General Conference

This post has been a couple weeks coming. I just get easily distracted nowadays.

Twice a year, in early April and October, my church holds what is called General Conference. It is a time when our leaders gather together and give sermons on a number of topics. Mostly about living better lives, drawing closer to Christ, and the like. There are 5 sessions, each 2 hours long.

I have now taken part in General Conference in three countries; the US, Thailand and Indonesia. Our church takes great pains to make the proceedings available to all our members as quickly as possible – in most cases simultaneously through hundreds of translators working at the conference.

Well, in Asia, it is generally not simultaneous.

In Thailand, when I was a missionary, we would receive DVD copies of conference a few weeks after it was conducted. Because of that, and the fact the translation was not always that great, we didn't always watch all of it. Instead we watched a couple hours and called it good. 

Here is a picture of one of the churches I was in during conference. As you can see, it was actually a house (an awesome house, but still a house).

After ten years, technology, and the church, have made some changes.

Here in Indonesia, we still didn't watch simultaneous broadcast, but we do open the church to broadcast all 10 hours of conference. Most of it is done through satellite rather than DVD, although DVD's are available as a backup.

So on Friday night a few weeks ago, the second counselor in the branch presidency enlisted my help to get the satellite feed up and running. We kept getting the Spanish and Portuguese satellite feed rather than Indonesian.

What you see here is the finished product, not the 2 hours of tying together cables and trying channel after channel to get it. It looks so nice and organized now. (Side note: the BYU channel has some creepy yoga instructor on at 2 am Mountain Standard Time.)

The next day, we were able to watch conference on a projector.

It was a far cry from how I watched it in Thailand 10 years ago.

I also learned from last spring. Indonesian is not my native tongue, so I struggle with it. This time I downloaded conference on my laptop, which I brought with me and listened sitting in the chapel. 

Amazing how much technology can change the experience.

PS – if you are interested, one of the sermons that touched me this time around was Elder Scott's talk about the scriptures – I recommend reading it or listening to it by clicking here.