Preaching the Mormon Gospel in Remotest Australia, With Art

Australia|Preaching the Mormon Gospel in Remotest Australia, With Art

The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau. Sign up to get it by email. This week’s issue is written by Julia Bergin, who reported from the Northern Territory.

The car, driven by Mormon missionaries, trundled along the red dirt road for 90 minutes, before its driver suddenly announced that it was “time for a lesson.”

Like clockwork, the front passenger unclipped her seatbelt, turned around, and half hanging through the back seat where I sat, opened a black binder and proceeded to teach.

The subject was the “Plan of Salvation,” what Mormons see as God’s grand plan to save humanity and help it thrive. The lecturer, Sister Bonnie Jackson, was a senior Mormon missionary, but the volume she was relying on was no ordinary religious text.

This was a special Indigenous edition of the Book of Mormon.

“It’s a crossover between what is cultural for them and the message that we want to deliver,” Mrs. Jackson said, leafing through the pages of pictorialized Mormon scripture, each image painted by a local Aboriginal artist.

Mrs. Jackson and her husband, Elder Kevin Jackson, first arrived in the Australian desert 18 months ago as senior missionaries of the Mormon Church, formally known as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. The couple, who are American and in their late 60s, were among 12 Mormons posted on “bush assignment” to Alice Springs and neighboring Indigenous communities like Mulga Bore, Engawala and Atitjere.

The Mormon Church has been in Australia since 1840. Today it has over 157,000 members, more than 200 formal meeting houses, and 300-plus congregations, including a half-dozen outposts in remote Northern Territory Indigenous communities. Although populations are small — between 50 and a few hundred people — the Mormon Church has a substantial presence there.