The newly formed three-man First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints gave its first joint interview to a fellow member and former journalist.
President Dallin H. Oaks, who was announced as the faith’s 18th president-prophet Tuesday, and his two counselors, apostles Henry B. Eyring and D. Todd Christofferson, sat down Wednesday with Emmy-winning reporter Jane Clayson Johnson in downtown Salt Lake City’s Relief Society Building on Temple Square.
In the initial leadership announcement, Oaks and his counselors broke with a decades-old tradition by forgoing a news conference with reporters. The Salt Lake Tribune has been requesting an interview with the new presidency.
(The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) Members of the new First Presidency — Dallin H. Oaks, Henry B. Eyring and D. Todd Christofferson — speak with award-winning journalist Jane Clayson Johnson in the Relief Society Building in Salt Lake City on Wednesday, Oct. 15, 2025.
When Johnson asked how he felt about succeeding President Russell M. Nelson, who died Sept. 27 at age 101, the 93-year-old Oaks said, “I felt that I had lost a friend. I sat by him for 41 years in the highest councils of the church, and I knew what it would mean to be in the chair he had occupied so capably. So I felt sorrow and burden.”
How does he view his role as church president?
“With great humility, a sense of incredible responsibility and with a need to try to keep up with all that leadership requires in [the church],” Oaks replied. “I view it with the assurance that the Lord will bless me as I am his worthy, active, pleading servant.”
The reporter asked Eyring if he had seen a change in Oaks since his ascension to church president.
“I really had the feeling this is not the same man I was with a day or two ago. It’s another man,” Eyring said. “There was a kind of quiet, clear knowing exactly what to do — to me it was a spiritual experience.”
(The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) President Dallin H. Oaks, left, and President D. Todd Christofferson of the First Presidency greet award-winning journalist Jane Clayson Johnson in the Relief Society Building in Salt Lake City on Wednesday, Oct. 15, 2025.
Johnson went on to ask about the role of women in a church with an all-male priesthood, the 17.5 million-member faith’s recent global growth, the leaders’ message to young Latter-day Saints, and how to respond to members who feel they “don’t fit” in the faith.
Here is what they said:
• On women: “Remember you have a Heavenly Father who loves you, who has created you to return to live with Heavenly Parents to enjoy the choicest blessings that God has for his daughters,” Oaks said. “But it doesn’t always come at once. We have work left to do, but we are a lot better off than we were even a decade ago. I think we should also say that we have not always been wise in using the great qualifications and powers of the daughters of God.”
When the church brings male and female perspectives together, “we get a better perspective,” Christofferson added. “We get closer to the divine perspective.”
“Leadership is serving,” Eyring said, “and women do that in a way that is just remarkable.”
• On why the church is growing: It offers seekers “a gospel of happiness ... and information about the purpose of life,” Oaks said. “People who subscribe to its doctrine find that it makes their life more happy, more significant, more resistant to the difficulties we all experience in mortal life, and more able to serve their fellow men and to raise their children.”
Christofferson said it is the fulfillment of Nelson’s message about gathering the “covenant people of the Earth.”
“I believe that’s what we’re seeing,” he said. “The Lord is bringing things to pass. We’re able to help, maybe on the fringes, but he is moving in his power. I see the Lord moving across the Earth and his spirit influencing people in their lives.”
• To those on the margins: “We are all children of God,” Oaks declared. “God loves them, and he has a plan for them wherever they are on the pathway toward that divine destiny.”
Eyring encouraged such members to “just pray, and you’ll have a feeling of being back from the margin and included.”
Don’t wait to “be invited off the sideline,” Christofferson counseled. “Come forward and contribute what you can to the body of Christ. Everyone is valuable. Every contribution is valuable.”
• To the next generation: “You have a Heavenly Father who loves you,” Oaks said. “... Trust in the Lord. Come and enjoy his blessings with us.”
They are born in “the most exciting time in the history of this work in this world,” Eyring said. “I promise them a glorious future, and I think that it’s already emerging.”
Christofferson warned young people that no “technology, no other recourse or source can replace the spirit. Turn to the Lord. … Jesus Christ is always the answer.”
At the end of the exchange with Johnson, all three authorities shared their faith in Jesus Christ and the church.
“Jesus Christ is the way,” said Oaks, who then read a verse from the Book of Mormon that teaches, “there shall be no other name given nor any other way nor means whereby salvation can come unto the children of men, only in and through the name of Christ.”
Eyring urged listeners to “find the peace that you’re finding such difficulty discovering in the world around you.”
Christofferson affirmed his faith in the reality of Christ’s resurrection as “the proof of his power to fulfill all of his promises.”