the worth of temple building, I believe it is critical to incorporate global perspectives. I think, sometimes, about Emmanuel Kissi’s Walking in the Sand, in which he details his experience of the Church in Ghana—including poverty, political oppression, and profound personal loss. Yet in his description of the meeting in which Gordon Hinckley promised to build a temple in Accra, Kissi notes that “the whole congregation became jubilant, with hand clapping and cheering.” And at the temple’s dedication, Kissi says that the celestial room “was perceptibly charged with the Spirit of holiness.”

The Accra Temple meant something to the Saints of Ghana that might not exactly match what the Orem Temple means to me.

There are Latter-day Saints in the world who grew up (and still live) in societies that prioritize the oral performance of tradition; in societies where ties to ancestors hold immediate, daily importance; in societies that don’t distinguish between natural and supernatural, or between political liberation and spiritual deliverance. For these Latter-day Saints, the temple—and many other parts of Church membership—likely means something different than it means to me and to other American Saints (probably even those whose voices dominate general conference, podcasts, and even outlets like Wayfare).

Which somehow brings us to Part Two of the story I started—although, like I said, I can’t prove that these events are connected.

About a week after I’d met the bloody woman on Kyivskaya Street, I sat with my companions in the local branch building, waiting for an investigator who was running late. Our phone rang, and since I was the slightly-more-senior companion, it was my job to answer.

“Is this Sister Bates?” asked a shaky voice. I confirmed that it was. “I have your card,” the woman explained—and immediately, for no reason I can exactly pinpoint, the blood-flecked face popped into my mind. I knew I was speaking with her.

“Oh yes,” I said as I began to pace anxiously. “How can I help you?” And can I even help you? I wondered.

The woman sounded as if she were crying as she told me that she was in a barn, that she was experiencing painful drug withdrawals, that she felt she was dying.

Because I had failed her once before, I desperately wanted to help her now. “Where are you?” I begged her. “I can send someone to you—we can get you to a doctor—we can help you.” She refused, but I persisted. “No really! Just tell me where you are, and I’ll get you some help.”

“I don’t need a doctor,” the woman sobbed. “I called to ask if you would pray with me.”

My knees went weak again. At her lowest, loneliest moment, this woman wanted prayer.

I prayed over the phone with her. After amin’, I wanted to ask her, again, to let me know where she was. But her voice was calmer and quieter. She sighed and said “thank you,” then hung up the phone. For the next several days I dialed and redialed her number, but the calls never connected.

It wasn’t until years later that I learned about the cultural significance of end-of-life rites, including prayer, for many Ukrainians. Prayer for the dying offered a deliverance for the woman that I did not fully understand at the time.

I believe that the Church can—and should—commit its enormous resources to addressing the physical, medical, and temporal needs of God’s children throughout the world. I also believe, shaped in part through my phone-prayer encounter, that the Church can—and should—commit its resources to addressing the spiritual needs of God’s children.

Patterns in the growth of global Christianity seem to indicate that many people in the world hunger for Spirit as much as they hunger for food. The pockets of populations that experience the starkest oppression often tackle that oppression “on their own terms,” as Jenkins said—and sometimes those terms blur what Westerners distinguish as boundaries between physical and spiritual needs.

Temples of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have a theological foundation that uniquely positions them to be a nexus of the physical and the spiritual, and a joining of liberation and deliverance. When Joseph Smith Jr. dedicated the Kirtland Temple in 1836, he filled the dedicatory prayer with language of fighting oppression. He pleaded with God to “break off . . . [the] yoke of affliction” from a suffering, struggling people, to “have mercy . . . upon all the nations of the earth [and] upon the rulers of our land,” and to arm with power anyone who “go[es] forth from this house” to receive blessings alongside “all the poor and the meek of the earth.”

That dedicatory prayer can be, if we let it, a radical framework committing Latter-day Saint temple goers to unite in global fights against political and spiritual oppression. It can be a foundation for activism that doesn’t divide people’s temporal and spiritual needs. It can be an invitation to listen to people describe their needs “on their own terms,” to meet them where they’re at, and to take diverse viewpoints seriously. Doctrine and Covenants 109 paints the temple as an instrument of “full and complete deliverance” for anyone who suffers—not just as a place of quiet contemplation.

I still wish I could have done something concrete to help a woman who clearly needed physical assistance. But I also marvel that she kept the vizitka I gave her, and turned to it when her spirit cried out for assistance. Her face still flashes in my mind whenever I wrestle with the realities of temporal and spiritual want—and I pray that the “endowment of power” I received, and renew in the temple, can help me break off yokes of all kinds of oppression.

Greer Bates Cordner is a Ph.D. candidate in American religious history at Boston University School of Theology.

Art by Carly White.

1. Harvey Cox explored his own version of this shock, and the ways that a Brazilian Pentecostal woman challenged his views, in Fire from Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-First Century (Da Capo Press, 2001), 163–68.