SOURCE: https://latterdaysaintmag.com/come-follow-me-podcast-28-the-word-of-god-grew-and-multiplied-acts-10-15/
Excerpt from Meridian Magazine Podcast
Scot
Maurine and I had the immense privilege of attending the Accra Ghana Temple Dedication back in 2004. We immediately fell in love with our fellow Ghanaian saints there—but especially with one pioneer member: Joseph William “Billy” Johnson. We had the blessing of interviewing him extensively and visiting with him in his home.
Billy Johnson started his studies in 1964 by reading a tract on Joseph Smith and the first vision, and said he, “I was convinced. I believed. I felt the spirit when I read the story of Joseph Smith, especially how the Father and the Son revealed themselves to him. That moved me a great deal.”
He took his studies of the Book of Mormon with equal conviction, poring over the pages. Then, he said, “One early morning of March 1964 while I was about to get up to prepare for my daily chores, the Spirit of the Lord fell upon me. I heard a voice from heaven speaking to me saying, ‘Johnson, if you will take up my word as I will command you to your people, I will bless you and bless your land.’ Trembling in fear, I replied in tears, saying ‘Lord by thy own help, I will do whatsoever thou would command me.’
“From that day on,” said Brother Johnson, “the Spirit of the Lord constrained me to propagate the restored gospel to my people. I started door to door and performed open missionary work preaching the new message we read from the Book of Mormon.”
Unending Challenges and Trials
Maurine
As soon as he started to do this work, persecution was heaped upon him. From a distance, we might have assumed that the Church flourished as it did because the Africans were easy and receptive, able quickly to cling on to the good news of the gospel.
That wasn’t so. It was the same story that had been replayed in England and Denmark more than 100 years before. The gospel is introduced and all hell breaks loose.
“We were ridiculed and heckled by mobs who did not believe the Book of Mormon and the testimonies of Joseph Smith,” he said. They believed only the Bible and they would not accept any other book of scripture as the word of God. A lot of Churches took notice of us and started calling us names. They branded our group as an anti-Christ organization.”
Remember, at this point in 1964, Brother Johnson had not been called on a mission by the Church. No mortal has asked him to preach the gospel. He is devoting full time to a calling that he feels only within himself. He has a message that includes exclusion of the priesthood, limitation to blessings, and no church to attend.
Scot
This can’t be readily appealing. What keeps him going? He is harangued by day, but taught by night. With enormous spiritual hunger, he called upon the Lord who continually answers through his Spirit, “Here am I.”
He preached the Book of Mormon and people answered that they had read the Bible. They told him that it is the only book. He explained that the 66 books of the Bible were not all written at the same time. He reminded them that Christ had said he had other sheep. And he kept plodding along, crying to the Lord for more.
One time after he had been fasting for three days, he dreamed of walking on a plain and he looked ahead and saw two enormously heavy books. He was told, “Johnson, go carry them. Go carry them. Go carry them.” It seemed impossible to him, but he followed the instruction, picked them both up and found the books were light. “They were light,” he said, “because they supported each other. Once I saw it in a vision, I didn’t doubt any more.”
Maurine
Brother Johnson said, “Persecution became bitter, so much that we nearly gave up from the very onset, but through much prayer and fasting, we waxed strong in faith and continued to preach the gospel without flinching.”
One day at Accra Post Office Square, a religious group suddenly broke up the meeting by distributing anti-Mormon pamphlets. “They thought they could discourage us, but we were undaunted. We persisted and won the hearts of 40 people that day.”
Pleading for Direction from the Church
Won them for what? Mere scraps of information, but nothing they could model. Brother Johnson or a member of his group wrote letters to the Church, and they received kind letters of encouragement, magazines, a hymnbook and instructions about how to run a meeting. First, have an opening song. Next an opening prayer. The correspondence was continuous through the years. The plea was “Come for us.” The response, “We want to. The time is not yet.”
Scot
Brother Johnson persisted. Their church group met in a school owned by the Anglican Church who finally decided that the rate of growth of Johnson’s group was a threat to their own. The LDS group was asked to leave.
They moved their meetings to a storeroom in Brother Johnson’s house. The group outgrew it. They registered with the government. They started a primary school called the Brigham Young Educational Institute. Brother Johnson named his son Brigham. He was not a bishop so they called him the Reverend Minister Johnson. They hung on, sometimes with tears, but they hung on.
In 1969, Brother Johnson moved to Cape Coast where he established what became 10 separate congregations in the little villages that dotted the area. Their meeting houses with the odd little signs that announced themselves as The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were a motley group. The Cape Coast group met in a converted old cement warehouse. The front wall had a large painting of Christ and at the back of the podium a finely crafted and polished statue of the Angel Moroni. The tin roof leaked when it rained and Brother Johnson spent much time trying to get a government permit to fix it. Attached to the pulpit was a picture of the Bible and the Book of Mormon and the room was decorated with the pictures of Joseph Smith, the Tabernacle Choir, and other Latter-day Saint scenes. The Assin Fosu Branch met in a room of the village school building. Sekindi-Takoradi Branch met in the restaurant of the ‘branch president.’
Maurine
They had high hopes to be baptized members of the Church, but the years were long. In 1977 he was approached by no less than four denominations who tried to influence Johnson’s Church ‘with large sums of money to cause a change of our name to theirs’…In each case they knew that Mr. Johnson’s church could not have been recognized by the Church in Salt Lake because of the Church’s position in regard to the priesthood. In each case Mr. Johnson was approached by these churches telling him that the Church in Salt Lake would never recognize his congregation and that he might just as well give up hope and come and join their ranks. [One group] offered Mr. Johnson a scholarship in theology and a full time salaried position as a minister in their church. They also offered to contribute $10,000 towards the purchase of some improved facilities and equipment.
“The contingent which included a bishop, stayed in Mr. Johnson’s home for about one week. Towards the end of the week Johnson ‘decided to pray and ask the Lord to confirm that this is what he should do.’ During his supplication he heard a voice tell him, ‘Do not confuse my people,’…He immediately got up from his knees and went into his living room where at the same time the bishop of the aforementioned church also came into the living room and before Johnson could say anything himself, the bishop said that the Lord had just revealed to him that he should not persuade Mr. Johnson and his congregation to depart from their own church.”
Despite prayers answered and heavenly manifestations, sometimes Brother Johnson was discouraged. Elder Emmanuel Kissi wrote, “Whilst in anxious prayer one of those days, Johnson heard an unidentifiable voice…saying to him, “I will come and help you. Do not be discouraged. Be patient. The Church in America will help you.”
The Revelation Finally Came
Scot
Then on June 9th, 1978, Brother Johnson had difficulty sleeping, so he listened to the radio, a radio that had not been working very well of late. During the midnight broadcast of the BBC, he heard the news that the Church was going to extend the priesthood to all worthy males. The floodgates were opened. The blessings that Brother Johnson had sought for so long would now be available. He “sat there and cried.”
At a Regional Representatives seminar that same year, President Spencer W. Kimball, who had prayed so long for this revelation on the priesthood, said, “We have an obligation, a duty, a divine commission to preach the gospel to every nation and every creature…We feel that the Spirit of the Lord is brooding over the nations to prepare the way for the preaching of the gospel. Certain political events have a bearing upon the spreading of the truth, and it seems as though the Lord is moving upon the affairs of men and nations to hasten their day of readiness when leaders will permit the elect among them to receive the gospel of Jesus Christ…And what about Africa? They have waited so long already…Are they not included in the Lord’s invitation to ‘teach all nations?’ Are they not included in the utmost part of the earth?’”
At that same meeting President Kimball read a letter from Brother Johnson, “We therefore solemnly declare in the name of Jesus Christ that God has prepared the groups in Ghana for you, and we have no where else to go but forward, looking for your missionaries to help us understand the Church better.
“It is our burning desire to live by that faith and attain its standards.”
Maurine
On the day of the Ghana temple dedication, Brother Johnson said, “We will always remember what the missionaries have done for us. My heart is burning with love and appreciation. When I started preaching with the Book of Mormon, everyone said, they won’t come. Leave the Church. I said, ‘I know they will come because the Lord has told me.’”
The First Missionaries Arrive in Ghana
When the first two couples Rendell and Rachel Mabey and Ted and Janath Cannon came to Ghana, the land was in a drought, conveniences were hard to come by and food was difficult to obtain. Brother Johnson said, “I remember Elder Cannon had a characteristic movement. He was always pulling up his pants because he had lost so much weight.”
It was a rainy day in Cape Coast when the missionaries came. Since the roof was so full of holes “we could look through the ceiling and see the birds,” the rain poured through and everyone was wet. Still, nobody moved, so intent were they on hearing the gospel. “We were sitting in the room wet, and we were listening to the missionaries. They would explain things to us, and ask if we believed. We nodded, saying, ‘We believe. We love the Church. We love it. It is close to our hearts.’”
They had been taught through the Spirit, and they knew.
Scot
Of course, some things needed to be corrected. They had not ever seen a Latter-day Saint Church service so they had incorporated ideas they had seen in other churches. They had a collection plate, they used drums in their worship, they had interpreted the Word of Wisdom to mean that they could eat wheat but not oats. They changed as soon as they understood, including something that could have been sticky.
So the day of the temple dedication, Brother Johnson had “shining tears of joy.”
One night, before the Church had come, he had been weeping for a different reason. He was discouraged and pained, wondering, “Will our brothers from the West ever come for us?” Then in a dream his brother, who had died four years before Brother Johnson had found the Church came to him and said, “Do not weep. I have found your Church in this place, and I want to be baptized, but I cannot without your help.” To prove to his brother that he spoke the truth he sang for him “Come, Come Ye Saints.”
Brother Johnson said, “Temple work is the sweetest part of the Church to which my heart and soul have always clung. I want to meet my mother and father in the resurrection prepared to enter the kingdom of God.
“There is a chorus of God’s love inside every member of the Church today. We can’t express our gratitude for the blessings we have received.”
As for the future, he said, “It is time to do more missionary work. This is not the time to rest on our laurels. It’s the time to work harder so we can raise up more missionaries to spread the message of love for the world.
Maurine
I had the immense blessing of standing in line with Joseph William “Billy” Johnson as we went into the temple dedication. He said he had spent the entire night before prostrate upon the floor in fervent prayers of thanksgiving to the Lord for giving his people this temple.
I talked to him again when we came out of the Temple—and he told me that during the Hosanna shout and the singing of The Spirit of God he had seen an open vision of the hosts of the Ghanaian dead who were all in their tribal garb and awaiting their work to be done.
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