Quite The Week

Old Copenhagen

Senior Missionaries

As Temple Missionaries we are not part of the Danish Mission.  Our Mission President is the Temple President.  We are working with the Danish Mission in our free time and President Andersen has asked if we would join with them when they hold their conferences.  We are not on their list, so frequently they forget us; however, this week we were invited to join with them for the Senior Missionary Conference.  There are seven other couples and we enjoyed being with them. We were able to eat a lunch and a breakfast with them, and attend the National Museum as part of their agenda.  We needed to be at the Temple in the afternoons and evenings, so it was necessary to slip away after the morning sessions.  The conference ended on Thursday. 

Friday morning was the first sunny day we have had in a long time.  We went for one of our long walks around town.  We found some old streets to explore, and took a picture or two.  It’s amazing to discover streets that look as though they haven’t been touched in 300 years.  There are some, and we hope to find them all.

Saint Nikolai

Saturday was an exceptional day at the Temple.  The Young Adults of Copenhagen had a Baptismal session, for which we were in charge.  The Temple was filled at all sessions all day.  Many members traveled from Jutland, Fyn and Sweden.  We haven’t had so many in the temple in one day sense we arrived 5 months ago.  We started at 8 am with the baptismal session, which lasted for 2 hours and finished the last session at 4 pm.  We hope this is the beginning of an up swing in attendance at the Temple.

Two of the church members who are professors at the University gave lectures on 160 years of Mormonism in Denmark this weekend.  The one is a member of the Stake Presidency and is about to publish a book on the History of the Church in Denmark.  Both lectures were very “scholarly” and difficult for me to understand completely.  I did understand enough to find it very interesting.  One of the talks covered the Foundation Laws that were written in 1849, which gave the country freedom of religion (of sorts).  It dealt with our relationship with the Baptist Church in those days (the Baptists having established a precedence for allowing Christian Churches other than the State Lutheran Church (Folkekirke) to exist outside of the city of Fredericia, which was designated as a settling place in the country for Catholics, Jews and other-than-State Church religions).

After the first missionaries arrived in 1850 the Church grew rapidly to 17,000 members (not counting children under the age of 8)  all of which emigrated to Utah.  The streets in the photos today looked much the same when those Saints sailed away during the 1850’s and 1860’s, except for the up-to-date baby buggy and the father’s cell phone.

Fisher Woman

In our Sunday walk in the park we stumbled on the ice rink at the Frederiksberg Alle entrance to the park.  It was a beautiful sunny day and the skate rental facility was thriving.  The pathways were crowded with people of all ages.  It was only 4 above 0, but after such a long, bitter cold winter it felt like summer.

New Copenhagen

We love you,

Dad's Day Out

Mom's Day Out Too

Mom and Dad

Elder and Sister Larsen