Thirty years after first visiting, Elder David O. McKay became president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1951, and soon began implementing his dream of an international college in Laie. By February 12, 1955, he stood in a cleared sugar cane field and blessed the people who would serve there and live nearby that ...this college, and the temple, and the town of Laie may become a missionary factor, influencing not thousands, not tens of thousands, but millions of people who will come seeking to know what this town and its significance are.
When President McKay made this prophecy, the prospect of millions coming to Laie seemed impossible: Laie was a rural community with a population of less than 1,000. The nearby Kahuku sugar mill was the only significant economic enterprise in the area, and the annual visitor count to Hawaii at the time was about 110,000 — compared to over six million annually today.
In September of that year the Church College of Hawaii (CCH) — which became Brigham Young University Hawaii in 1974 — opened as a junior college in temporary facilities with 153 students and 20 faculty and staff. Several years later, after hundreds of volunteer "labor missionaries" — many of them coming from the South Pacific — had built the permanent campus, President McKay dedicated the new buildings and pronounced that, among other purposes, BYU-Hawaii had been established to develop students with character and integrity, or as one man said:
... men [and women] who cannot be bought or sold, men who will scorn to violate truth, genuine gold. That is what this school is going to produce. More than that, they will be leaders. Not leaders only on this island, but everywhere. All the world is hungering for them, and, best of all, the world is recognizing them... You mark that word, and from this school, I'll tell you, will go men and women whose influence will be felt for good towards the establishment of peace internationally.
In the 1980s former BYU-Hawaii President Alton L. Wade pointed out that when President McKay made this prophecy, there were 1.36 million members of the Church, but only 82,000 of them lived outside North America. Today there are over 12 million members of the LDS Church, with over half living outside the United States and Canada.
