NOW THEY WANT THE CHILDREN.
The LDS Church’s Strengthening Families Conference has a children’s programme. It also has 17 new African missions launching in July 2026. That is not a coincidence.
BY JOURNALRAGE | INVESTIGATIVE DESK | MONROVIA
When the 8th Strengthening Families Conference opens at the EJS Exhibition Complex in Monrovia on June 19–20, 2026, the adults in the hall will hear speeches about family unity, moral values, and child protection. They will see keynote addresses from church elders and panel discussions on community responsibilities. They will be handed printed materials, shown curated videos, and invited to visit exhibition booths staffed by friendly representatives.
What many of them will not realize — what journalRAGE is here to make plain — is that a significant portion of what happens at that conference will not be aimed at the parents in the room.
It will be aimed at their children.
“CHILD PROTECTION” — AND WHAT COMES WITH IT
The 7th Strengthening Families Conference, held in Freetown, Sierra Leone, in June 2025, carried a formal theme: “Building Stronger Families within Communities Through Women Empowerment and Child Protection.”
Child protection. These are words that every parent, teacher, social worker, and community leader in Liberia will instinctively support. No one opposes child protection. The phrase is designed to be unopposable — and that is precisely why it is chosen.
But look at what comes with it.
At past editions of the conference, the exhibition floor has featured booths from organizations including Children Youth and Development, FamilySearch, YSA Gathering Place, BYU Pathways International, Ensign Global College, and LDS Charities. These are not neutral civic organizations offering health screenings or nutrition programmes. They are the programmatic infrastructure of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — a Utah-based institution — each one a node in a comprehensive system designed to draw children and young people into a specific religious and ideological framework, beginning as early as possible.
At the 2022 conference in Ghana, FamilySearch set up over 24 computers for a “discovery experience” for participants at the National Theatre. Consultants from the area provided the experience and were asked to pray before they came to the conference to be guided on how to identify the type of discovery experience that would touch the individual and allow the “Spirit of Elijah to touch their hearts.”
A “discovery experience.” Designed to “touch the heart.” At a family conference whose theme is child protection. In a country whose government officials had been courted by the Church in Salt Lake City.
This is not welfare provision. This is recruitment infrastructure — dressed up in the language of family safety and delivered through the open door that “child protection” creates.
THE YOUTH PROGRAMME: A FIVE-DAY IMMERSION RUNNING IN AFRICA FOR OVER A DECADE
The Strengthening Families Conference is the visible front of something much larger.
Running parallel to it — and in the same countries, through the same church infrastructure — is the For the Strength of Youth programme, known as FSY. FSY conferences are five-day events that have been held extensively outside the United States and Canada for more than a decade. They were first developed because concerned area presidencies in West Africa and Eastern Europe asked: “How do we strengthen our youth?” In those parts of the Church, youth programmes have fewer numbers, spread farther apart, and don’t have many opportunities to come together — so bringing the youth together for a week is significant.
FSY is a large, five-day event that includes devotionals, classes and activities designed to help strengthen faith in Jesus Christ and help youth have fun as they learn to apply the gospel in all aspects of their lives. Youth are taught to associate with other youth who share their beliefs, learn to receive revelation from the scriptures, and be mentored by young single adult counselors who teach and encourage them in gospel living.
The programme is explicitly modelled on Brigham Young University’s Especially for Youth programme. Its curriculum is built around LDS doctrine. Its counselors are trained LDS young adults. Its devotionals teach LDS theology. And it has been operating in West Africa — where Liberia sits — for over a decade.
In 2026, the LDS Church is rolling out an entirely new twelve-chapter FSY curriculum — one chapter for each month of the year — focused on doctrine, principles, and real-life application, with youth leaders worldwide invited to prepare children for these changes.
Liberian children who attend these programmes are not attending a neutral values education conference. They are attending a structured five-day immersion in the theology of a church headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah.
THE SCALE OF WHAT IS COMING: 17 NEW AFRICAN MISSIONS IN JULY 2026
Here is the number that every Liberian parent, teacher, and government official needs to see.
In October 2025, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints announced plans to create 55 new missions worldwide, effective July 1, 2026. Sixteen to seventeen of these will be in Africa — the most new missions ever organized in Africa in a single year, bringing the total number of missions in Africa to over 70.
July 1, 2026. Twelve days after the Monrovia conference closes.
Independent researchers who track LDS expansion have noted this is a much more aggressive national outreach strategy than the Church has historically pursued. Previous expansions typically required several established stakes and 10,000 members in the area. The new wave of missions is being created in areas with far fewer members — including Senegal, where there are 300 members in five small branches, and The Gambia, which has two branches.
By the end of 2025, over 84,000 full-time missionaries were serving worldwide — an all-time high — and convert baptisms in 2025 reached approximately 385,000, a record that surpassed the previous all-time high by nearly 55,000.
The conference opens in Monrovia in June. The new African missions deploy in July. The children’s programming is embedded in the conference floor. The FSY youth immersion events have been operating in West Africa for over a decade. This is not a sequence of unrelated events. This is a coordinated expansion strategy — and the Strengthening Families Conference in Monrovia is its advance party.
THE CHILD WHOSE STORY APPEARS ON THE CONFERENCE WEBSITE
The official website of the Strengthening Families Conference — strengthenfamily.org — carries testimonials designed to illustrate the conference’s mission.
“At just 10 years old, I was forced to work instead of going to school. My dreams of learning felt impossible. But then, a local organization supported by SFC stepped in. They not only helped me return to school…”
A ten-year-old child. Helped to return to school — by a local organization supported by this conference.
This is how the pipeline works. A vulnerable child is helped through humanitarian intervention. The assistance is real; we do not deny it. But the assistance is delivered through institutions that are, by design, nodes of a larger recruitment and indoctrination infrastructure. The child who returns to school through an SFC-supported organization is a child who is now connected to that organization, its networks, its counselors, and its curriculum. The help is genuine. The hook is also genuine.
Liberia has hundreds of thousands of children in exactly this vulnerability. Children who dropped out of school. Children in households struggling with poverty. Children whose parents are overwhelmed. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the wealthiest religious institution on earth, and it has brought its humanitarian arm — its food warehouses, its educational partnerships, its self-reliance programmes — to bear on exactly these children, in exactly these communities, in exactly the countries where it is simultaneously holding “family values” conferences and deploying new missionaries.
WHAT THEY ARE TEACHING THOSE CHILDREN
The FSY programme and the Children and Youth programme of the LDS Church are not hidden. Their curricula are published. Their doctrinal content is explicit.
The vision of the Church’s Children and Youth programme is to “strengthen the rising generation’s faith in Jesus Christ, and help children, youth and their families progress along the covenant path as they meet life’s challenges.” The programme is centred around helping children and youth grow in four areas — spiritually, physically, socially and intellectually — just as the Savior did. Within each of these areas, children and youth are encouraged to make personal goals to become more like the Savior and draw closer to Him.
This is a Christian programme. We note that plainly. But it is not a generically Christian programme. It is a specifically LDS programme, built around LDS doctrine, LDS scripture, LDS sacraments, and the specific institutional theology of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — the same theology that taught for 126 years that Black people were spiritually inferior, that formally restricted Black men and women from its temples and priesthood until 1978, and that did not repudiate the theological basis for that restriction until 2013.
It is that institution’s specific doctrine that is now being packaged as “child protection” and delivered to Monrovia in June 2026.
THE CONFERENCE THEME USES CHILDREN AS A SHIELD
The framing of the Freetown 2025 conference theme — “Women Empowerment and Child Protection” — is instructive precisely because it is so carefully constructed. It is impossible to oppose. Any journalist, civil society activist, or government official who raises questions about the conference can immediately be characterized as opposing child protection. Any parent who expresses concern can be told they are standing against their own children’s welfare.
This is not an accident of phrasing. It is a strategic communications choice that mirrors tactics used by the same network of organizations — Alliance Defending Freedom, C-Fam, Family Watch International — in campaign after campaign on multiple continents. Lead with the child. Frame every policy goal as child protection. Ensure that opposition to the policy must first overcome the optics of opposing children.
When LDS Church leaders met with the First Lady of Sierra Leone’s staff to formally propose the Freetown conference, they noted explicitly: “The First Lady’s priorities are women’s empowerment, and the protection of our young children. The Strengthening Families Conference will be a tremendous platform to show Sierra Leone’s desire to raise strong families to God.”
To raise strong families to God. Whose God? Under whose theology? With whose curriculum in the children’s exhibition hall? With whose missionaries arriving twelve days after the conference closes?
WHAT LIBERIAN PARENTS ARE NOT BEING TOLD
When a Liberian parent brings their child to the EJS Exhibition Complex on June 19–20, 2026, they will walk past booths staffed by cheerful, well-organized, and genuinely kind representatives of LDS-affiliated organizations. The food provisions will be real. The educational resources will be functional. The smiles will be sincere.
What will not be disclosed at that exhibition hall is this:
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is simultaneously the organizer of this conference, the funder of these booths, and the institution that will deploy new missionaries to Liberia’s surrounding region in July 2026, less than two weeks after the conference ends. The same institution that is presenting itself as a child protection organization is the institution whose formal doctrine teaches that children must be raised by a father who presides and a mother who nurtures — meaning that the hundreds of thousands of Liberian children being raised by single mothers are, in the theological framework of the institution at that exhibition hall, being raised in a deficient family structure.
The same institution that is offering educational support to Liberian children barred Black people from its temples for 126 years, taught that Black people bore a spiritual curse, and only reversed its theology under external pressure less than fifty years ago.
That is the institution handing educational materials to Liberian children at the EJS Exhibition Complex.
THE FASTEST GROWING RELIGIOUS EXPANSION IN AFRICAN HISTORY
The scale of what is happening cannot be overstated.
The Africa West Area of the LDS Church — which includes Liberia — already has membership exceeding 450,000 with nearly 1,700 congregations, having added multiple new missions in 2023 and 2024 alone. Seventeen new missions are being added to Africa in July 2026 — the largest single-year expansion in the Church’s African history, including in countries where there are currently only two or three branches and a few hundred members.
This is not a church modestly present in the community. This is an institution engaged in the most aggressive religious expansion strategy it has ever deployed on the African continent — using humanitarian assistance as an entry point, children’s programming as a retention tool, and high-level diplomatic cultivation of government officials as the mechanism for securing state endorsement.
The first LDS missionaries to Africa arrived in 1852. Church growth was slow for over a century because of the restriction on Black men receiving priesthood ordination. After that restriction was lifted in 1978, growth began to accelerate. What has happened since — and particularly in the last five years — is a transformation in scale and strategy that demands scrutiny from every government and civil society organization on the continent.
WHAT MUST BE ASKED BEFORE JUNE 19
journalRAGE is not calling for the conference to be banned. We are calling for transparency — the same transparency that should be required of any foreign institution seeking access to Liberian children, Liberian families, and Liberian lawmakers.
We are asking: What child-directed programming is planned for the June 19–20 conference in Monrovia? Which LDS-affiliated organizations will be on the exhibition floor, and what will they be offering to children and young people? What data — names, contact information, family details — will be collected from families who interact with those booths?
We are asking: Was the Liberian government informed that 17 new LDS missions are being deployed across Africa twelve days after this conference closes? Does the Ministry of Foreign Affairs — whose minister visited Salt Lake City in June 2024 — understand that the “humanitarian conference” she helped facilitate is the advance event in a missionary expansion strategy unprecedented in the history of the African continent?
And we are asking every Liberian parent this: When you bring your child to that exhibition hall, when you accept the educational material, when you are connected to the “local organization supported by SFC” — do you know who is at the other end of that connection? Do you know what they teach? Do you know what they have said, for 126 years, about people who look like you and your child?
THE RISING GENERATION. THEIR WORDS. OUR CHILDREN.
The LDS Church describes its global youth programme’s mission as strengthening “the rising generation.” That phrase appears across their communications, their conference materials, their children’s curricula, and their mission expansion announcements.
It is a beautiful phrase. Every Liberian parent wants to strengthen their rising generation. Every Liberian teacher, every community elder, every mother who built this country through war and Ebola and poverty wants a rising generation that is strong, educated, morally grounded, and secure.
What none of them asked for is a Utah-based institution — with a 126-year history of telling their ancestors they bore a spiritual curse — to be the one defining what strength looks like. To be the one staffing the exhibition hall. To be the one with missionaries arriving in July. To be the one whose theology decides whether their family, their household, their way of raising their children is valid or deficient.
Liberia’s rising generation belongs to Liberia. Their formation belongs to Liberian families, Liberian communities, Liberian teachers, and Liberian faith traditions, not to an expansion strategy launched from Salt Lake City and delivered to Monrovia through a conference that calls itself child protection.
journalRAGE is Liberia’s independent platform for human rights journalism. Founded in 2019, we report on the communities others choose to ignore. Secure tips: contact@journalrage.org
This is an opinion and advocacy piece consistent with journalRAGE’s editorial mission. All factual claims are sourced and documented. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was not contacted for comment prior to this draft; standard journalistic practice requires right of reply before final publication.