The 20th and 21st century gathering to Zion: Trecking to the Temple

In the 19th-century Church members gathered to Zion by leaving their homes, and moving permanetly to a place to be gathered with the Saints.

From 1847 until the 1890s the destination was Utah.

After 1900 the Church leadership stops encouraging members to gather to Utah. In about 1915 the Church leadership explicitly asked members from Hawaii living in Utah to move back to Hawaii in preparation for a temple there.

After the Laie Temple was built in Hawaii there were some members from especially Samoa who moved to Hawaii to be near the temple. I also knew a sister whose family came into Salt Lake City by train having left Norway in about 1948 and they were gathering to Zion.

However after 1900 the gathering to Zion more and more becomes not a permanent move, but a journey to the temple, that is followed by going home.

Brother Michael J. Lantz and his wife made this joruney in the early 1970s, from Michigan to Salt Lake City, managing by dint of being open about their journey to find member homes to stay in along the way. Elder Lansing, an Area Authority Seventy from Virginia, can tell of his family's journey to the Salt Lake Temple from Richmond Virginia in the late 1950s.

I know another couple who in the early 1980s journeyed to the Salt Lake Temple from Iowa to marry, only to find the temple closed due to flooding. They had to continue their journey to Jordan River Temple to marry.

There was a president of the Sydney Temple whose family had sold their car among other things to finance going to the New Zealand Temple at its dedication. President Monson has a story of a family from Tahiti where the husband worked several years in the mines of New Caledonia to fiance the family going to the temple.

Elder Fallabella can tell of the long treck from his home in Guatemala through Mexico to get to the Mesa Temple where he was sealed to his father and his deceased mother.

Vai Sikehema's family saved money when he was young to go from Tonga to New Zealand to be sealed. They did not have enough money to go home, so for a few months his father worked shearing sheep in New Zealand.

By the time I was born the journeys were not quite as long. By the time I went to the temple as a youth we only had to drive about 4 hours each way to get to the temple.

However to this day many have to drive much, much further. Even in the mid 1990s both Brazil and Mexico had only one temple. In both countries many people would travel for days to go to the temple. When the temple opened in Aba Nigeria the first group from Camerron traveled for 60 hours one way. Looking on a map and calculating the distance it would not seem to take this long, but when you are going through muddy roads and have to push the car it can take this long.

There are lots more stories of trecking to the temple. Chile still has not gotten a second temple. Arequipa Peru still requires a long treck to the temple, and Iquitos deep in the Amzonian interior of Peru will probably require such a treck much, much longer.

While there is a temple announced for Nairobi, it will be a time of long tecking for much longer.

While the Perpetual Education Fund is the one named after the Perpetual Emmigating Fund, and it has some similar purposes, in another way it is the Temple Patron's Fund that more closely matches the goals of gathering in the 19th-century PEF. This fund allows members to contribute toward helping those members who live so far from the temple to be able to go. I would encourage all who can to contribute.