J. Reuben Clark - Church Service

Church Service

In June 1925, Clark was appointed to the Young Men's Mutual Improvement Association Board of the LDS Church. In April 1933, Clark was called to serve in the LDS Church as the Second Counselor in the First Presidency to Heber J. Grant. President Grant held the position in the First Presidency vacant for over a year until Clark was able to resign from his ambassadorship and resolve necessary government matters.

Clark was sustained as second counselor to Heber J. Grant on April 6, 1933. He replaced Charles W. Nibley, who had died in December 1931. This call was unusual, not only for the delay between Nibley's death and Clark's call, but also because counselors were generally selected from within the general authorities of the Church. (Clark had also never been a stake president or bishop in the church.) He immediately set out to relieve Grant of some of the unessential administrative duties he placed upon himself that became a source of fatigue.

Grant had been active in business throughout his life and encouraged his new second counselor to continue to take advantage of business and governmental opportunities whenever possible. The interests of the LDS Church would be best served, he believed, by Clark continuing to be involved in leadership endeavors outside the Church. A week after joining the First Presidency, Clark was asked to fill a position on the board of directors of the Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States headquartered in New York. Soon afterward, he was summoned to the White House by Franklin D. Roosevelt who asked him to be a delegate to the Pan-American Conference at Montevideo, Uruguay. Grant gave his approval to both of these proposals, and Clark felt duty-bound to again serve his country when it needed him.

Following October general conference in 1933, Roosevelt again tapped Clark, this time to serve on the newly formed Foreign Bondholders’ Protective Council. As the Great Depression ravaged the world’s economies, a billion dollars in US citizen-owned foreign bonds had fallen into default. Clark was asked to lead the Council’s effort in recovering money on the defaulted bonds, first as General Counsel and then as Council President.

In 1933, Clark began urging his brethren to change the welfare policy of the LDS Church, which directed members to seek assistance from the government before the Church, and adopt many of the innovative techniques instituted by Harold B. Lee of the Salt Lake Pioneer Stake to aid the Saints, such as employment coordination, operation of a farm and cannery, and the organization of jobs for stake members to refurbish and sell a Utah company’s unsold, defective products.