Senior Missionaries Share Stories of Church History in Germany and Central Europe

Latter Day Radio, now podcasting from The Intersection of Faith & Freedom.

For two years, Elder Phil and Sister Doreen Lear had one of the best senior missionary assignments in the Church: From November 2016 to 2018, they were assigned to collect, preserve and then set up local Church history centers in the Europe West area and lived north of Frankfurt, Germany in a small village, Bad Homburg, near the Frankfurt Temple. They worked in 38 countries, collecting stories, photos, documents and artifacts from all over. They were also assigned to help local stakes and missions to set up records preservation centers in those countries. Latter Day Radio host and producer, GM Jarrard (far right, with his wife, Christie), and Elder Lear (with his wife, Doreen) were companions in the West German Mission (Frankfurt) in 1965 and 1966; the photo shown here was taken in 2017 in Geneva, Switzerland, when the Lear’s visited the area on assignment while the Jarrards were serving a short-term mission with BYU’s Kennedy Institute of International Relations at the United Nations.

This podcast combines several episodes that the Lears recorded in the KLO studios in Salt Lake City in November, 2018, right after their return; this is the second history podcast they recorded on KLO–an earlier segment is available here as well. Their report covers some pertinent historical events in Central Europe over a 100-year period of time until the fall of the Berlin Wall.