When President Jeffrey R. Holland, president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, died on Dec. 27, 2025, his biography was already in the works. Following his 2023 health scare, President Holland contacted Church historian Matt Grow to document his life story.
On this episode of the Church News podcast, Grow shares how working with President Holland during their one-on-one conversations helped build his testimony of the Savior.
He is joined by guest host and fellow Church leader biographer Sheri Dew, executive vice president of Deseret Management Corp. and a former member of the Relief Society general presidency. Both highlight President Holland’s faith in Jesus Christ, his candor, his communication skills and his unfailing hope.
Listen to this episode of the Church News podcast on Apple Podcasts, Amazon, Spotify, bookshelf PLUS, YouTube or wherever you get podcasts.
Transcript:
Matt Grow: I think that’s really the message of his ministry, that we’re all going to experience those challenges. For some, it will be one thing. For others, it’ll be another thing. But with a little bit of help from those who love you, and with the faith in good things to come, this is a gospel of happy endings, right? And it’s, of course, hope centered in Jesus Christ. His talks over time, so many are about a parable of Jesus. Why? Because he wanted students to study where Jesus walked. And that hope in Jesus Christ, I would hope, would be one of the main things that people would know about President Holland.
0:53
Jon Ryan Jensen: This is Jon Ryan Jensen, editor of the Church News. Welcome to the Church News podcast. Today, we are taking you on a journey of connection as we discuss news and events of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
When President Jeffrey R. Holland, president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, died on Dec. 27, 2025, his biography was already in the works. After his health scare in 2023, President Holland reached out to Church historian Matt Grow to help capture his life story.
On this episode of the Church News podcast, Grow shares how working with President Holland during their one-on-one conversations helped build his own testimony of the Savior, Jesus Christ.
He’s joined by guest host and fellow Church leader biographer Sheri Dew, executive vice president of the Deseret Management Corp. and a former member of the Relief Society general presidency. Both highlight the late President Holland’s faith in Jesus Christ, his candor, his communication skills and his unfailing hope.
1:55
Sheri Dew: Well, Matt, I’ve been looking forward to this conversation. In fact, let me admit that I kind of elbowed some others out of the way and said, “Gee, if we’re going to interview Matt Grow about the topic that I’m going to mention, I’d sure love to have the chance to do that.” So thank you for being willing to have the conversation.
Matt Grow: Well, thank you for being the one to have it with.
2:16
Sheri Dew: Well, no, I’ve — we’re going to talk about someone that literally millions of people love and that we both love, the topic today being President Jeffrey R. Holland and his remarkable life and ministry. I don’t know how many people know, maybe it’s not very widely known yet, that you have for more than two years been working with him on his biography.
Matt Grow: Yeah, it’s been one of the great privileges of my life to do that.
2:43
Sheri Dew: So, that’s what we want to talk about, because a biographer just gains perceptions and insights and has experiences — especially with their subject, when the subject is alive, as this has been the case — just have experiences that are unique.
So that’s what we want to talk about today. We want you to talk to us about what you have learned from this very close association with President Holland.
3:06
Matt Grow: This is going to be exciting for me. It was right after he had his health crisis in August 2023, where we nearly lost him at that point, after his wife, Sister Pat Holland, had died. As he came out of that health crisis, he called me over to his condo with his children and said, “We’ve thought about a biography. I’ve thought about a biography for the past few years.” I think you had something to do with that, Sheri, in encouraging him. And he said, “Would you write my biography?” And I have never worked with someone who is living.
Sheri Dew: You’re a historian.
Matt Grow: I’m a historian. I’ve worked on Joseph Smith and Parley Pratt and Brigham Young. So I hesitated for just a minute. I mean, an amazing opportunity, but how do you capture the life of someone like him? And working with someone living is so different than working with scraps of paper that are left behind.
Sheri Dew: Right.
Matt Grow: After I finished writing those other biographies, I always thought, “Did I actually capture the man? If I could have spent a couple of hours with him, would I have written it differently?” And so, one of the amazing things is that President Holland really prioritized the writing of this biography. He wanted it written.
We met most Friday mornings for interviews over the last two and a half years of his life, so dozens and dozens of interviews. And he is just a remarkably candid person. He’s always been open about his own life over the pulpit. He shared things over the pulpit that were unusual. And it was just amazing to sit with him, because he was always candid, he was always open, he was vulnerable. He wanted to share the highlights, the lowlights, the learnings, the life as it was lived.
5:06
Sheri Dew: So, when you think about writing the biography of a prophet, seer and revelator, that’s a unique thing as well, at least for those of us who are believers and believe in prophets, seers and revelators. Doing so is a burden, and it’s a blessing. You pick up that stick, and you get both ends of the stick.
So, talk to us about the burden that you have felt and the blessing it’s been to you — if, in fact, I’m characterizing that as you’ve experienced it.
5:37
Matt Grow: I think that’s just right. For me, the key burden was, “How do you accurately, honestly, fairly capture this amazing life in a way that will pay tribute to President Holland?” But he wouldn’t want tribute paid to him. He would want people to know through his life the Lord Jesus Christ. He would want people to understand the miracles of his life. He would want people to understand what faith did for him.
And so that is a different type of work than your traditional historical work. There’s a spiritual element to it. And President Holland, he was a believer to the core. He had remarkable faith, and he wanted people to understand that faith and understand what it had done for him. So there’s both, of course, the typical work of the historian, “We’re going to read the letters, and we’re going to look at the journals, and we’re going to talk with a lot of different people, we’re going to get different perspectives.” But then there’s this spiritual aspect to it that is a burden, because you want to capture it in a way that will be fair and accurate to President Holland, but also fair and accurate to the spiritual aspects.
And an amazing blessing as well. For me to be able to sit with President Holland for dozens of hours and listen —
Sheri Dew: And ask him anything you want, right?
Matt Grow: Yeah, anything was sort of on the table. It really was. President Holland had an amazing ability to express himself verbally in writing. I sort of joke sometimes that some people, when you do an oral history with them, you better come prepared with a list of 25 questions, because you’ll ask, and they’ll give you one or two sentences, and you need the next question. President Holland, you could throw out a question, and 45 minutes later, we’re rounding around, but we’ve been to lots of amazing places along the way.
7:29
Sheri Dew: Right. I’ve heard biographers at different times be interviewed, and often they’ll be asked this question: “Well, is your biography of so-and-so, is it objective?” And I always think to myself, “Well, how could it be?” The biographer, by the very nature of the job, is that if you’re writing about somebody that is significant enough to deserve a biography — if I could put it that way — there’s probably rooms full of information, libraries full of information, and that would be the case with President Holland. Just studying all of his messages and talks and seminars, and he’s at Harvard doing this, and Claremont doing that, and Yale doing this, just that is a huge job.
So, how have you gone about the process of saying, “OK, I’m sifting through all this information, and I’m going to come up with a book that is a few hundred pages long”? Not 25 volumes, which could be written, right? Which could be written.
8:25
Matt Grow: Absolutely. Yeah, and it’s a great question. Most historians, I think, long ago gave the idea of objectivity. It’s just not possible for people to be objective about the things they write about. And I’m a believer. I believe that President Holland was an Apostle of God. So that puts me in a different space as a biographer.
But you’re right; with any history, with any biography, the selection of what you’re going to tell is paramount. Just for example, when he was president of BYU — he was president from 1980 through 1989 — there are 200 boxes of material at BYU produced as part of his presidential administration. I can’t even look at it all, much less write 10,000 pages on his time at BYU. So I think as a biographer, I’m really looking for what tells us about the person, what stories were particularly important to him, what experiences were particularly important to him. And then, what through that person can we learn about the Church? Can we learn about the broader culture? So you’re looking for those.
And working with a living individual was just amazing this way because talking with President Holland, you could sit down for two hours about BYU, and you understood that from his perspective, what were the core themes, what were the most important experiences? And then you could add to those. And it was always kind of fun when he would read a chapter and say, “Matt, you found things that I had forgotten about. I hadn’t thought about this in a long time.” So it worked both ways. As I found other records, new memories, perspectives would come to him as well.
10:12
Sheri Dew: So, give us an idea of a story or two that would be an example of the kind of thing that he thought was a reflection of how he saw his life. Does anything come to mind?
Matt Grow: Yeah, one story that I love — and this story has been told in part before, including in your work on President Hinckley — and it’s the story of how young Jeff Holland gets on his mission. And it was just his mission was so bedrock to him. And he gets on his mission. He’s had a gift of faith his whole life. His father’s kind of in and out of the Church, in and out of Church activity. His mother is a real rock when it comes to spiritual things.
And then, as he begins to date Pat Terry, she says, “I’d really like you to go on a mission.” And so he’s thinking about all these things. And at that time, you had to be 20 to go on a mission, and he’s 19. And he goes in and talks to his bishop. Then this bishop says, “I’ve heard something. The mission age might be lowered. I’m going to send you to Salt Lake. Go meet with the Missionary Department.”
So he gets on a Greyhound bus and comes up to Salt Lake from St. George, of course, where he lived. He walks into the Church Administration Building, and he gets an appointment with an assistant of the Twelve, Gordon B. Hinckley, who’s running the Missionary Department. And President Holland walks into the office and says that Elder Hinckley is surrounded by papers and applications.
And he says, “What do you want?” A little bit gruff. And he said, “Well, you know, I’m thinking about I’d maybe like to go on a mission.” He said, “Well, why do you want to go on a mission?” And in President Holland’s memory, he stumbles around a little bit, but they have a little bit of a conversation. And then Elder Hinckley says to him at the end, “Well, go get back on your bus to St. George. Don’t tell people you’re going on a mission, because you’re probably not going right now.” So he gets back on the bus, and he’s pretty deflated. But then a week later, a letter arrives from the Missionary Department, and he’s been called to Great Britain.
Now, a fun aspect of that story that he never knew about was that while he was doing the interview, Elder Hinckley was filling out a form. We have this form in the Church archives, and it has questions like, “Does the candidate appear in good physical health?” “Well, he’s got a little hay fever,” Elder Hinckley writes.
And so there’s a series of questions, and one of the questions is, “Rate this individual’s testimony of the gospel of Jesus Christ.” And Elder Hinckley writes, “Fair,” which is remarkable for those of us who who only knew President Hinckley from his public ministry, but young Jeff Holland would have said, “That’s probably a fair description at the time.” We all have to grow in our testimony. Apostolic testimonies don’t just come full grown. And it’s really on his mission that he comes to this fervent testimony of the Book of Mormon, a fervent testimony of Jesus Christ.
And so, I love that story of him because it shows him at this critical moment. It shows maybe what another record can tell us about the life. And it also, I think, shows how the Lord weaves lives together. So, Gordon B. Hinckley is going to be an enormous influence in his life, ongoing, ongoing. Throughout his life, Gordon B. Hinckley just plays such pivotal roles. And there he is meeting him when he’s 19.
And so the other little ending to that story is that he is called as one of the first 19-year-olds to go on a mission. They are thinking about changing the mission age. It was a little bit of an experiment. And they call young Jeff Holland, and then a month or two later, they announce to the Church 19-year-olds can go on a mission.
14:11
Sheri Dew: So he has, President Holland, has said many times in my earshot — and I think it’s on a public record many, many times — where he said, “No young man was ever affected by a mission any more than I was,” that kind of thing, right?
Matt Grow: Yeah, yeah.
Sheri Dew: And he talks about Marion D. Hanks as one of his mission presidents and being, of course, a companion with Elder Cook, and so forth.
Did you get an essence for what was it exactly that happened on his mission in Great Britain that seemed to flip that switch for him?
14:45
Matt Grow: Yeah. It’s a great question. And when I began the project, I said, “President Holland, tell me what kind of records you’ve kept of your life. Have you kept journals?” He said, “No, not really.” “OK.” But then it turned out that he keeps journals like I keep journals sometimes, which is he’s got a whole bunch of journals that are the first 10 pages have writing in them. But he kept a journal his first year of his mission, which does really allow us to see him growing into this testimony.
He gets to his mission at an interesting moment. The mission president he gets there with — not Marion D. Hanks yet — a man he really loved and respected, but was pushing the missionaries a lot for baptisms and baptismal numbers and incentives and created an atmosphere that was hard for a lot of the young missionaries, including young Elder Holland. And there was just a lot of pressure on the missionaries, and he felt it.
And about six months into his mission, he gets transferred to this town in England. It’s, in his memory, it’s a place where Anglican priests are trained, and they’re not very — the weather is cold. This is November and December. It’s really rainy. The reception is cold. These priests in training aren’t excited to see them. And there is literally one active member in the branch, so it’s not a branch, but there is one active member. And they’re just not having a lot of success. It’s really hard.
They go home to their apartment. There’s no central heating in the building. It’s really cold. They have one electric space heater that the landlord is complaining about because their electric bills are going up. So it’s just a cold, hard time.
Sheri Dew: Probably dreary.
Matt Grow: Dreary, just overcast and dreary. But he’s using that time to dive into the Book of Mormon. And it’s around that Christmastime — and he talks about this on a number of occasions — that he has an experience with the Book of Mormon. This is the first time he’s really read it straight through. And he just has an experience where it’s a confirming experience the book is true, this is the gospel of Jesus Christ.
And then somewhat later on his mission, Marion D. Hanks, who’s already a member of the Council of the Seventy, is sent to Great Britain as the mission president. And Marion D. Hanks is maybe the best teacher in the Church, just a renowned gospel teacher, kind of what Jeff Holland becomes. And he just has this experience where he’s able to work with President Hanks pretty closely and see his love of the Book of Mormon and see his love of the gospel.
Sheri Dew: And maybe his style of teaching, also.
17:35
Matt Grow: Yes, yeah, his style of teaching, where Marion D. Hanks could be very profound, knew the scriptures, but also funny, witty, was OK to say when he didn’t know something. So, yeah, young Elder Holland is watching his mission president and learning these lessons. And then President Hanks is just one of the great influences in his life.
17:57
Sheri Dew: Obviously, then, President Holland — again, when we think of him, we think of him as the communicator to end all communicators; just such a powerful communicator.
Now, I would say here that one of the privileges I had was from, on various occasions, working with him on different books that he wrote. And he had a pattern that was so predictable, you could set your watch by it. And that is he writes this manuscript that everybody loves, goes through all the levels of review and goes to the board, and everybody just is raving about it. And, again, you could set your watch because you knew that the call was going to come: “Sheri, I’ve just been looking at this manuscript. It’s just awful. Why haven’t you told me it’s awful? Why would you let me publish this kind of thing?” So he was always — he was never satisfied, even with his own writing.
So, I’ve thought about you the last couple of years you’ve been working on this, and I think, “Oh, pray for Matt.” Because how does anybody communicate about this remarkable communicator who was never happy with his own writing? I don’t know how he felt about others. I never heard him comment on anybody else’s, but I heard him comment on his own.
So, how did you approach that really daunting challenge, in a way?
19:18
Matt Grow: I mean, it’s just a great question. He always had an amazing gift to communicate. You can see it when he’s young and he’s writing for the school newspaper, and very early after he goes to BYU and after he graduates, he recognizes that his great gift is this ability to communicate. It’s just there from the beginning. People who hear him preach on his mission recognize this gift.
And certainly he develops it over time, but it is true that he always found faults with his own communication. It’s really remarkable. I had someone who worked closely with him said, “You know, Matt, I don’t think he’s ever been happy with a talk he’s given.” And for those of us who just love his talks.
Sheri Dew: And can quote him chapter and verse, right?
20:05
Matt Grow: Yeah, absolutely. So, after I had worked with him for just four or five months, I said, “Let me write an initial chapter. Let’s see if we’re in the same ballpark as to what we want done here.” And I gave it to him, and it was 15 or 20 pages long. The first five pages were totally rewritten, just totally marked up. And I said, “OK, President, I see that — I think we have a choice here. You can write an autobiography. And if you want to write an autobiography, I will help you in any way possible. But if this is a biography, you’ve got to let it be in someone else’s voice here, and with a communication style not quite your own.” Because his voice, you can’t replicate that voice. It’s totally unique.
And so he, over time, he became comfortable with that. But of course — and he read about two-thirds of the final book before he passed, and he would do some editing along the way. And of course, he’s a brilliant editor. And I don’t think he was capable of having a piece of paper with writing put in front of him and not to play with it a little bit. He’s just an editor at heart.
21:16
Sheri Dew: So, you’ve talked about his candor and his desire for things to feel authentic, which is part of the reason we love him. We feel like when he talks to us, he’s talking to us about real life, and that real life is messy, and real life has ups and downs.
Any examples of the experience you had with him and his candor?
21:36
Matt Grow: Yeah. One of the great examples of his candor is his first talk he gives at general conference. It’s long before he’s a general authority, so in 1982, and he’s president of BYU, and they’re looking for someone to speak in the priesthood session, a father and a son. And so they turned to Jeff Holland and his son Matt Holland, who’s 16 or 17 years old at the time.
And the talk that he gives in general conference begins with a story of him as a graduate student at Yale, and he’s in the stake presidency, and he’s doing a PhD, and they don’t have much money, and there’s just all these pressures. And he comes home one day and he’s just totally stressed out. And Pat says, “Matt’s got something he needs to tell you.” And Matt’s 4 or 5 years old, and he says, “I didn’t mind Mommy today.” And Elder Holland rebuked him, kind of loses it with him and sends him to bed without a story and a prayer. And Pat’s making it clear by her expressions that that was not what she was hoping for from the young father, from her husband.
And then he tells about this dream he has that night, and it’s this dream where Matt has been left without guidance, and someone else is giving guidance rather than his father. And he wakes up in the middle of the night and goes to Matt’s bedside and gives him a hug and says, “Fathers aren’t perfect. I’m not going to be perfect, but we’re going to do this together.” And I’m not sure if anyone’s ever begun their first general conference talk by saying, “I really lost it with my 5-year-old, but that realness, that everyday sort of quality.
And I think another of the places where his candor just really made a difference for so many people in the Church was when he talked about mental health in general conference.
Sheri Dew: For sure.
23:42
Matt Grow: And he said — he gives a lot of examples of people who have struggled with depression in the past. And everyone on that list, I think, is one of his heroes: Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill. And then he says, “I’ve struggled with depression myself.” And I think just that acknowledgement, “I’m not going to talk about depression or mental health in the abstract. I’m going to talk it because I’ve been there. I’ve lived that. I know that.”
And I think the power that that story had for Church members all across the globe, to understand that in this age where so many people struggle with depression or anxiety, there’s this man who I really admire who’s willing to say in a culture where we haven’t often, we haven’t always been willing to say that.
And so, in the book, we’ll tell that story, and it’s a really interesting one. It’s actually after he’s called as a general authority, and it’s his first year as a general authority. He’s got all sorts of concerns, this huge transition. He’s got financial concerns and concerns of, “Can I do this? Can I do this job? I’ve looked up to these men all my life. How can I be one of them?” And it just sends him to a place that’s really hard for him. And about a year into his calling as a general authority, he’s sent back to England, and that sort of lifts him out of the depression that he’d been experiencing.
25:17
Sheri Dew: He also was somewhat open in certain settings, and I may not know about all the settings, but when he was called to the Twelve, about how strongly that call hit him.
Matt Grow: Yeah.
Sheri Dew: What did he share about that with you, just about trying to grab hold of what that meant? I’ve heard him be pretty open, to some degree at least, about that.
25:47
Matt Grow: Yeah. Yeah, it’s — I think every Apostle faces that challenge, right?
Sheri Dew: Well, you’ve got to.
Matt Grow: Yeah. It’s just for people in that position, they’ve looked up to the Apostles all their lives. They’ve interacted with these men. When he walked into that room as the newest Apostle — and he’s quite a bit younger than the others; he’s in his early 50s, he’s quite a bit younger than anyone else in the room. And President Hinckley is at the door and says, “Welcome, dear friend.” And he’s known these men. He’s had this association. And just that sense of, “How do I live up to this?”
And he and Pat had spiritual experiences before that time, where they felt that a calling might come, that he might be called to give his life in that way. And if you think about the calling of the Twelve, that’s really what they’re doing. One of the — he gathers his family soon after his call and says, “We know what this means for us. We’re not going to retire. There won’t be a fun little retirement that we’ll do.” When they accept that call, they know that they will do that their entire lives, including when they’re old.
Sheri Dew: Through sickness and in health. Aging on stage.
Matt Grow: Aging on the stage, which is a hard thing to do.
Sheri Dew: But we saw him do that with just such courage.
27:27
Matt Grow: Yeah, yeah. And one of the tender things is that apostolic brotherhood. And I’m sure there’s aspects of it that are impossible to understand unless you’re in that brotherhood. But I mentioned earlier the sense of how the Lord weaves lives together. Early on in his life, he also has experiences where he’s able to work with people like James Faust and people like Howard Hunter. And so he’s worked with, he just has these experiences where as they get older, he’s able to provide that support as they’re aging on the stage.
There’s this moment at general conference, the conference before President Faust dies, and he’s really in a lot of pain, a lot of back pain. He has trouble standing. And President Holland is next to him and just holding him up during conference, and that sort of visual witness of that brotherhood that they have.
And one of the things I just loved seeing was the way that they mentored each other, the way that President Holland felt mentored by James Faust and Gordon Hinckley and Thomas Monson and Marion Hanks and Howard Hunter. And then, as I talked with newer Apostles, the way that they all talked about being mentored by Jeffrey R. Holland.
Sheri Dew: Beautiful circle.
Matt Grow: Yeah.
29:00
Sheri Dew: One of the things that is so clear in this discussion, Matt — and I think in everything that we have seen from him — is, just like you said, he talked about his own mental health to talk about mental health to everybody. He was willing to talk about those things. So that’s one of the ways he connected with people.
But then he had other gifts and ways of expressing and connecting with individuals one on one. I mentioned before we started this podcast that, since his passing, that one of the things I’ve been doing is going through old emails — thankfully, I don’t clear up all my old emails like I should — looking for any email that I still had a record of that he had sent to me. Honestly, I could publish a book of those. They are funny, they’re thoughtful, they’re smart, they’re clever, they’re inspiring. It’s all of the above, and you’ve got to have a raft of those.
But he would do things like, “Dear Kansas wind storm. Now here’s what I’m thinking about today.” So there’s that little connecting thing that says, “How does he remember that I’m from Kansas and da da da,” but he did that almost, it seemed, effortlessly.
What did you see about that, again, in his ability to just connect with it seems like anybody who crossed his path?
30:19
Matt Grow: he had a remarkable intellect, and part of that intellect was a remarkable ability to remember people’s names and details about their lives. He was able to make those connections because I think he prioritized learning about people.
It was said of his father, Frank Holland, that if you were having a bad day in St. George in the 1950s, you just needed to run into Frank Holland, because you would leave with three or four compliments and feel really good about yourself. And his son, Jeff, got that, received that gift, learned that, I think, from his dad. And so you couldn’t help but be in President Holland’s presence, but he was going to give you two or three compliments and remember details about your life.
One of the things that stood out to me — I mentioned about how he mentored the younger members of the Twelve or other general authorities — was how connected he was with their families. He connected with their parents, he connected with their kids, and he remembered the names and remembered the details, and he would ask about them.
One of the fun connections that I had with President Holland was a year ago. We were doing an oral history over Christmas, and he said, “Well, Matt, how’s your Christmas?” I said, “Oh, it was great, President.” I said, “Our daughter actually said she’s thinking of going on a mission.” And then he said, “Well, Matt, I want to talk with her.” I said, “Well, President, you’re a very busy man.” He said, “Matt, set up the appointment. I’m going to talk with her.” And so they had a wonderful talk.
And so since then, she was called to serve in Washington, D.C., Persian-speaking. And so many of the interviews after that, he said, “Matt, how’s our Persian missionary? How’s she doing?” He cared about the details of people’s lives.
Sheri Dew: It’s remarkable, really.
Matt Grow: Yeah, and he was able to communicate to you that he cared, that he was interested in your life, that he remembered the details, he was going to follow up, he was going to ask about so many of the people I spoke with. And I talked to probably 50 or 60 people besides President Holland. A common theme was people saying, “I felt like I was his best friend.” He made people feel that way. And that’s a gift.
32:39
Sheri Dew: It’s a gift. And I think anybody who knew him had that feeling at different times that, “I think he must really care about me.” But then you say, “How would that even work? Just in terms of time and space, how do you even give the feeling that he cares about so many people?” But, boy, he was able to do that in a remarkable way.
Can we learn from that?
33:00
Matt Grow: I think so. I hope so. Even if we don’t quite have his ability to remember names and details, I think that genuineness that he had. And there was a playfulness to it. “Kansas windstorm.” You see that all over the place. He just has this playfulness. He’s fun. He’s funny. You enjoy being in his presence. There’s a lightheartedness and a lightheartedness even when speaking about very serious topics. He just made it feel comfortable. So, yeah, I hope we can learn from it.
33:35
Sheri Dew: You always left feeling better, and he always left feeling, “Well, Sheri, now, if you need something, you call me.” Well, I’m not going to call him and bother him. But, “If you do need something, you call me.” Well, how many people did he say that to? It has to — because I wouldn’t claim any kind of special connection. And yet, he made me feel that way.
33:58
Matt Grow: Yeah. And he was renowned among other Church leaders for the amount of correspondence that he would answer, both email and written. He did really — and his habit of passing little notes to people, little notes of congratulations or “Hey, great job.” I think he took seriously the idea of building other people up.
34:23
Sheri Dew: I would say here that on an occasion or two, that when President Russell M. Nelson was President of the Church, that I heard him comment that — I never saw, but I heard him comment — that he had just received a note from then-Elder Holland. And in a way that the conclusion I always drew was, “And that meant something to President Nelson.” Maybe we don’t realize that the President of the Church could use a little attaboy once in a while too.
Matt Grow: Yeah.
34:54
Sheri Dew: So he, President Holland, seemed to have an uncanny ability to help a whole lot of people feel better about themselves, in a one-on-one way.
Let’s talk about the love of his life, Sister Patricia Terry Holland. What a remarkable woman. And he was just effusive and very clear, through the years, in his adoration of his wife.
I’m wondering if there’s anything you can share about conversations you might have had after she stepped across the veil and he was dealing with that huge vacuum.
35:32
Matt Grow: He had this journal entry in the late 1970s. At the time, he is commissioner of Church education. He’s doing a lot of international travel to visit Church schools, visit seminaries and institutes all over the world. And on one of those plane flights, he writes in his journal, “Pat just means everything to me. I love Pat, and I would never be able to do any part of my life without Pat. I couldn’t go on if she weren’t here.” And when I came across that journal entry, of course, Pat had been gone maybe six months at that point. And you could just tell the remarkable partnership that they’d had and this deep void that was left in his life.
And of course, they had three children together. Many people saw the funeral, where Matt and Mary and Duff gave phenomenal — and so the children and the grandchildren did lots and lots to step into that void. But you could always just tell that at the center, something was missing. And to listen to to listen to President Holland tell stories about dating Pat as teenagers and writing her on a mission, and then going in young married life together, and the different pressures and strains and things that they faced, and the real pride that he had in her as she developed some of her own gifts.
They were renowned when they were leading BYU, when he was president for what was called “The Jeff and Pat Show,” which is they would stand up at the Marriott Center, and they would go back and forth. And that was important to him. That was deliberate, because he wanted to show students what a marriage could look like. And he wanted female students to see a woman at the stand. And he wanted everyone to see this married couple at the stand, being candid about sometimes they could irritate each other, but they have this kind of fun back-and-forth that they do, but at the core of it this love for each other and this love for the gospel of Jesus Christ.
And most people don’t know that it was Pat Holland who was first called to be one of the general leaders in the Church. In the mid-1980s, she’s called into the general Young Women.
Sheri Dew: As a counselor to Ardeth Kapp.
Matt Grow: As a counselor to Ardeth Kapp, when they’re doing things like coming up with the new Young Women theme and Personal Progress and the values that defined a generation of the experiences that young women had in the Church.
38:22
Sheri Dew: I heard Ardie say on a number of occasions, Sister Kapp, that she can’t imagine that they could have come up with everything they did, with the values and everything else, had she not had Pat at her side. And Pat was a counselor for a fairly short time. I think it was two years or less.
Matt Grow: Yeah. About two years, yeah.
Sheri Dew: But during that very formative, important time, and he’s president of BYU. And so he surely talked to you about this incredible schedule. They’ve got young kids, and Pat’s coming back and forth to Salt Lake, and President Holland is then president of BYU, and, oh my, and he’s come flying back and forth to Jerusalem, dealing with trying to get the Jerusalem Center going. I mean, what did you learn as he described all of that era in their lives?
39:08
Matt Grow: It was a period of amazing progress in a lot of ways, and amazing stress. It was hard on them as they tried to balance all of these various things. And in a lot of ways, Elder and Sister Holland were very different personalities.
And one of my big regrets is that I never got to meet Sister Holland. So, we started six weeks after she had passed away. He is just so outgoing. She was a little more introverted. He’s renowned as a scriptorian, but she was — she loved.
Sheri Dew: Was his equal.
Matt Grow: She was his equal and had a gift for loving the scriptures, for feeling revelation in her own life, for communicating with students, with young women. And then later in his apostolic ministry, she’s at his side so much, testifying, teaching, building.
40:14
Sheri Dew: I have to just say that I did have the privilege of knowing Sister Holland, and she is absolutely one of the heroines in my life. I could still quote chapter and verse several things she said that I think are some of the most profound observations about Latter-day Saint women that I’ve ever heard. She was really remarkable.
And maybe do a little plug here for speeches.byu.edu. If you haven’t watched “The Jeff and Pat Show” from those years, that’s a very fun experience to watch all these messages they gave together. Sometimes it was her and then him. Sometimes they were together. But they were always joined at the hip in overseeing.
Matt, how has this experience changed you?
41:00
Matt Grow: It’s been really remarkable for me to think about how the Church operates currently, how God uses the current Apostles to spread His message throughout the world.
I’ve worked at the Church History Department for 15 years. Most of that time has been really focused more on the past, more Joseph Smith and Brigham Young and that sort of thing. But of course, at the Church History Department, we’re also trying to chronicle the contemporary history of the Church, and so to be able to really look deeply at how — well, I think I could put it this way:
One of the challenges of writing a biography of a prophet, seer and revelator is that when you write a biography, you’re looking for how that man or woman changed history. They are the actor. They are the agent. How did what they do change what happened? That’s not really the system we have at Church headquarters. Change happens as revelation comes to councils, as it comes to groups, as it comes to the quorum. And so certainly, individuals, experiences and their insights and their efforts contribute. But you can’t really say, “This general authority changed the mission age” or “This general authority did ‘Preach My Gospel.’”
And there’s different metaphors. President Holland once used a metaphor of a relay runner, and you pass the baton to the next person. Or I’ve heard another metaphor used, that it’s sort of like a glass, and you can see lots of fingerprints on a glass if you were to pass the glass around and it had a little bit of condensation, and some fingerprints would be more visible than other fingerprints. But change at the Church happens with lots of fingerprints on it, with lots of people acting, with lots of inspiration coming to groups.
The Church is governed through councils. The Council of the First Presidency, the council of the Quorum of the Twelve, the Priesthood and Family Executive Council, the Missionary Executive Council. And as these men and women get together and study problems and seek revelation. So, to me, I think that was one of the learnings.
And of course, just on a personal level, you can’t help but spend time with someone that remarkable and think, “I really should be reaching out a little bit more. I really should be remembering people’s names a little bit better. I really should be saying, ‘Great job.’ I really should be trying to have a little bit more of a profound discussion. I really should be trying to listen a little bit more to the Spirit.” I think that’s why we should try to tell the lives of these prophets, seers and revelators.
44:01
Sheri Dew: One of the things that seems really profound to me as I look at the work you’re doing and others have done is that when you examine to the best of your ability the life of a prophet, seer and revelator, you can see the Lord’s — talk about fingerprints — you can see the Lord’s fingerprints on that person, from the beginning.
I love what you said a few minutes ago about how lives intertwine and how he came into early contact with Elder Quentin Cook, how he came into early contact and had a mentor in Elder Marion D. Hanks and how important that was, and early relationships with President Hunter and President Faust that would intertwine.
But as you watch, as you look and have looked at the fingerprints of the Lord on this man who’s been training and tutoring him his whole life and bringing him along, when someone finishes reading the biography that you’ve written, what do you hope they know about him?
45:04
Matt Grow: Well, maybe I’ll say two things. President Holland was blessed with remarkable intellect. He wanted to study and learn as much as he could by scholarly means. This is a man with a PhD.
Sheri Dew: He’s smart.
Matt Grow: From Yale. And at the same time, he never saw a conflict between the best of the learning of the world and God’s truth, that they didn’t need to be irreconcilable, that all truth was one great whole. He believed that. And so I would hope that that would be one of the learnings, that this man who saw great merit in the learning of the world — certainly not all the learning of the world — that he had ultimate faith in God’s truth, that you could reconcile the learning of the world with eternal truth.
And then the second thing I would say is just hope. As we’ve thought about what to call the biography, we sort of settled on maybe the word “hope” needs to be in the title. I just love his talk — and so many people do — about “An High Priest of Good Things To Come.” And here’s this young father, and he’s got to drive his family from St. George to Connecticut, and he’s got a toddler boy and an infant girl and a young wife, and he makes it to Kanarraville two times.
Sheri Dew: Twice, yes.
Matt Grow: And President Holland loved cars, and so he told me exactly what happened with the car. And what he doesn’t tell in the general conference talk is: So, the car breaks down once, they go back, they fix it. They break down twice, they go back. And they get to Connecticut, because his mom, Alice, says, “You’re taking our car. You leave that car with us. That’ll be my car. We’ll figure it out. You take my car to Connecticut.”
Sheri Dew: I always wondered how they solved that.
47:26
Matt Grow: Yeah. And then, of course, the point of that talk is he and Sister Holland visit the same spot many decades later, and he says, “I can see the young man, and I just want to yell out, ‘Keep going. You’re going to be OK. Things are going to work out.’”
And I think that’s really the message of his ministry, that we’re all going to experience those challenges. For some, it will be one thing. For others, it’ll be another thing. The car’s going to break down twice. You’re going to have to walk back to that same farm or having left your little toddler and your baby and your wife. I’m sure that felt pretty hopeless and immensely frustrating. But with a little bit of help from those who love you — sometimes it’s the mom who gets the car — and with the faith in good things to come, this is a gospel of happy endings. This is a gospel of good things to come.
And it’s of course hope in the good things that will come in our lives, but a hope centered in Jesus Christ. You can trace the references to Jesus Christ, and we’re talking more about the Savior than we have at times in the past. And I think President Holland was one of those.
If you look at his talks over time, so many are about a parable of Jesus, so many are about — and one of the great efforts he made in his life was to get the BYU Jerusalem Center. Why? Because he wanted students to study where Jesus walked. That hope in Jesus Christ, I would hope, would be one of the main things that people would know about President Holland.
49:12
Sheri Dew: Thank you, Matt. Thank you for this conversation. I’ve just been — my mind has been just flooded as you’ve been talking about the many ways and things that President Holland did and said that changed my life, that had that kind of impact for me.
I can’t wait to read your biography and to have an opportunity to savor the impact that this leader has had on literally millions of us. Thank you so much for sharing this today, and all the best as you finish this massive project. I’m guessing there are some from the other side keenly interested in watching over and probably helping from afar.
49:59
Matt Grow: Well, you know, writing about a living person, it was so interesting because I’ve always told myself, as a historian, “Someday I’ll have to maybe talk with Parley Pratt or Joseph Smith.” And with President Holland, the feedback was a little bit more immediate. Maybe there’ll be some feedback waiting in the future as well.
And he was a big believer that the veil could be thin, that miracles happen, that communication from the Spirit happens.
50:31
Sheri Dew: He spoke about angels plenty of times.
Matt Grow: He spoke about angels plenty of times. For me, he’s just one of the great spiritual giants of this dispensation.
Sheri Dew: Thank you. Thanks for sharing your testimony, your experiences. We’re in your debt today. Thank you, Matt.
50:55
Jon Ryan Jensen: Thank you for listening to the Church News podcast. I’m your host, Church News editor Jon Ryan Jensen. I hope you learned something today about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and had your faith in the Savior increase by looking through the Church News window as a living record of the Restoration. Please subscribe, rate and review this podcast so it can be accessible to more people. And if you enjoyed the messages we shared today, please share the podcast with others. Thanks to our guests; to my producer, KellieAnn Halvorsen; and to others who make this podcast possible. Join us every week for a new episode. Find us on your favorite podcasting channels or with other news and updates about the Church on TheChurchNews.com or on the Church News app.
