LDS Leader to Foster 'Global Sisterhood'

The phone rang at 7:45 a.m. on the Monday morning after the 2002 Winter Olympics ended in an explosion of fireworks. A groggy Bonnie and Jim Parkin were still in bed.

On the line was the secretary to LDS Church President Gordon B. Hinckley, who was already hard at work. Could they meet the 91-year-old leader of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints later that morning?

Jim Parkin hung up, turned to his wife and said, "This call is about you, not me."

At 11 a.m., the Parkins were ushered into Hinckley's spacious downtown office, where the man who is considered by Mormons to be a "prophet, seer and revelator" quietly asked Bonnie Parkin to take the helm of the church's Relief Society, a women's organization of 4.9 million members.

With her acceptance, Parkin gave up the life of a Salt Lake City physician's wife, whose days were filled with gardening and grandchildren, tennis and lunches, cleaning and canning, to become a kind of jet-setting global CEO -- without pay.

Parkin is now the most powerful woman in the LDS Church (with the possible exception of Hinckley's wife, Marjorie).

But that isn't how she sees the job.

Her assignment? Merely to create a "global sisterhood" among Mormon women in every culture and circumstance.

A tall task, especially for a woman who has lived the bulk of her life in the Salt Lake Valley. Parkin was born in Murray and grew up on a farm in Herriman. She earned a bachelor's degree in elementary education and early childhood development from Utah State University. She married Jim Parkin in 1963 and later the Parkins moved to Seattle for Jim's medical residency at the University of Washington.

Returned to Utah, Bonnie Parkin raised four sons while being a PTA president and volunteering on school community councils, and for reading and tutoring programs. Her numerous ward and general church positions included the Young Women general presidency and membership on the Relief Society general board.

When Jim Parkin retired as an ear, nose and throat surgeon, he was called to serve for three years as president of the LDS England London South Mission. During the first 11 days of the assignment, Bonnie Parkin contracted a virus and lost all hearing in her right ear. It didn't slow her down.

Still, Parkin believes her experiences are universal enough to connect with Mormon women everywhere.

After all, she says, she has been single, in the workforce, had children and now grandchildren. She has seen the terrible twos and troubled teens. She has nursed a mother after a stroke and a father with cancer. She has sent sons on missions to foreign lands and welcomed daughters-in-law into her embrace. She has known farm life and school life and city life and non-American life. She has seen close-up the effects of alcohol, disbelief, illness and disappointment.

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