The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint Official New Zealand/Pacific Islands Internet Site

Elder Martin leaves a strong legacy and example of Church service

Saturday, February 20, 2010

Elder Douglas James Martin passed away on January 23, 2010, in Hamilton, New Zealand with his family at his side. He was 82. Funeral services were held on Tuesday, January 26, 2010, in the Hamilton New Zealand Stake Center. Elder Tad R. Callister, Pacific Area President, presided and spoke at the funeral.

Douglas J. Martin, to me, was in a class all by himself," said Elder Glen L. Rudd, a released member of the Seventy who served with Elder Martin in the Pacific Area Presidency. "In his positions he served faithfully and well in different assignments." "He traveled far and wide throughout the Pacific Area and gave his usual devoted attention to every matter possible," Elder Rudd said. "He was known and loved by the people in the islands as well as all of Australia and New Zealand."

Elder Martin was born in Napier, New Zealand, on April 20, 1927. When he was 3, Jesse Jamieson and George Martin adopted him into their family. As a young man, Douglas was introduced to the gospel of Jesus Christ by a Maori girl, Amelia Wati Crawford. Her example helped bring him into the Church, and the dedication of the Maori people he met in the Church helped him learn what it means to be a Latter-day Saint.

“They showed me the example of total obedience and faith in the Lord,” he recalls. They had very little in the way of material goods or education, but learning the gospel and following the Savior were much more important to these Maori members than obtaining things to make mortal life comfortable. “I think I learned obedience from those people,” Elder Martin once reflected. “I like to be obedient.” He was baptized in 1951 in a creek at Korongata, a Maori center near Hastings.

He was twenty-four years old when baptized and he went on to serve a mission before he and Wati were married. Because there was no temple in New Zealand in 1954, Douglas and Wati traveled to Hawaii, in company of a group of older Maori members, to be married in the temple. The Martins have three living sons: James, Sydney, and Douglas. Another son, Craig, drowned in childhood.

Church service was a way of life for Elder Martin. Shortly after the New Zealand Temple was dedicated in 1958, President David O. McKay called him as a sealer. During the temple’s first four years of operation, he served as temple recorder. Concurrently, he served as a bishop. He later was a counselor to two stake presidents and in 1967 was called by Thomas S Monson to serve as president of the Hamilton New Zealand Stake where he served for ten years. He was subsequently patriarch in that stake and was serving as a regional representative at the time of his call to the First Quorum of the Seventy.

“The calling was stunning. I literally didn’t sleep all that night” after receiving it, Elder Martin recalls. “I was overwhelmed.” Looking at the men in his new quorum, he said, “I feel the very least of them.” His call came just two weeks away from retirement as manager of a plastics molding plant when he was preparing to fill his spare time with some of the pastimes he enjoyed—beekeeping, gardening, fishing, wood-turning, or surfing. However, now Elder Martin was looking forward to “for the first time, completely turning his life over to the Lord.” Elder Martin always recognized the support of his wife during his years of church service. “She puts the Church first. She has a total faith” which comes from her Maori heritage, he added.

Elder Martin served two years of his five-year call in the First Quorum of the Seventy before being transferred to the the newly created Second Quorum of the Seventy in 1989. He first served as second counselor in the Phillipines/Micronesia Area presidency from 1987-88 until later that year when he became the second counselor in the Pacific Area presidency. He then served as first counselor in the Pacific Area from 1989-90, and later as president of the Pacific Area from 1990-92. After serving as a member of the Seventy, Elder Martin served as the Hamilton New Zealand Temple president, from August 1992 to September 1995.

Elder Martin leaves a strong legacy and example of prayer, fasting, scripture reading, genealogy, temple service, Church service and home teaching for his family (including 22 grandchildren and 4 great grandchildren) to remember.