On Sunday, July 30th, we arose early and drove the two hours to Bibiani. We arrived just after 8:30 am. The occasion was the formation of the Hwenampori Branch. Explaining the pronunciation of this new unit is a bit difficult. It is a very light “shw” sound at the beginning represented by the Hw (Shwen-am-poor-ee). In any case, this branch was created out of the Bibiani Estates Branch and the former District Clerk was made the branch president. His name is Evans Appiah-Kubi. His first counselor is Seth K. Eduku and the clerk is Kwadwo D. Annor. All three are in their very early 30’s. Kwadwo is the only one who is married, but all have jobs and are stable financially. A good time to get married! I told them their first job is to get an Elders Quorum President and a Second Counselor in the Branch Presidency. This branch is already quite large in terms of membership so now they will need to go and reactivate some who have lost their way. Once we get the number of missionaries back up to 200, I hope to put a set of missionaries in the branch to help it grow. For now, Elder Panton and Elder Akwa (Bibiani Zone Leaders) will cover both units.

On Monday, July 31st we again gathered and played some basketball at the Mission Office.

That night we again met with the Mission Leadership Council. I really love these meetings and I can see the unity developing among the Council. Here is the agenda for that meeting.

MLC ZOOM MEETING
Time: 8:30 pm, Monday.
*Presiding: President Kunz
*Conducting: Elder Mba
*Opening Prayer: Sister Asantewaa

1. Insight from Scripture – Sister Clarke
2. Follow up from last week: What success did you have this past week in finding one serious person a day?
3. Baptismal dates: the mission just recorded the highest baptismal dates for the third week of the transfer. What did we do to achieve this ??
4. Under the section “Be One” on page 21 of Preach My Gospel, it says, “Help your mission develop a culture of unity, trust, accountability, and compassion so you can strengthen and support one another.” What can the MLC do to develop this culture in the mission?

*Closing Prayer: Elder Bryant

We ran out of time when it came to discussing item 4, so we tabled it until next week.

Tuesday we were in the Dichemso Stake Center for the combined Dichemso/Suame conference. It followed the same format as recorded in last week’s post. The Sister Training Leaders (Sister Clarke and Sister Ganjiri) gave an excellent instruction titled “The Power of the Spirit”. The requirement was to spend 30 minutes on a topic of their choice from the new Preach My Gospel. Theirs was from Chapter 4.

With these latest zone conferences, we did a review of Chapter 3 of Preach My Gospel, Second Edition. Each week we review a new chapter, so last week was Chapter 2 and this week Chapter 3. Here are the boards from all three conferences in the order we held them.

And here are the three boards from LaDawn’s instruction on the blessings of “living inside the box” of our covenants, commandments, mission rules, and spiritual promptings. LaDawn used Doctrine and Covenants 109 to identify the blessings that come to those who live righteous, temple worthy lives.

During the vision refresh, I added two new white board drawings to explain the importance of Faith in Jesus Christ. The first shows the iterative nature of the Doctrine of Christ that begins with Powerful Personal Study as the catalyst that grows our faith and then leads to repentance, baptism and the making and renewing of all covenants, and the sanctifying influence of the Holy Ghost. The second shows the continuum between Justification and Sanctification. We had an amazing discussion with the zones about how to know where we each are on that continuum and the things we need to do to progress.

In the Wednesday zone conference with Bantama, Bibiani, and Obuasi, Sister Kekula and Sister Eme, the Sister Training Leaders, presented instruction on “Seeking Christlike Attributes” from Chapter 6. Another powerful instruction!

On Thursday, Sister Asantewaa and Sister Konoekor, the University Sister Training Leaders gave an instruction on “The Two Great Commandments” which comes primarily from the 4th lesson in Chapter 3 on Becoming a Disciple of Jesus Christ as well as being mentioned in Chapter 1. Well done Sisters! (Unfortunately I forgot to take a picture of them presenting.)

Here are some additional pictures we took from each conference. The group pictures are during LaDawn’s instruction on identifying the blessings in the Kirkland Temple Dedicatory prayer.

And here are the zone pictures from the three conferences.

By the time we made it to Friday we were pretty tired (but not weary). Zone conferences start at 9:00 am and go to 4:00 pm. On Tuesday we did 8 interviews / phone checks and on Wednesday and Thursday we did 2 each day following the conferences. We handed out an additional mission phone to each missionary companionship at these conferences. We provided instruction, warning, encouragement, and maybe even threats in regards to how these phones are to be used to further their missionary purpose only. We are grateful for the desire every single missionary in the mission has to be good, do good, and increase their focus on Jesus Christ.

On Friday we traveled the short distance to the Agric building and interviewed the 12 missionaries serving in the southern part of the Bantama Zone. Everyone was on time and even early so things went well and we were able to finish by 3:00 pm. Here are pictures from those interviews.

Saturday was a bit of a recovery day, spending most of the day working on missionary letters and the weekly letter that I send to the missionaries (here is the link).

In the afternoon we went with the Pack’s and the Loveland’s to Ike’s for a nice Saturday afternoon meal. It was good, but boy were they slow!

We love these zone conferences and we love when they are over and we have delivered the messages we have felt inspired to deliver. We think we are going to try to do the Kumasi Zone Conferences on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday next time so that we have a day in between to make sure we are fresh for that last conference. Some missions hold short zone conferences of about 4 hours and then break for interviews. We bring these missionaries in from so far out that we want to maximize the time we are together. While they take a lot of energy to have 7 hours of worthwhile instruction and practice of skills, we know it is what we need to do for the Ghana Kumasi Mission. The joy of the work is overwhelming at times. We often feel like Ammon as recorded in Alma 27:17, “Now the joy of Ammon was so great even that he was full; yea, he was swallowed up in the joy of his God, even to the exhausting of his strength”. We again express our love for this work and for these missionaries who are working so hard to become disciples of Jesus Christ. We extend our witness that Jesus Christ lives and is the son of the Eternal Father. He is our Savior, our Lord, our God, and our King. How grateful we are to gather Israel one last time with Him at the helm, Together in Ghana.