Chieko Okazaki served as first counselor in the Relief Society General Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 1990 to 1997. Effectively the second most prominent woman leader in the Church during the 1990s, Okazaki produced a substantial corpus of written work by the time of her death in 2011, and her thought presaged several key shifts in LDS discourse during the following decades. In particular, her writings suggest a distinctive ecclesiology centered not on meetinghouse worship but on a network of relationships constituted by reciprocal acts of embodied service. Network metaphors are ubiquitous in Okazaki’s writing, typically imaged in handicrafts including fishing nets, woven sandals, quilts, and, famously, the child’s game of cat’s cradle. For Okazaki, the network of embodied women’s relationships is constitutive of, not auxiliary to, the Church itself: the cat’s cradle, she observes, does not exist separately from the hand that makes it.
Okazaki’s ecclesiology is fruitfully read as a complex response to the priesthood correlation movement that shaped LDS experience from the 1960s. She shares with it a progressive anthropology that sees human nature as perfectible through education and the nurture of character; moreover, she shares its soteriological confidence in touch-based (priesthood) ordinances. But she works to counter correlation’s bureaucratic, programmatic enthusiasm in favor of spontaneous, low-resource, embodied encounters between women that can be implemented in cultures around the world; Jesus’s healing of the blind man in John 9 with nothing but spit, mud, and touch is paradigmatic. In this way, Okazaki anticipates the ecclesial transformations that would be required of global Mormonism in the 21st century.