Peter

Peter — the chief apostle — is the figure whose story structures the close of Feed My Sheep, Elder Jeffrey R. Holland’s MTC address to departing missionaries. Holland reads the risen Christ’s threefold “Do you love me?” / “Feed my sheep” exchange on the Galilee shore as the moment Peter “strode into eternity” and became the great apostle: the point of the three questions is that leaving the nets “was forever.” Holland uses this to charge missionaries that a mission marks an hour they cannot come back from — “you’ve left your nets, and you’re going to feed sheep” — and that “Do you love Him?” is the only foundation the work can rest on. In Holland’s telling Peter is “still the chief apostle,” the one who brings the Melchizedek priesthood and apostolic keys back in this dispensation.

Context: Simon Peter was one of Jesus’s twelve apostles in the New Testament, a Galilean fisherman who became the leader of the early Christian church after the Resurrection. The shore exchange Holland builds on is recorded in John 21.

Where this appears

• Feed My Sheep — the apostle whose “Feed my sheep” exchange with the risen Christ anchors Holland’s close on why a mission, like Peter leaving his nets, is “forever.”