I’ve done a few blog posts at By Common Consent about my mission here, here, and here. One discussion point is that my mission was following the Alvin Dyer Challenging & Testifying Missionary approach, a controversial approach that created high baptism rates followed by low retention rates. It’s an approach that was unique at that time (1989-90) in Europe in our newly formed mission in the Canary Islands and Azores. It had gone out of fashion, but our president liked it, and we used it.
By contrast, missionary friends in other places in Europe had a lot of hurdles to take investigators over before they could be baptized. Sometimes when I would share a story of a person we taught who was baptized, my friends serving elsewhere would sputter “But how did you get them ready? How did they have time to go to church twice first? How did you get through all the discussions?” That wasn’t a requirement in my mission, and it didn’t occur to me (based on how we were taught to work) that it would be necessary or important.
For those unfamiliar with the Challenging & Testifying Missionary approach, here’s a link to the talk it is based on. We were given a copy of the talk upon arriving in the mission, and we were told to refer to it often as a way to motivate ourselves and re-center if we were struggling. I was excited that Dyer’s own mission experience took place in my native Lancaster, PA.
Here are some of the quotes I found that most resonated for me when I was a missionary, with some explanation of what they meant in practice, and a few that were perhaps on somewhat shaky ground:
The more I see of people coming into the Church, and I have seen many thousands I see the reality of this one thing that the Lord knows who He wants in the Church. This has been determined beforehand and there isn’t much that you and I can do to destroy that.
This was a huge contrast to some other missions where success was considered a byproduct of missionary obedience. That was not a misconception under which our mission was laboring. I jest–a little. Yes, we had some missionaries who were a little bit lax, but for the most part, people were trying to obey the rules that mattered. We didn’t consider the rules to be a path to success, just a way to keep missionaries safe and worthy. Frankly, we had a lot of autonomy working on islands with little oversight, and how individuals interpreted the rules was often fairly loose.
You could interpret Dyer’s statement to be determinism, and maybe some did, but I think most of us viewed it as people having their own agency to choose to join or not, and that we should invite everyone and if they were interested, we’d keep going with them. We starting talking about baptism as early as we could, and if they didn’t progress, we’d move on.
One of the most difficult things to remember is that this matter of teaching by the spirit is the special talent that a missionary has been given, and unless he uses it in testifying of the truth, he may lose it. And when he once loses it he may never get it back again. There is no other talent the missionary has to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ other than to testify of it by the spirit. . . . I know in my heart that we have not sold this idea of testifying by the spirit fully to the missionary. I don’t believe our missionaries as a whole are teaching this way. We have learned the catchword of “teaching by the spirit” but we do not do it. We teach by our knowledge and this is often confusing to the people.
We were very focused on the idea of teaching with the spirit rather than teaching the discussions exactly as written. We would hit on the majority of the points, but we were constantly distilling the discussions into a set of objectives, the 2-3 main things we had to get across, and the purpose was to keep the person progressing to the next step or to determine they weren’t interested in going on. Sometimes, we would teach them in a different order if it just felt right in the moment. We had a lot of ambiguity and freedom. It’s probably one reason I’ve never been a fan of following a correlated lesson methodologically.
You actually do not know when you go to a door whom the Lord has prepared for the gospel. You must approach each door with the idea that here is where people who are prepared for the gospel live. You must do it without fail at every home because you do not know if these people have been chosen by the Lord.
Again, this idea that every door is a potential sale baptism was something very powerful at getting us through our fear. The longer you delay asking someone if they want to be baptized, the less likely you will ever get the chance. We often brought it up at the door, not just in the second discussion. For us, the idea that some people were ready and others were not was also very freeing. You didn’t have to really create or prepare new church members, just find them. And if they didn’t progress, they weren’t the ones God had prepared.
The missionary often says, “We have met the most wonderful family today and we are going to challenge them Wednesday.” How do you know you are going to Wednesday? Why didn’t You challenge them last night? Know more about what? Do you think you can teach a testimony? Can you analyze your own testimony of the gospel? Try and do it. Try and explain why you think Jesus is the Son of God. You will never explain it by physical reasoning. Where do you get the knowledge to say “I know Jesus is the Son of God?” John said, “Of this no man needs teaching.” The gospel of Jesus Christ is not knowledge. When people say they are glad to have a knowledge of Jesus they speak in what we call a manner of speech. The gospel is a feeling. It is controlled and governed by the power of the Holy Ghost, and this great personage has been assigned to administer the gifts and the spiritual powers of this life and you cannot and never will be able to take the place of this power as it ministers unto and influences people.
As I look through my mission journal, we focused a lot on whether we felt like we had brought the spirit into the discussion. Sometimes we just didn’t feel it; we could generally agree when it wasn’t there and when it was, regardless of what investigators decided to do. I don’t think we felt bad about it when we weren’t successful at bringing it into the discussion; we just tried again. I read one particular passage in my journal that was about this experience where there were 2 elders and my comp & me. We tried, we taught the same things, but we just weren’t feeling it. We didn’t know why, but because of our focus on the Challenging & Testifying Missionary, my assumption was that these just weren’t people who were ready. We didn’t assume it was our fault or because we were bad missionaries. We’d get frustrated when it felt like a waste of time, but that wasn’t the same thing as internalizing it or feeling guilty.
I don’t believe that all who come into the Church are going to stay in and there will be many spin off because they were not able to sustain their conversion, which more than likely has been a doctrinal and not a spiritual conversion. Here is the right slant of missionary work. Dogmatic instructions tend only to confuse.
In practice, this aspect of the approach meant we as missionaries were off the hook for what happened with the people we baptized afterward. For some, that meant baptizing people they knew would never stick with it, such as sailors in the port who were leaving that week and didn’t live there, but sort of assuming/justifying that the baptism was still a positive step in the overall journey of the person’s life.
There were plenty of us, though, who really did want people to stay in the church, but in this case the nature of our specific mission rules & culture made it difficult for us to facilitate retention. We had a rule that missionaries could only attend church if they had investigators with them. Otherwise, you were kicked out by the Zone Leaders. In my case, there was one area where my trainee & I had not been to church for six weeks, and then we came one Sunday with two families to be baptized. As soon as they were baptized, we were once more not allowed to attend church. One family stayed active and the other did not (although they probably wouldn’t have anyway). The members were frustrated with us for not attending, although we would visit them during the week. They felt the pressure of having new converts they hadn’t met just dumped on their doorstep.
I was just talking with a fellow missionary at a reunion about how crazy that rule was. The running joke in our mission was: “The only time I was inactive in the church was on my mission.” I mentioned that I kept writing to president about how this rule was terrible, and eventually it did get changed, but much later than my letters. This other missionary said that I probably had two mistaken assumptions: 1) that our President was the one who created the rule (rather than the APs or ZLs), and 2) that President actually read my letters. Oy! Good points.
I am convinced that we keep people out of the church. I can tell by the look on some of your faces that this goes against the grain. You still like it nice and easy, where you go in and teach the lessons. Teach by the spirit when you go into the home, and have the spirit so strong it comes out of your fingers and they feel it so strong they say, “I know what you say is true.” You can teach all six lessons in 10 minutes when they say that.
I’m not sure anyone actually taught all six discussions (at the time) in 10 minutes, but we also didn’t do them over a period of 6 weeks. When my parents went through the discussions there were 52 weekly discussions before baptism. We were teaching all 6 discussions in 1-2 weeks usually, and sometimes we taught 3-6 after baptism.
There was probably a bit of a “coffee’s for closers” mentality in the mission, too, as a result. If you were baptizing, you could relax in other areas, and those who weren’t baptizing were just not willing to do what you were doing. I wouldn’t say everyone felt that way, but there were some who got very caught up in what we called “the yellow sheet” which was the monthly newsletter showing who had baptized for how many months. If you ever went a month without baptizing, you would fall off the sheet and had to start from scratch again, just like an OSHA violation in a manufacturing plant: “0 days incident free!”
For those in leadership roles, not baptizing might mean being bumped back down in rank. Since I was a sister, leadership roles were not relevant. We were trainers or senior companions, but not eligible for leadership positions. Even so, a few of my companions were very focused on their placement in those rankings. Others were pretty rebelliously cavalier about them. I was kind of agnostic about them. It was great to feel like you were making a difference, but the rankings were just about how other missionaries saw you.
I know missionaries who cling to the idea that they can’t be baptized until they know what they are being baptized for. You teach about the Godhead and the apostasy. Often they don’t know what you are talking about. . . . Now these lessons are important. I’m not saying they are not. When people are baptized they have an eagerness to learn everything about the Church. . . . I was telling the president about a fine attorney we baptized recently. He got his testimony the first night. Here is a man who stands before the judgement bar and argues cases, but he got a different feeling that night. The attorney said he knew that Joseph Smith was prophet by the way the missionary said it. The missionary said, “We’ll get him after the third lesson,” and they did. This man had the stamina to withstand the three lessons. He said, “I didn’t know that they were talking about. The only desire I had was to get into the Church.
In practice this meant that the focus was not on content in the teaching, just on creating a feeling and then asking them to be baptized and join the church. On the one hand, it was a humbling message to the missionaries to point out that there was precious little they were going to “teach” these people who were much older and often wiser than they were. The focus was on seeing everyone as having great potential, and then inviting them.
We are preparing people to be leaders in the worlds that will follow this one. Do you suppose He will have to change the man or woman that He wants to prepare to be a future king and queen in some other world? That is ridiculous. This is God’s work. Our work is to help Him get people into the Church.
Now, of course, there are a few issues with this approach that are probably obvious to most of us.
- Lack of coordination with the local members / wards which led to lower retention.
- A bit of “used car salesman” Glengarry Glen Ross style Zone meetings. And these were definitely the norm (minus most of the language, although I do recall one ZL suggesting that we “reach down to see if we had some balls” given poor results). Mostly I laughed this stuff off because they were being idiots.
- So-called “baseball baptism” approaches in some cases (“port” baptisms were more common in our islands mission), but these issues were probably mostly driven by having a numbers focus that was solely measured by baptisms and not retention or growth. The lack of responsibility among missionaries for retention was reinforced by the statement that some people just won’t stay active. It wasn’t something people felt was in their control, which it’s not, but we could have done a better job at hand-offs.
That was my experience as a missionary anyway, and the funny thing is that as a result, I have found that I’m actually pretty good at sales, although I avoid the slimy tactics that I saw from time to time. In a mission skit at a conference, some elders did a funny but telling sketch in which they were teaching an investigator as if it really was a used car sale.
ELDER: We’ve got a great Celestial Kingdom plan for you that comes with baptism. What do you think?
INVESTIGATOR: Well, I’m not ready to give up smoking.
ELDER: That’s totally fine. We’ve got another package called our Terrestrial Kingdom package. And guess what–that also comes with baptism!
INVESTIGATOR: Well, that sounds good, but I’m not so sure about giving up sex with my girlfriend.
ELDER: No problem! There’s a package that’s just right for you. It’s our Telestial Kingdom package. That also comes with baptism. So what’s it going to take to put you in a font today?
It was an effective skit at getting the point across, taking a swipe at some of the tactics that were used. For those of you who served missions, let’s hear about your experience:
- Did you use the Challenging & Testifying Missionary or some other approach? What were the pros & cons of the approach?
- What do you think would be the ideal approach for missionaries to avoid some of the pitfalls? If you were a mission president, how would you avoid the issues you saw as a missionary? What numbers would you measure?
- Do programs like this work or simply create a scorched earth effect for future missionaries?
- Did you see yourself as primarily a teacher, a salesperson, a therapist or something else?
- Did leaders in your mission push the numbers too much or get caught up because of the need to have successful results or did they avoid that? Did the sisters stay out of the fray because they weren’t considered eligible for leadership?
Discuss.
Wheat & Tares 
My mission was stateside in the early 80’s. We didn’t use the Challenging and Testifying program. I heard of some missionaries coming home to wards I served in where they tried an approach of just leaning on the members to get referrals and didn’t tract at all. That sounded SO nice to me as I mainly remember my mission as days full of knocking on doors in the heat (sometimes >100 degrees) with no success. After a year or so, that turned into not something that I even felt was going to give fruit, but became a bit like the Geico commercial – “It’s what you do.” Towards the end (and in the middle of the summer) I think I was more inspired to tract where I knew members were and we could stop for a few minutes and get a drink. But then again, I just heard in conference we are supposed to go with the first thought that comes into our mind. So now I don’t even feel guilty for that (other than taking some time from members that I am sure were busy).
I can’t even fathom being a mission president, so I can’t even think of what I would do. I take that back. I would get kicked out as a mission president as I would turn the mission into a “service first, second, and third and proselyting a distant fourth.”
I would say I saw myself as a cold-call salesperson. Which is NOT my personality. But I am grateful that this made me build some muscle in this area where I could do things that I didn’t feel I could do.
I certainly remember numbers being important, but was more frustrated with the “Elder, pray for a goal for the # of baptisms” and no matter what I came up with
Reading this made me feel ill.
European mission. “Tracting” door to door; no other proselyting activity permitted during most of my mission. “Important” statistic: proselyting hours. Result, e.g.: a week in which my temporary companion had 70 proselyting hours without doing any proselyting I hadn’t done in 50. (I wondered which of us couldn’t count and decided I didn’t care.) Most memorable statistic: 3 weeks of “tracting” 14 hours/day without the opportunity to say more than “we are” before the door closed (if it had ever opened at all). Challenging & Testifying was out of the question — both lack of opportunity and the Church there still dealing with hundreds of “members” on the books who had no real connection to or interest in the Church and at least some of whom didn’t know they were members.
Still worth it for the few I taught and the value of the Church in their lives, for the dedicated members I met, for the eye-opening experiences, personal growth, and mostly for lasting and significant friendships.
I served in Chile Santiago North from January 05 to January 07. My second mission president, the now Elder Kevin R. Duncan, gave us a redacted version of the Challenging & Testifying Missionary. His purpose with that was to help us want to actually baptize again. You see, Chile had a huge inactive problem due to “baseball baptisms” in the 80’s and 90’s and Elder Holland, when he was the area president in the early 2000’s, had reoriented the missionaries to be more focused on reactivation/retention efforts. When I got there, we were still focused on that and were actually nervous about baptizing people, fearing they would go less active and we would damage the local church and their souls. With the introduction of this talk into the mission, President Duncan told us the time for reactivation focused work was over and we were to now turn more of our attention to investigators. We still had strict prerequisites for when we could baptize people (they had to be present for the sacrament 3x, have received all the lessons and accepted all commitments, be living the word of wisdom and law of chastity for at least a week prior to their baptism, and be reading everyday before we could baptize them) but we were to be focused on getting people ready to be baptized and make baptism the central theme in all we did. That, combined with a heavy focus on getting high numbers in the “Lessons with a Member Present” key indicator, lead to a greater success in both baptisms and retention.
I served in the Canary Islands 93-94 (Hi again!) and had a different experience. We were told that there were people ready and waiting to accept, but finding them was related to our personal worthiness. (A GA came and told us this directly.) For the first few months of my mission I lived with a huge amount of guilt. Not only were we not baptizing, but barely even teaching – which meant I was some grand sinner and unworthy and that unworthiness was sending innocent Canarios into Satan’s grasp. I spent a great deal of time repenting for really stupid thing. The GA generally seemed to believe this though which to this day is really jarring to me. He didn’t even know us and thought we were just awful, lazy people. I, err… reached a point where I decided that was entirely crap and that very little of it had anything to do with me. My mission got better after that, although the baptism rate did not.
“For some, that meant baptizing people they knew would never stick with it, such as sailors in the port who were leaving that week and didn’t live there, but sort of assuming/justifying that the baptism was still a positive step in the overall journey of the person’s life.” This made me laugh. On Lanzarote 3/4 of the branch were inactive members with non-Spanish names that lived in the Elder’s piso. The story we passed around was that your generation of missionaries was paying sailors to get baptized to make yourselves look good and that you guys were a deeply wicked batch of Missionaries and we were much more obedient. Which I suppose is one way to explain why your baptism rate was much higher than ours. We averaged 2-3 baptisms a month for the entire mission (if I remember correctly).
Served in Brazil, late 2000s. Definitely had the Challenging & Testifying approach as the modus operandi. Baptisms were the biggest key indicator, and we were the second highest baptizing mission both years I was out . . . averaging 1,300 baptisms per month. A lot of youth baptism, with likely a few 7 years olds thrown into the dunking frenzy. Retention was another matter, and was only really focused on the second year by the mission president, but was still second-fiddle to NOBs. I had the *blessing* of serving as an junior to the APs for two transfers when the hot weekly indicator became number of lessons.Lessons had to have opening closing prayer, at least one principle taught, one challenge issued, brief testimony, & follow-up visit set to count- which I learned surprisingly can all be done in about 4-5 mins. While this machine gun approach to hitting as many investigators as possible resulted in a lot of baptisms during those 12 weeks, I’ve very doubtful most of those people baptized then are still attending church today. The few people from my mission that I helped teach that I have stayed in contact with, and that are still actively attending were almost all member referrals who were genuinely interested in learning more before they ever met a missionary.
Served in southern Italy, ’87-’89. Our mission didn’t have the C&T mentality as a whole, but there were a few Alec Baldwin ZLs. In general, we were scattered all over Sicily and southern Italy in small towns with very little inter-district contact, so if the attitude in a 4-person district went south (as I saw it do on occasion) it could hurt the work in a big way.
The Dyer talk did make the rounds as a clandestine photocopy, of course, as it probably still does. But few of us bought into it completely. Our president was a native, not only of Italy but of the mission itself, and he was not willing to institute any policy that would harm the reputation and long-term growth of the Church on his watch. For the most part, we taught deliberately, Built Relationships of Trust, Presented the Message, and used the Commitment Plan insofar as it was possible, and with no more than the usual amount of cultural insensitivity demonstrated by Utah boys in a strange land. At least, as a recovering Catholic, I could add some perspective on local customs.
We did have a visiting GA (ReTx, was your guy by any chance a retired Air Force general?) who poured gasoline on all of us in zone conferences and lit us on fire, and not in a good way. I had been a member for 13 months when I entered the mission field and at the time he hit the mission, I had been out for maybe a year. He told us in Zone Conference that if we didn’t give it everything we had and then some, “the Lord would never trust us again.” Impressionable (and depressionable) as I was then, it took me years to recover from my mission – in some ways, that stupid SOB messed up a good chunk of my life.
We had one small district with four of us, and the other companionship (also our ZLs) went a little Dyer-nuts – “never mind the interviews, boys, take ’em right down to the ocean and dunk ’em.” It got ugly, Prez got involved, things were not pretty. In our defense we were under a lot of stress; it was one of the hottest summers on record, no one was sleeping, the public water supply ran every 14 days and we each got 2 liters a day for washing/shaving, and tracting 4 hours a day in 115 degree heat was enough to drive anyone a little bit nuts. All of the involved elders and I have long since apologized and are the dearest of friends, but it was a very tough month or so.
By the end of my mission, I had developed a pretty thick skin with regard to the constant pressure from APs and ZLs to drive up the “colloqui count,” our prime measure – the number of discussions conducted in a week. (Any remotely Gospel-oriented conversation – “Hi, we’re Mormon missionaries, here to teach you about Jesus.” “Va fa’ un sego.” – counted as a discussion.) At one point during my last six weeks, when asked to defend our lack of activity in a small mountain town with 5 adult males, 2 adult women, and 7 kids belonging to the two married couples in the branch, I snapped back, “If you don’t like how I’m doing it, Elder, what are you going to do? Send me home?” He shut right up – and my then-companion, as well as the AP who took the ZL’s indignant report, still enjoy razzing me about that.
That ZL is probably a stake president or Area Authority Seventy somewhere.
I served in Brazil mission from 2000 – 2002. Our mission rule was that we had to give the six discussions word for word as they were written. We sounded like a bunch of damn robots and our mission had very few baptisms. Most wards I served in had 600-700 members with only 50-60 attending so at some point our mission must have had the challenge and testify method or something similar. Unfortunately the retention level for our mission is probably the same as yours. I know of only two people that I baptized that are still active (Thanks Facebook).
Numbers were a huge part of the mission as were the politics involved in rank advancements. I was not a fan of either one. I have a feeling the sisters did not get involved as much in all of that, but I do not know for sure.
I was not prepared well by my parents prior to serving a mission. My expectations of the whole experience could not be met. I do feel bad for mission presidents. They have a very difficult job. We had a limit of four service hours per week. I wish that number was higher. We spent most mornings and afternoons very inefficiently knocking on doors. Even when someone would allow us to come in, there was usually not a man present so we could not enter. If I were a mission president exercise and study would occupy the morning until lunch time. After lunch would be service until 5:00 and then the shirts and ties would come on until 9:30.
I am still glad I went. If you are thinking about going on a mission watch a show called Groundhog Day with Bill Murray. It pretty much sums up the experience.
First and foremost–Angela C–you do look FABULOUS in the picture! That, along with the post, took me back to the late 80s. When I was in the MTC (December to February, 87/88), one of the “not super focused” missionaries next door had a dream that there was a big dance at the MTC. Angela C–you would have been a hit!
I served in Chile, Santiago North, 87-89, and this talk was “scripture” for most of my mission. It inspired me in the ways you describe and it challenged my faith as well. In my mission we baptized around 300 people a month using this approach. But, the mission next door, Vina del Mar, by far out did us! They baptized over a thousand every month! And very, very few stayed. Oh, and eventually they had to really, really clean house in Chile because of so many inactive members.
I learned a lot about faith, humility, and how leaders and both inspired and deeply flawed humans with agency. I’m still trying to understand all of those lessons.
Thank you so much for this post!
Concepcion Chile, 76-78. For a while we had a “modified Dyer” approach. As we spoke to the people at the door, we would say something to the effect of “If we can convince you that our church is the true church, would you get baptized?” if they said no, then we moved on. If they said yes, then we accepted the challenge to teach them. They still had to receive all the “charlas”, be keeping the commandments, and come to church before baptism.
I’m so glad I went “back in the day” before they came up with all these stupid rules. We had no rules about having a man in the house when we taught a female. The “always with your companion” rule was OK unless you needed to be someplace and your companion was sick. As a ZL I even traveled to a mission wide ZL conference in a faraway city all by myself on a train, per the mission president’s direction. We did transfers by ourselves all the timem, on bus and trains. Our Area GA was Elder Wells, the father of future Miss America Charlene Wells. He never got on us for not baptizing enough, or gave us any obedience guilt trip. Our Mission Pres was the nicest guy. I think Leadership roulette can make or break a mission, and I got a win!
I still have a hardback copy of , ” The Challenge”, by Alvin R Dyer. Leadership roulette was kind to me and I had a good mission, serving in South Korea. I need to read it again and see what my reaction is. That book is the genesis of the the challenging and teaching philosophy. I too am grateful to have served during a time when we had few restrictions and allows to use our own judgement while serving. Our mission president literally trusted most of us and gave us a great amount of leeway to perform the work. In many ways, we were decades ahead of our time with regards to leadership councils, sisters in leadership roles and being allowed to be creative.
So disturbing, makes me glad my son chose to pass on this, much as it was always my dream for him. I’m so sorry that you willing missionaries have been put through such experiences.
But I’m a convert, baptised in the sea in the 70s. Without you my family would not have been sealed in the temple, and I think it’s unlikely my family would have survived intact without an understanding of the gospel. Not sure how to square this circle, other than a greater emphasis on service. That would have sold it to my socially committed son.
handlewithcare: I didn’t consider it a trial, and I don’t really now look back on it as a negative. I see the flaws with C&T missionary, but it’s got a lot to recommend it, too. Basically, any approach can go overboard. Maybe your comment was not addressed to me. I just wanted to be sure you know that I don’t see this approach as a bad idea. Here are three I see as much worse:
– too much focus on teaching in a specific manner, not enough adaptation to people’s needs
– too many hurdles before baptism. It’s not an obstacle course. People should join a religion because of a spiritual experience, not because they are methodically convinced using logic and flannel boards
– use of guilt and obedience as motivators for missionaries: “guilting” or shaming them over numbers. This happens in many missions, regardless of the teaching approach used. Whether you baptize or not is up to the people you teach primarily, not up to whether a missionary gets out the door 5 minutes late.
Quite so Angela. But this approach did not work for my husband. It was only when the beautiful logic of the gospel was explained to him through examining scripture and doctrine, that both his mind and heart were satisfied. He had no knowledge of the Spirit, or what those feelings might mean, indeed he found them frightening. Whilst I understand that we can’t make this too complicated for our young missionaries, I believe the gospel is for all and so there have to be many approaches and an ability to work with those who primarily use their minds to understand what they are experiencing. I also feel this leads to a more resilient testimony.
Turn the Dyer approach against itself. Think of it like a math formula.
Take the Dyer approach as the first part of the formula;
Add the statistical fact that we increased the missionary force by 40% with no statistically significant increase in conversions during the recent surge.
Add another factor describing the changing missionary to baptism ratio over decades.
Multiply by the better preparation and stricter worthiness requirements.
Do the logical operation and the answer is:
Either we are raising exclusively tens of thousands of slacker missionaries who happened to go a year early and/or are slacker females (statistically impossible).
Or God doesn’t want more people in this church. (At this time).
Like the priests of Baal and Elijah. Call down fire from heaven. No fire. Proves you are evil, deserving of death. The first half of the story applies to the Dyer approach, the second half when Elijah called fire down hasn’t happened after decades of this nonsense.. https://www.lds.org/manual/old-testament-stories/chapter-34-elijah-and-the-priests-of-baal?lang=eng
If the Dyer approach were a telescope and you turned it around and looked through it the other direction, you see proof that this missionary program is not of God, and from there it is only a small step to the church is not either. The Dyer approach is a farce, a scam, a lie. It destroys not builds,it is of the devil born in the stable of pride and nursed on the manure of exclusivity.
Channeling Elder Dyer, Elder Dyer, what is your explanation for the failure of the surge, the decades long dropping ratio of missionaries to baptisms, the enormous retention problem? Is it not following your approach or is it due to following your approach? Or perhaps something else?
The California Mission (at that time there was only a North, South, and California). Late 1967 through 1969.
We definitely used the C&T approach, though I don’t remember any references to Alvin R. Dyer. One of the mission president’s counselors ran a professional sales training business, so we got a lot of self image and goal-setting messages and posters from his company. We each received a mission “newsletter” monthly. It had a message from the Pres, the 2 APs, and the previous month and mission-to-date statistics of every missionary: discussions taught, baptisms, and baptisms per month average. We had quarterly “Conversion Conference” where the top baptisers would come to the mission home for some event, such as an LA Dodgers baseball game. Every month there were several companionships that exceeded 10 baptisms.
We were required to learn the 6 discussions word-for-word. Investigators were not required to attend church, though that was strongly emphasized. We were expected to teach all 6 discussions prior to baptism and required to take a Stake Missionary, from the matching ward, to at least one discussion with the investigators–but why were those guys ALL weird?
Success, in terms of baptisms, was extremely high. An average of 3.6 baptisms per month per companionship. I think the relatively high number of referrals from members (each companionship usually had 3 wards to brow beat), a high rate of in-migration (California and Las Vegas), and an American society that was questioning everything, including religion, (think back to all the social and political unrest in 1968 and 1969), had a lot to do with those high numbers and our teaching methods didn’t get in the way.
We referred, formally, to the members as “Finders” and the missionaries as “Teachers.” Don’t know about retention. I haven’t kept in touch with any of my “successes.” But, I doubt it was any higher than average for the U.S. West, because I am convinced that the social net/connections are at least 60% of the formula for new converts. Some wards did a better job than others of “putting their arms around” new members.
Lastly, that rule you mentioned about missionaries not attending church unless you came with investigators! That is completely moronic and counterproductive. The members have to see the missionaries regularly to better garner their trust to teach their friends…let alone we didn’t have time to visit that many members in their homes (and the mileage allowance limits or the work to ride a bike all that distance) and ask them for referrals–we were teaching discussions 😉
I served in Eastern Europe in the mid 2000s. Our mission went by the “Ballard Ten” philosophy. Apparently Elder Ballard at some point challenged missionaries to contact ten extra people everyday. This was the heart of a huge effort to always be finding (my brother served stateside and they did something similar with OYM – open your mouth). The major statistics push was for lessons taught and lessons taught with a member present – but we were allowed to count lessons taught to inactive members. We got really good at New Iconoclast’s 5 minute lessons as well :).
In terms of positive effects, I met all of the most interesting people doing extra Ballard contacts, including everyone I taught who was baptized. I made friends with everyone from the Turkish mafia to a guy who thought he was Odin. We really were motivated and believed there were people who wanted to talk to us, and we rarely had to do doors because we’d just street contact instead.
In terms of negative effects, our entire mission schedule was built around contacting, so we weren’t allowed breaks between 4 and 9 pm. I never ate dinner. Not even once. During the winters we also rarely ate lunch because we’d split it up into four 15 minute breaks to warm ourselves up in random tea shops throughout the day. Small wonder that over half the sisters I served with were dealing with intestinal and/or menstrual problems by the end. It’s been a decade, and I only just found out last month that most of my DLs and ZLs took dinner breaks and I feel oddly betrayed by this information.
This intense focus on contacting also led to the only truly scary moments of my mission. I had several companions who believed that contacting everyone meant ignoring your intuition about danger, and their insistence that my caution was lack of faith led to the Russian mafia firing shots at us. One got herself roofied, one got whisked away by a Polish gang for about an hour, and one got us caught outdoors in a freak Baltic Sea hurricane. So ya, there are flaws in taking any approach to the max.
Overall, though, we felt this approach was working because we were pretty much the only Eastern European mission that way baptising at the time. My first mission president was promoted directly to area president, so Salt Lake must have approved as well. My second mission president focused much more on serving people and less on numbers. The numbers took a slight dip in response, but it felt like we were doing more lasting good.
While we’re talking about mission experiences, and for as difficult as mine was for a number of reasons, I would be remiss if I did not give credit to one of the finest, gentlest, most Spirit-led couples it has ever been my privilege to serve with. They were president and matron of my mission from 1986-89, and while they were not perfect, they never, ever stopped trying to find better ways to express their love and care for each missionary, each member, each branch, and the work. I was blessed to serve as mission secretary for a few months in the middle of my mission, and am grateful to have been able to learn from them almost daily. Very few who served with them would, I think, disagree with that assessment – but even if so, they were exactly the people this missionary needed at that time.
My Prez and Sister Prez
“I had several companions who believed that contacting everyone meant ignoring your intuition about danger” Yeah, this happened in my 4th month as well. I warned my comp not to talk to these guys because they were obviously bad dudes and totally on drugs at the time, and yet she insisted on doing it anyway. She got robbed.
Maybe we should just teach everyone who will listen and just let the people who want to be baptized invite themselves to be baptized. If they aren’t committed enough to choose it for themselves, what makes you think they’ll stay active?
Hungary, 99-02.
The scriptures are full of doctrine, but there are certain doctrines that are preceded with “remember.” I take it these are truths so important that we are commanded to think of them often. Here’s one: “Remember that that which cometh from above is sacred, and must be spoken with care, and by constraint of the Spirit; and in this there is no condemnation, and ye receive the Spirit through prayer; wherefore, without this there remaineth condemnation.”
The missionary effort is imperfect, and various leaders have implemented imperfect programs, or have program-ized sentiments that imperfectly encapsulate the work of sharing the Gospel. The Lord will direct His imperfect people if they remain humble and teachable, D&C 84:23-24, and He will compensate for our institutional weaknesses if we do not glory in them.
I believe that comparing the sharing of the Gospel to selling used cars–even if a leader in some capacity has made such comparison in the past–distorts what the work is about and overlooks Who is in charge of the work (and surely weeps over our sins in imperfectly sharing His perfect gospel).
There is a time and a place for offering insights into how the work could be improved, but such insights “must be spoken with care, and by constraint of the Spirit . . . .”
Thank you for your service, dear sister. Am I right that you would say, like I would, that while your mission had its share of gaffs, they do not overshadow the personal growth and closeness to the Savior you developed on your mission?
I always mused at fact that they made us read the challenging and testifying missionary where they told us to baptize the person on the spot “dam the creek” was the term. And yet none of us were allowed to do so. Everyone was required to be interviewed by the ZL etc.
So why on earth are we reading this talk if we can’t practice it???
I’m glad we didn’t practice it but there was still a cognitive dissonance that was occurring because we were reading about it but couldn’t do it.