There's a detail in Elder Cook's talk that most people probably heard and then moved past. He's describing the arrival of English and Welsh converts to the Salt Lake Valley in 1852, and he quotes the Deseret News account: they were "sunburnt, and weather-beaten, but not forlorn; their hearts were light and buoyant, which was plainly manifest by their happy and joyful countenances."
And then thousands of Saints lined the streets near the Temple Block to welcome them. Brigham Young told them, essentially: We've been praying for you every single day.
Elder Cook follows that story with this line: "We may not welcome you with marching bands, but we pray the blessings of heaven will attend your efforts to progress along the covenant path."
That sentence is doing more work than it appears to. Read it again. He's acknowledging a gap — between what happened in 1852 and what happens now. He's not accusing anyone. He's inviting. But the gap is real, and I think it's the quiet center of everything he's trying to say.
The Arithmetic of Conversion
The numbers Elder Cook shares are staggering. Nearly 900,000 converts in 36 months. A 20 percent increase in conversion rates across multiple continents. More people joining in three years than the entire Church membership at its 110th anniversary. Those numbers represent something extraordinary happening across the earth — and they represent an enormous pastoral challenge that I don't think we've fully reckoned with.
Here's the math that should keep us up at night: if 900,000 people joined in three years, that means roughly 300,000 people a year are showing up to our wards and branches for the first time. Not as visitors. As members. As people who have made covenants. People who need to be known.
And the honest truth — the one Elder Cook is gentle about but clear about — is that we are not historically great at this part. We are good at finding. We are good at teaching. We are good at baptizing. We are less good at what comes after.
The Lord told the early Saints that the fulness of the gospel would "be proclaimed … unto the ends of the world" (Doctrine and Covenants 1:23). That prophecy is being fulfilled at an accelerating pace. But proclamation is only half the sentence. The same section says the Lord's purpose is "that every man might speak in the name of God the Lord, even the Savior of the world" (verse 20). Every man. Every woman. Every new convert sitting in the third row wondering if anyone remembers their name.
What the 1852 Saints Had That We Sometimes Don't
Think about what those English and Welsh converts walked into. They had crossed an ocean and a continent. They arrived exhausted, sunburned, carrying everything they owned. And what greeted them was not a program. It was a people. Thousands of people who had prayed for them by name, day after day, before they ever arrived.
That detail matters. Brigham Young didn't say, "We're glad you're here." He said, "Thousands of prayers have been offered up for you, day by day." The welcome wasn't manufactured in the moment. It had been built over months of genuine spiritual investment. Those converts were already loved before they were seen.
Now think about a convert in 2026. She gets baptized on a Saturday. She shows up to sacrament meeting the next day. Maybe the missionaries sit with her. Maybe someone from the Relief Society introduces themselves. Maybe — and this is the version Elder Cook is worried about — she sits alone and no one says a word. She comes back the next week and it's the same. By week four, she stops coming. And we add her to a statistic we don't talk about much.
Elder Cook referenced Elder Gong's teaching that "no one should sit alone either emotionally or spiritually." That's not a throwaway line. That's a diagnosis.
The Difference Between Welcoming and Belonging
There's a distinction I keep thinking about. Welcoming is what happens when someone walks in the door. Belonging is what happens when they feel like the room was incomplete without them. Most wards can manage a welcome. Belonging is harder, because belonging requires us to change, not just them.
When a new convert joins a ward, the adjustment isn't only theirs. It's ours. We have to make room — not just on the bench, but in our circles, in our conversations, in our assumptions about how things are done. A convert who grew up Pentecostal might worship differently than someone raised in the Church. A convert from West Africa may have questions we've never considered. A twenty-year-old who found the Church through social media may not know a single hymn but may understand grace in a way that would humble us all.
President Eyring, in his October 2024 talk, spoke about the simplicity of the doctrine of Jesus Christ — that what we teach is not complicated. Faith. Repentance. Covenants. The Holy Ghost. He also acknowledged the reality that "all of us have family members we love who are being tempted and tried." That includes our newest family members. Converts face enormous spiritual pressure in the months after baptism. The adversary knows exactly when someone is most vulnerable, and it's not before their baptism — it's after.
So when Elder Cook says "we love you; we need you; the Lord needs you," he's not just being polite. He's making a doctrinal claim. The body of Christ is literally incomplete without every person who has entered the covenant. Paul said it plainly: "The eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee" (1 Corinthians 12:21). That verse isn't about tolerance. It's about ontology. The Church is not the Church without its newest members fully present and fully engaged.
What Hastening Actually Requires of Us
We love the language of hastening. It sounds exciting. It sounds like momentum. Doctrine and Covenants 88:73 — "the Lord shall hasten his work in its time" — gets quoted frequently, and it should. But I wonder if we sometimes read that verse and think the hastening is someone else's job. The missionaries' job. The prophet's job. The Lord's job.
Elder Cook is redirecting our attention. The hastening is happening. The 900,000 are already here. The question now is not will they come but will they stay, and the answer to that question is almost entirely in our hands.
Think about the Savior's parable of the sower. The seed that fell on stony ground "had no deepness of earth" and withered under the sun (Matthew 13:5–6). We tend to read that parable as a commentary on the convert — on the quality of their soil. But what if the soil is partly us? What if the depth of earth a new member puts down roots in is shaped by how deep we let them into our lives? A ward that offers polite distance is stony ground, no matter how good its intentions.
The converts of 1852 didn't just survive in Salt Lake. They built it. They became bishops, Relief Society presidents, temple workers, pioneers in their own right. They could do that because the community that received them refused to treat them as guests. They were immediately family — with all the messiness and obligation that implies.
The One Thing
Here is what I keep coming back to. Elder Cook is an Apostle with access to data most of us never see. He knows the conversion numbers. He also knows the retention numbers. And he chose to spend his conference time not celebrating the growth — though he does celebrate it — but pleading with existing members to receive the people the Lord is sending.
That tells me something. It tells me the bottleneck in the Lord's work right now is not finding. It's not teaching. It's not even baptizing. The bottleneck is us. Our capacity to love people we don't yet know. Our willingness to make room for people whose spiritual journey looks nothing like ours. Our ability to move from welcoming to belonging.
Brigham Young told those exhausted converts in 1852 that the Saints had been commanded "to gather Israel, save the children of men by the preaching of the gospel, and prepare them for the coming of the Messiah." Three tasks. Gather. Save. Prepare. We tend to think gathering is the missionaries' work, saving is the Savior's work, and preparing is the temple's work. But all three of those things happen — or fail to happen — in a ward. In a quorum. In a ministering visit. In a text message sent on a Tuesday that says, I'm glad you're here.
Nine hundred thousand people in three years. Each one of them someone's answered prayer. Each one of them walking into our buildings sunburnt and weather-beaten, heart light and buoyant, looking for a people who have been praying for them day by day.
Have we been?