Week 53: In Want of Work
Dear Loved Ones,
This week, I want to diverge from my usual week in review and talk about missionaries working with members. It never ceases to amaze me how members of the church can simultaneously hero-worship missionaries and don't want to do missionary work.
We had a correlation meeting with our ward mission leader and he told us that the Prophet is placing renewed emphasis on missionary work this year. He told us and the members assembled at this meeting that he trusted that "God is preparing" people to meet with us.
I interrupted. "Can I put a caveat on that? God doesn't prepare people to meet with us. You do."
Barring near-death experiences, your friends aren't going to come up with the desire to find religion on their own. You must prepare them.
A lot of my readership on this email is from the Tithing Hill Ward in Riverton, Utah. If you think there is no work to be done in our ward, let me give two evidences to the contrary:
1. Sydney Brown
2. Megan Foote
Both of these girls grew up within 200 feet of my house. Sydney was two years younger than me and Megan was two years older, and Sydney went to a private Lutheran school, so I wasn't close friends with them. But we played together. You might remember her as the girl whose dad drove the fire truck in the primary parade. I remember inviting her to a ward campout in elementary school and her awkwardly saying she didn't know whether she could come. My mom helped missionaries meet with her when she was ten, and that fizzled out, but she eventually joined somehow as an adult. She served a mission in Chicago, got married this Saturday, and is moving to Missouri to live near Adam-ondi-Ahman.
Sydney's main introduction to the church seems to have come through a boyfriend her senior year of high school. When I was little, I took Sydney with me to Cookie Sunday, this activity our primary did where everyone got a cookie for reciting an Article of Faith. When I was a teenager, I didn't interact with Sydney much anymore, even though she lived two doors down from my house. We had separate schools and separate worlds. But one time we had this water slide activity for Young Women's that was designed to be something we could invite people to. So I brought Sydney.
Even though she had lived within ward boundaries for years, people who lived on the same street as her (granted, River Vista is a long street) asked me if she was my cousin. No, she lives here. You've just never noticed her.
If you think there is a lack of people to be taught in your Wasatch Front ward, it's only because you don't know them. You may think you have no missionary opportunities because you aren't tripping over friends and neighbors peppering you with questions about the gospel. But why would they ever ask you those questions unprompted? Take the effort to turn strangers into acquaintances, acquaintances into friends, and then you'll have somebody to share the gospel with.
Do not give yourself a free pass out of sharing the gospel by telling yourself that missionary work is done "Over there," that you can laud loved ones who serve, plant the flag of your son's mission country on your coffee table, and regale the missionaries you invite over to dinner with tales of what you did in Argentina back in the day while ignoring the needy in your own backyard. I wish people cared half as much about sharing the gospel as they did the emblematic existence of nametag-toting college kids.
Without member help, the chronic problem in North America is too little work and too much time to do it. I served in Boise and was very starved. I imagine it's even worse in Utah. And don't limit yourself to sharing the gospel with non-members. Holding onto baptized members, people who have already made covenants, is leagues more important than trying to push it on strangers.
Our roommates, who serve in a nearby ward, follow this business model where they visit a member and ask, "Who else in the ward could we minister to?" They get a name and in that way are able to run their area without tracting. Naturally, I tried doing that as soon as I heard it, but it doesn't work in our ward. We have a bunch of elderly single people who don't socialize.
What all missionaries want, what they really want, is to help people. It's a viral misconception that missionaries only work with non-members. We want to serve the mother of five whose husband is in Afghanistan. We want to do Come Follow Me with homebound people. And most of all, we want to reignite people who are already members and bring them back to church.
If nothing else, invite your missionaries over to do chores and keep them off the streets for an hour. Everyone wants to tell us "Be safe," but nobody wants to keep us safe. I can either teach felons or I can walk in an unlit roadway on a street without sidewalks because Kansas City doesn't have those.
One time I was trying to talk an old lady into letting us do service for her and she insisted we couldn't because "you have appointments."
Um, no. A missionary workweek is seventy hours and an average week. Maybe five to seven of those weeks, in my experience, are lessons. Some are spent in meals or meetings, but most of it is tracting. Or in Utah and Idaho, trying to contact the same inactive people who have told years' worth of people that they aren't interested.
One time I did the math and figured we spent 47 hours tracting. Tracting is both the most common and least effective way of doing missionary work, especially in the winter, in the dark, in the ghetto, when people don't want to open their doors to strangers. We try anything we can think of to get ourselves off the streets at night, like popping into members' houses to share some random message or doing service for them after dark. But most people are quite capable of doing their own chores and don't need a random spiritual thought. They just ask if they can take us home, and no, they cannot. We have to work.
Strangers with stupid titles showing up on your doorstep is a rather ineffective way of convincing people to change religions, so not much happens, and that's normal. But in the winter, you can tract for hours and not talk to anybody. From 9 to 5, everyone's at work, and when the sun sets around 5:30, we get told off for knocking. My favorite is the guy who told me, "My God would not have ladies out this late."
Ours does.
Please, please give the missionaries something to do. Whether that's by preparing your own friends to meet with them someday, reaching out to less active friends, referring them to people in your ward who need service, or soliciting them to do service for you.
Sincerely,
Sister Smith
This week, I want to diverge from my usual week in review and talk about missionaries working with members. It never ceases to amaze me how members of the church can simultaneously hero-worship missionaries and don't want to do missionary work.
We had a correlation meeting with our ward mission leader and he told us that the Prophet is placing renewed emphasis on missionary work this year. He told us and the members assembled at this meeting that he trusted that "God is preparing" people to meet with us.
I interrupted. "Can I put a caveat on that? God doesn't prepare people to meet with us. You do."
Barring near-death experiences, your friends aren't going to come up with the desire to find religion on their own. You must prepare them.
A lot of my readership on this email is from the Tithing Hill Ward in Riverton, Utah. If you think there is no work to be done in our ward, let me give two evidences to the contrary:
1. Sydney Brown
2. Megan Foote
Both of these girls grew up within 200 feet of my house. Sydney was two years younger than me and Megan was two years older, and Sydney went to a private Lutheran school, so I wasn't close friends with them. But we played together. You might remember her as the girl whose dad drove the fire truck in the primary parade. I remember inviting her to a ward campout in elementary school and her awkwardly saying she didn't know whether she could come. My mom helped missionaries meet with her when she was ten, and that fizzled out, but she eventually joined somehow as an adult. She served a mission in Chicago, got married this Saturday, and is moving to Missouri to live near Adam-ondi-Ahman.
Sydney's main introduction to the church seems to have come through a boyfriend her senior year of high school. When I was little, I took Sydney with me to Cookie Sunday, this activity our primary did where everyone got a cookie for reciting an Article of Faith. When I was a teenager, I didn't interact with Sydney much anymore, even though she lived two doors down from my house. We had separate schools and separate worlds. But one time we had this water slide activity for Young Women's that was designed to be something we could invite people to. So I brought Sydney.
Even though she had lived within ward boundaries for years, people who lived on the same street as her (granted, River Vista is a long street) asked me if she was my cousin. No, she lives here. You've just never noticed her.
If you think there is a lack of people to be taught in your Wasatch Front ward, it's only because you don't know them. You may think you have no missionary opportunities because you aren't tripping over friends and neighbors peppering you with questions about the gospel. But why would they ever ask you those questions unprompted? Take the effort to turn strangers into acquaintances, acquaintances into friends, and then you'll have somebody to share the gospel with.
Do not give yourself a free pass out of sharing the gospel by telling yourself that missionary work is done "Over there," that you can laud loved ones who serve, plant the flag of your son's mission country on your coffee table, and regale the missionaries you invite over to dinner with tales of what you did in Argentina back in the day while ignoring the needy in your own backyard. I wish people cared half as much about sharing the gospel as they did the emblematic existence of nametag-toting college kids.
Without member help, the chronic problem in North America is too little work and too much time to do it. I served in Boise and was very starved. I imagine it's even worse in Utah. And don't limit yourself to sharing the gospel with non-members. Holding onto baptized members, people who have already made covenants, is leagues more important than trying to push it on strangers.
Our roommates, who serve in a nearby ward, follow this business model where they visit a member and ask, "Who else in the ward could we minister to?" They get a name and in that way are able to run their area without tracting. Naturally, I tried doing that as soon as I heard it, but it doesn't work in our ward. We have a bunch of elderly single people who don't socialize.
What all missionaries want, what they really want, is to help people. It's a viral misconception that missionaries only work with non-members. We want to serve the mother of five whose husband is in Afghanistan. We want to do Come Follow Me with homebound people. And most of all, we want to reignite people who are already members and bring them back to church.
If nothing else, invite your missionaries over to do chores and keep them off the streets for an hour. Everyone wants to tell us "Be safe," but nobody wants to keep us safe. I can either teach felons or I can walk in an unlit roadway on a street without sidewalks because Kansas City doesn't have those.
One time I was trying to talk an old lady into letting us do service for her and she insisted we couldn't because "you have appointments."
Um, no. A missionary workweek is seventy hours and an average week. Maybe five to seven of those weeks, in my experience, are lessons. Some are spent in meals or meetings, but most of it is tracting. Or in Utah and Idaho, trying to contact the same inactive people who have told years' worth of people that they aren't interested.
One time I did the math and figured we spent 47 hours tracting. Tracting is both the most common and least effective way of doing missionary work, especially in the winter, in the dark, in the ghetto, when people don't want to open their doors to strangers. We try anything we can think of to get ourselves off the streets at night, like popping into members' houses to share some random message or doing service for them after dark. But most people are quite capable of doing their own chores and don't need a random spiritual thought. They just ask if they can take us home, and no, they cannot. We have to work.
Strangers with stupid titles showing up on your doorstep is a rather ineffective way of convincing people to change religions, so not much happens, and that's normal. But in the winter, you can tract for hours and not talk to anybody. From 9 to 5, everyone's at work, and when the sun sets around 5:30, we get told off for knocking. My favorite is the guy who told me, "My God would not have ladies out this late."
Ours does.
Please, please give the missionaries something to do. Whether that's by preparing your own friends to meet with them someday, reaching out to less active friends, referring them to people in your ward who need service, or soliciting them to do service for you.
Sincerely,
Sister Smith
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