If you haven’t read Part One of my interview with Angela Liscom Clayton, go here. Part One discusses the genesis and background for her new mission memoir from BCC Press: The Legend of Hermana Plunge.
In Part Two, we dig deeper into Angela’s experiences as a missionary in the Canary Islands. What was mission culture like, and how did the mission change her?
“The president handed me a note that said, ‘Thank you for your comments. Your time is up.’ I read it aloud to gasps and laughter from the audience and kept going.
“This was me in Hermana Plunge mode. It was originally a name I adopted as a bit of mission culture theater, a cheeky reference to baptism, a way to show I was part of the rah-rah meetings. But I had long since abandoned that superficial meaning and taken to using the name in my letters to President…
“Being Hermana Plunge meant I was going to say the truth and do what was right, no matter what anyone else thought of me. I was letting go, immersing myself in the work. I was all in. My life was there, in the moment, not at home.”
Angela Liscom Claytom, The Legend of Hermana Plunge
INTERVIEW – PART TWO
Your memoir pulls no punches regarding some Elders craving authority, and the correlation (or lack thereof) between baptizing frequently and being obedient. Speaking as an RM myself, I think you do a great job conveying the spectrum of young men who serve. What would you say to readers who might react defensively to your critiques of mission hierarchy?
Angela: That’s a tough question, and I have already taken some criticism for that. In my opinion, it isn’t worth reading or writing a memoir that’s nothing more than a puff piece or some kind of unasked-for public relations spin for the church. The point of a memoir is to tell true things that will resonate for people, that will create empathy and also help us learn about ourselves through the experiences of others. These are human stories about real people at a specific point in time.
I don’t see the value in pretending that people were something they were not, and obviously, we continued to develop in the ensuing years into who we’ve become. I’ve gotten fantastic feedback from elders with whom I served who’ve read it and who found the experience cathartic, so I feel pretty confident that I hit the right tone. One elder told me: “At times I hated the honesty in your book, but that is also precisely what I loved about it.
I was one of those neurotic elders who didn’t dare flirt with or even talk dating with sister missionaries. It seemed a more open topic for you in the field. What would you say to today’s missionaries about discussing dating in the mission field?
Angela: That’s a great question actually. I think this is one aspect that sets my memoir apart from some of the others out there. Look, we’re human beings, and attractions and flirtations are a part of being human. It’s kind of taboo to talk about them between missionaries, and I don’t know if it’s because I was a sister or because we were in a tropical paradise, but we talked about these things plenty.
I would say that there’s a point at which a flirtation is motivational and makes you feel alive and happy, and there’s a point at which it’s a distraction, making it harder to work. You need to keep your head clear on which is which. The latter type of flirtation isn’t going to be good in the long run anyway, so you might as well shut that down and move on. It usually means it’s one-sided or that the person is too emotionally invested or self-focused. Being friendly and easy-going works. Being moody and obsessed doesn’t.
What was something you learned on your mission which can apply to readers universally? And what was something you learned which applies uniquely to the experience of sister missionaries?
Angela: I think most of the things I learned apply to people in general, not just to missionaries, so here go a few:
1) you can’t control things that involve other people;
2) not everyone is going to like you, so you’d better learn to like yourself;
3) leadership is what happens despite authority or even in its absence, but not because of it;
4) prayer is fine for some things, but it’s not how you get things done in an organization—you have to speak up and become influential;
5) one I’ve used in business plenty—if you want to learn about the unintended consequences of your policies, pay attention to how people game the system and exploit loopholes.
When it comes to lessons that apply to the sisters specifically, I would say that being barred from leadership gives you a few advantages:
1) you can say what you really think because there’s less at stake;
2) you have to develop true leadership because you won’t be given authority;
3) as one elder put it, your real boss is the Lord—everyone else is just there to do paperwork.
Did The Legend of Hermana Plunge turn out differently than you thought it would when you started writing it? Why or why not?
Angela: That’s hard to say. I knew going into it how much my mission had changed me, but I didn’t realize some of the ways in which my mission culture was unique. I also forgot how much being a sister colored everything I did as a missionary and how we were really on the outside of the structure. I was also surprised at how my relationship with the mission president developed through the book, something I hadn’t really thought much about.
Perhaps one of the most telling passages is a selection of recipes you included at the end. To borrow some of your words from the memoir, in what ways did the Canary Islands convert you?
Angela: That’s pretty funny you should mention that. As readers will know, my husband also served in the islands, and when we went back the first time, I was listing off all the foods I was so excited to eat again. Everything I listed, my husband was saying, “What’s that?” or “I don’t think I had that.” We were in a restaurant overlooking the caldera in La Palma, and I ordered the Cabrita (goat) which is very popular there. I said, “I’m sure you’ve had this.” He didn’t think so. “In a member’s house?” No, he said the elders seldom ate with members. We concluded that most of his meals in the mission were something he called “Arroz con Pollo sin Pollo” (rice with chicken without chicken). He would eat that when his money ran out. We had previously discovered that although we were in the same mission, mine cost a few hundred dollars more per month than his did.
Back to the question, we’ve talked many times about retiring in the islands. When we go there and eat in a café, we chat up our waiter, or we go in a store and talk to the cashier, and it just feels natural. We feel at home there. We have the local accent, and people open right up when they realize we aren’t German tourists. We still go visit people we taught or branch members or former companions when we get a chance. People there feel like family. I don’t know how that happens, but it has something to do with them taking care of you as a missionary, while you think you are taking care of them.
This ends my interview with Angela, author of the new memoir The Legend of Hermana Plunge. Read an excerpt of the book on Amazon. From BCC Press, the memoir is available in both paperback and Kindle formats. Thanks to Angela for participating in this interview.
Questions for Discussion:
Have you read this book yet? If so, what is your reaction?
How does Angela’s descriptions of mission life compare or contrast with yours? Or if you have not served a mission, how do her observations compare with your sense of mission life?
Wheat & Tares 
“1) you can’t control things that involve other people”
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. But this is a lesson that we just don’t want to learn. So much of what we spend our time on in church leadership is trying to control other people’s agency. It just doesn’t work, but more than that it can be damaging and even alienating for the sincere people who initially buy into that mindset since they want to be obedient. All types of missionary work in the church suffer from the misapprehension that if we are just obedient, just sincere, just hard workers, just have faith we can somehow control the actions of other people.
I ran into this as a 19 year old new missionary. My ZL asked me to set a baptism goal for the next month. I sincerely didn’t understand how I could set a goal that would influence someone else’s agency. I naively thought that the idea was so obviously mistaken that if I could reason with him he would get it. I told him that setting a baptism goal would be like setting a goal for how many letters (pre email world) I would receive the next month, and that I could set a goal for how many letters I would write and even set a goal for encouraging those people to write me back, but whether they did write back was not something I could control. He just stared at me and then said, “Elder C, I need a number.” I’ve been fighting the same losing battle in church ever since.
Thanks for the interview. I’m looking forward to reading this.
Wonderful commentary! My wife was a sister missionary in a third-world country, nearly 4th world, and was pretty feisty with her mission president, going so far as to refuse to shake his hand because of his disrespect of sister missionaries generally and her specifically. She was 25 at the time, a member for only one year and had not been raised to worship church authority. Respect it maybe, but not worship.
“2) you have to develop true leadership because you won’t be given authority;”
Too many people ignore authority anyway. What exactly is leadership? It is where you assume authority exists, make decisions, and other people accept your authority! If nobody is following you then you are just going for a walk in the park.
3) as one elder put it, your real boss is the Lord—everyone else is just there to do paperwork.
Well, your boss’s boss’s boss…
Michael 2: Good point about authority. It reminds me of a family hike we were on years ago when my daughter was 10. She wanted to be out in front, and she was getting mad because she was the shortest one. She kept saying, “Hey! I’m the leader!” whenever anyone passed her. It struck me that it’s how people with authority often act when they are ignored.
Pity the poor young elder who, never having been a leader or manager before in any real sense, and receiving little or no training for the job, is called to lead a district of six or zone of 16 missionaries. Angela offers as a lesson learned, ” Leadership is what happens despite authority or even in its absence, but not because of it.” That is doubly true for LDS missionaries. As she mentioned in Part One (I think), in being left out of the candidate pool, sister missionaries had the benefit of avoiding both “leadership anxiety” and the felt need to compete or qualify for leadership callings. The idea that one could lead from behind (without a position or calling) is quite foreign to young elders, but makes more sense to sister missionaries.
I’m through part 1 of the book and have enjoyed the humor along with her poignant feelings. It has been a fun read so far, but it strikes me that my mission (around the same time as hers) was rather different. I was surprised at the hard sales tactics in her mission. I didn’t experience that in the United States. If course we had pressure, but we still went to church every week regardless of whether we can with an investigator. I found that rule quite odd, and wondered if it was possible that a missionary could go inactive while on a mission.
I’m excited to read Hermana Plunge as I have enjoyed reading Angela’s blog posts about her mission. I also served on the Canary Islands, but I was there in the late nineties and my experience was quite different. It will be interesting to compare and contrast experiences.
From what I’ve seen in the blog posts, interactions with other missionaries were quite similar, albeit from an Elder’s perspective, but the proselyting experience was completely different. I found it nearly impossible to get a good discussion with anyone. Quite frankly, nobody wanted to talk to us. We rarely had investigators at church. If there was a rule to only go to church if we had an investigator than I would have been inactive in most of my areas.
I’ve read about the “Challenge and testify” approach multiple times now, in the blogs and in the book, and each time I want to shake some sense into the mission president and zone leaders. That is my emotional reaction, anyway, not necessarily my intellectual reaction.
When I arrived in the Islands in the late nineties, we were told to spend a good amount of time with less actives. So we got a list of members in the branch, marked all the ones in our area (I think there were about 200, but my memory is terrible), cross checked them with the area book, and went to every single one. We had 2 active families, and 2-4 less active families in our area that let us visit them. The others wanted nothing to do with us. Many of the addresses were non existent, several had moved, some of them claimed the person had died. We couldn’t transfer any records unless we had a valid new address, which we couldn’t ever get.
After my trainer was transferred, my new companion repeated the same process, even visiting the ones where the person had supposedly died, “in case they were lying.” (Really?)
I quickly learned the mission lore, that in years past missionaries would do anything to get a baptism, and they didn’t have to get investigators to do basic things like go to church prior to baptism. These were infamously labeled “bocadillo baptisms” (I never heard of baseball baptisms until after the mission), because presumably some missionaries would offer a sandwich (called a bocadillo) to homeless people in exchange for a baptism. Of course, I don’t know if that ever really happened, but pretty much everyone believed it, including some local members, although they probably heard it from the missionary rumor mill. Since then I have talked to missionaries to the islands from several different time frames, and they all believe their baptisms were legit, and that their investigators felt the spirit.
So the missionaries from Angela’s era were much maligned in our mission lore; the missionaries of my time felt like they were left cleaning up someone else’s mess. I don’t know whether that reputation was earned. I’ve since learned that areas all over Europe have similar activaty rates, so it may really not matter.
I’m not against the general philosophy of Challenge and Testify, except that it doesn’t seem to be in alignment with the way the church treats baptism. Once baptised, a person is a member for life. Missionaries using church records might show up at the person’s house until they are aged off the records (at 120 years old, I think?) If a new member is to stay in the church, they really need a support network, and in places like the Canary Islands the missionaries are most able to provide it, as active members are very sparse.
I never heard the term “bocadillo baptisms,” but because of our mission rule that you couldn’t go to church unless you had an investigator with you, missionaries did often just get on the bus and try to talk drunks into going to church with them. See what you think when you read the book about whether or not people were converted. Several converts I mention (and you’ll see this in all mission memoirs) had some serious social issues to overcome to be accepted in a local ward. Drug addicts, former prostitutes, people who were poor, those with family problems or abusive spouses or disabled children. There’s a reason people will talk to the missionaries, and it’s not because everything in their life is going well. But the members don’t always know what to do with these folks. Can’t they also be converted? This is one question raised in my book–whether the church really is for everyone. I question whether it is, even if the gospel is.
I served in the Canary Islands 93-4 and my experience exactly matches Altern’s. We spent a lot of time hunting up missing members from old lists. Those same poor people must have been endlessly pestered. And half the branch on Lanzarote apparently lived in the elders piso.
We were also pretty hard on the earlier missionaries and saw them as deeply disobedient and sinful. Of course we only averaged 3 baptisms a month for 120ish missionaries, so I don’t know that the focus on hyper-obedience gained us anything (but anxiety).
Thanks to everyone who is chiming in with perspective. This has to be one of the benefits of RMs opening up those storage boxes and sharing memories and hindsight.
As a long time less-active, I can sympathize with the image of being hit up by missionaries on a recurring basis, being asked to retell yet again the story of why I stepped away, and having them try to resolve my concerns with the same basic arguments I used as a missionary. It gets tiring sometimes. But sometimes I enjoy their checking in.
I do think there is a tendency for many missionaries to see the grass as greener on their side of the fence. Call it team spirit, or trying to achieve maximum satisfaction for the great sacrifice of 18-24 months of our youth. Past missionaries efforts are filtered through the limited perspectives of local members, perennial investigators, and veteran missionaries on the verge of going home. I also think the influence of the mission president on mission culture and tactics is profound.
I had the opportunity to serve for about a year each under two mission presidents. Very different men with different approaches and temperaments. One was a scriptorian and the other a time management guru. Both saw themselves at the cusp of a new escalation in the work, and by extension as righting a ship that had ended up a bit off course under previous captains. Their infuence was considerable, regardless if the missionaries followed them enthusiastically or begrudgingly.