Bishop Bill’s post earlier this week reminded me of this excellent OP written by Wilfried Decoo at Times & Seasons (which was also a book review of my mission memoir): http://archive.timesandseasons.org/2019/04/ethics-and-mormon-missionary-work/
Wilfried makes so many important points about the disruption caused by missionaries, and it’s not always good. I strongly encourage you to give his full post a read. It’s outstanding. Among his observations of the harms that proselytizing does:
- Lack of full disclosure: “most Mormon converts are baptized without realizing what will come next” If you’ve been a missionary, you know this is true. Hell, I wasn’t even a convert, and I for sure did not know at age 8 that I was going to be asked to treat gay people with contempt, police other adults’ garment wearing, and censor the use of the word “Mormon.” You are joining a membership with rules and norms that shift over time, but your allegiance is supposed to remain to the Church, regardless of these shifts.
- Upheaval in family relationships: “Missionaries trigger tensions, conflicts, and sometimes devastating breaches between converts and other members of their family.” Breaking off family ties is often seen as a sign of one’s righteousness and devotion, but is it really worth it to eliminate your original support network in favor of one that relies completely on your ongoing loyalty to the institution and its rules and leaders? Missionaries are largely taught to be indifferent to these familial ruptures, instead focusing on the importance of switching the convert’s allegiance to the local ward as a replacement and giving the convert (false?) hope that they will be the first convert of many among their family members.
- Community disruption: “We aspire to much more: change persons thoroughly, untie them from their original milieu, and involve them deeply in church life. In democratic countries with free religious pluralism, this aim is perfectly acceptable and does not cause community conflicts. In other countries, not so.” Not all countries see freedom of religion from an American perspective, and the Church’s political aims can also cause issues as new converts shift their loyalties from patriotic to their new American religion.
- Human rights implications: “proselytism implies criticism of other religions. . . it can also offend believers to such a degree that it injures their religious feelings and their rights to respect are being violated. In many countries and cultures so-called blasphemy laws condemn such irreverence toward one’s religion, comparable to the unacceptability of racist utterances.” The Church does seek to avoid actual physical harms to potential converts (e.g. won’t do missionary work where converts may be killed), but the insults missionaries sling toward other faiths, even in just telling the First Vision story, exist. Plus, there have been incidents like the missionaries mocking the Catholic mass, and we’ve got idiots like Brad Wilcox claiming other faiths are “pretending” at Church like children.
- Low retention rates: “How many converts have been helped and how many have been harmed (by missionary work)? If one considers being inactive as “harmed,” as President Hinckley mentioned, then the vast majority is harmed.” Wilfried suggests maybe 1 in 100 remain active until death (a Northern European perspective). My results would be a bit higher so far, but those results may not be typical. If you served a mission, what percentage of your converts stuck with it for life? Several of mine were active for decades, quite a few (or their children) served missions, but I can only think of a few who are still active 35 years later. Even for those who left, it was a positive for some (helped them overcome addiction or get out of a bad marriage), but it wasn’t for others (caused self-loathing among gay converts, caused family drama that was later regretted).
We’ve all heard the old chestnut that missions are for converting the missionaries, not the local populace, and this is certainly a byproduct in that it ratchets up sunk costs for those who serve, but let’s also consider some of the harms missions cause the missionaries:
- Mental health triggers. These seem to be more common than ever now. Missions can trigger scrupulosity, depression, and anxiety. It’s an extremely controlled environment in which you are exposed to people who may not be supportive. You face rejection constantly. You talk to people who might be dangerous or mentally ill. You aren’t really given a lot of training in the human and psychological aspects of dealing with companions and the public. The relentless experience of rejection can also lead to a deep sense of failure, particularly when combined with a mission culture that blames or praises missionaries directly for their results.
- Proliferation of bad ideas. Missionary culture is a hotbed of sharing some of the worst folklore and theories that our religion has to offer: sexism & misogyny, racism, dubious stories about things like the 3 Nephites or resurrections of Native Americans or encounters with Cain, and shaking the dust off your feet because someone slammed a door in your face. A few bad ideas also proliferated by mission culture are things like the prosperity gospel, the idea that one’s adherence to the rules can lead to other people’s conversions, the imperative to police and report the behavior of others, or the idea that non-members are inferior morally or spiritually than those who join.
- Physical dangers & harms. Missionaries often live in areas that are dangerous or unfit. One redditor went so far as to compare mission living conditions to human trafficking, and there were some parallels. Missionaries are also exposed to new diseases or parasites that can have lifelong health consequences, and the physical activity of walking so much can cause other physical ailments; I developed a foot problem in one area due to all the walking in a rocky field. Missionaries may also be targets of criminals; two of my companions were robbed, one of whom required a hospital trip as a result. One’s mission president may take such risks seriously or may try to downplay them. One missionary I knew was told “We don’t tell our moms everything” after that elder’s mom called concerned about the missionary’s living conditions (finding a dead drug addict in the hallway). I didn’t feel like I was in particular danger until my parents visited the mission and I showed them my working area. As we daintily stepped over discarded heroin needles, past cat-calling miscreants and explicit graffiti, it occurred to me that maybe it was not a safe place.
- Hierarchical aspirations. Mission culture can be very focused on things that are specifically antithetical to Jesus’ teachings about seeking the praise of men. In fact, most mission culture is more like a sales organization, tracking and rewarding numerical results rather than Christian discipleship. For many, the allure of praise and leadership positions is strong and carries into their post-mission afterlife as they strive for the praise and hierarchical rewards they learned indicate their “success.”
- Anti-social skills. While missions can teach young people social skills, they may also teach them anti-social skills like judging and confronting others, manipulation, sexist attitudes (viewing women as temptations or distractions rather than people), misdirection, high pressure selling, tattling (on fellow missionaries), and transactional relationships. Some missionaries carry these anti-social skills into their Church life and equate them with personal righteousness. Rather than gaining social skills, some missionaries seem to lose them during these most critical formative years. Missionaries are also often conditioned to see conversion as a cure-all rather than to gain the skills needed to deal with real problems like abuse, mental illness, addiction, or poverty.
- Sexual repression. The age at which missionaries serve coincides with peak sexual development into adulthood, which is no coincidence, and the mission requires full chastity and abstinence from masturbation at this same time, linking sexual repression to worthiness. While this doubtless has a positive side (fewer sexual regrets), it also results in downstream feelings of shame and guilt associated with normal sexual development. These issues are obviously exacerbated for queer missionaries, many of whom only begin to discover or question their identity or orientation at this stage of life.
- Cognitive dissonance. This is probably also just a part of growing up, but missions can erode the faith of the missionaries as they see the seedy underbelly of the Church up close, the disconnect between rhetoric and actions, the flaws of leaders, hypocrisy, their own shortcomings, the needs of people that go unmet, and encounter investigators (and others) whose spirituality or conversion experience outmatches their own.
Although missions also have positive impacts, teaching life skills, putting a pause on life for young people who might be subject to entirely different dangers if they didn’t serve, and exposing them to new cultures and new ideas, introducing them to a life of service, the pressure to serve may increase the negative effects for those who experience them. The other things to consider when evaluating the “good” and “harm” of a life experience is that some harms are temporary or lead to growth and life lessons. Some life lessons would inevitably happen another way if not this way. Some aspects of our personality are reacting to the unique circumstances of our lives, and some are created or influenced by those circumstances; they change who we are, how we think, and future choices.
It’s easy to fall into the “counterfactual trap.” It’s impossible to know for certain what would have happened on the path not taken. It’s too easy for an active, committed Church member to say, “If it weren’t for the Church, I’d be dead in the gutter,” or for an angry Ex-Mo to say, “If it weren’t for the Church, I wouldn’t have gone through depression / a bad marriage / wasted all that money and time.” You really can’t know what would have happened if you went the other route. Only in a Marvel movie do you get to see the other multiverses and go back and change events, and even then, there are always ripple effects. Those who state with confidence what would have happened are fooling themselves.
“It’s ridiculous to put eternal salvation in the hands of 19-year-olds who view it as a competition of who can baptize more people.”
Putting Eternal Salvation in the Hands of 19-Year Old Missionaries, Andrea Bennett & Kim Fu, The Atlantic
- Do missionaries do more harm or more good in the lives of converts, themselves, and the populace?
- If you served a mission, what harms did you see from your efforts? In what ways were you harmed? How did the impacts of your efforts change over time?
- If you served, what good did you see from your efforts and what ways did it improve you? How has this changed over time?
- Is the missionary program successful or not at converting the missionaries? Defend your answer.
Discuss.
Wheat & Tares 
“Do missionaries do more harm or more good in the lives of converts, themselves, and the populace?”
My experience in observing converts is that it’s been somewhere between good and neutral. Most converts I’ve interacted with were already unsatisfied with their current religious situation and the missionaries were merely one of several groups with whom the convert had already interacted. In other words, they weren’t picking off people who were deeply connected to their faith and happy with their lot in life only to have the missionaries upset the spiritual apple cart. That’s not to say that the convert found spiritual bliss after baptism, just that I saw no evidence the missionaries (including me) were tearing apart happy homes, though that’s just my own recollection. It’s certainly possible that I just wasn’t privy to the spiritual destruction wrought on these converts.
“If you served a mission, what harms did you see from your efforts? In what ways were you harmed? How did the impacts of your efforts change over time? If you served, what good did you see from your efforts and what ways did it improve you? How has this changed over time?”
I honestly can’t think of any harms I personally saw from my own proselytizing efforts (see answer above). Similarly, I don’t think I was harmed in any real way. Sure, two years was a long time, but I learned a foreign language, I lived neck-deep in a foreign land and culture that I came to love, and I had missionary companions from a lot more walks of life than I ever expected (a lot fewer Idahoans and Utahans than you might expect though there were a few). I also came to have a much deeper appreciation for just how blessed (and rich) I am as a first-world resident, and that Jesus’s call to care for the poor is as needed today as it ever was. Finally, I didn’t suffer from bullying or depression, though the current practice of calling home once a week would have been a great boost to morale.
“Is the missionary program successful or not at converting the missionaries? Defend your answer.”
It apparently converted me as I came home, graduated from college (and Institute), got married in the temple (with lots of family excluded and which I will regret for the rest of my life), and am active to this day. I admit I served a mission in an area where there wasn’t much in the way of anti-Mormon activity (i.e., Protestants armed with accurate information about Church history that the Church never taught us), so I never had to wrestle with truly tough questions about my faith. Also, this was just a few years before the explosion in broadband Internet when the not-so-tidy history of Mormonism became readily available and many years before the Church began efforts to respond to that history. TO put it another way, I was already so bought into the Church by the time I found out some of the real problems that any thought of leaving because of them was just not anattractive option.
Very interesting takes.
On human rights implications, I say criticizing religious beliefs and practices is fair game. It isn’t the same as criticizing someone’s biological makeup. I can change my beliefs, I can’t change my biology. However, the church is wise in not having missionaries go proselytize in Muslim countries (with some exceptions). The taboo against leaving Islam is very strong in many Muslim cultures and can result in ostracism, severe shaming, and even threats of bodily harm.
Wow. I feel like all I can really do is add my witness to pretty much everything this post says, including those patches of positivity. For some missionaries, and some converts, the Church is a really good fit. For others of us, it’s the delivery system for all our deepest frustrations, traumas, and neuroses.
Recently, a colleague finally discovered my Mormon background. I say finally because, I was in the mood for them to know. And I hoped it would help them appreciate my personal backstory of how the hell I ended up in my current blue-collar job. The resulting conversation was highly invasive, probably major TMI for anyone within earshot, full of lots of me speaking, them giggling and saying, “Really?!” as I described my peculiar religious upbringing, mission, and subsequent college social debacles while becoming agnostic.
Actually, it’s a conversation that’s pretty old for me, and I’m mostly just tired of having it. Because it dredges up a lot of old pain and leaves me feeling like I am still completely that 20-year-old who lost his faith in a single night on his mission. I can be a man in his late-40s talking to a woman in her mid-20s, and absolutely feel like the younger of the two of us: inexperienced, naïve, and unfortunate–thanks to my tunnel-visioned gospel upbringing.
Absolutely, missions can do more harm than good, and arguably did for me. Avoiding the “counterfactual trap” is probably the major thing I must continue to focus on, especially as I go through mid-life. Thank you for this write-up. I say again, based on my experience and knowledge, everything in this post rings true to me.
The concerns the OP raises apply to all endeavors. Going to high school is nerve racking. A not insignificant number of young people drop out of college and fail at their first jobs. Far too many fail at marriage. Life is hard and people fail at it. So yes, missions can be personally harmful and they can be unhelpful to the Church and to the cause of bringing others to Christ. This can happen and with hundreds of thousands of missionaries having served in recent decades there will be many anecdotes of mission failure. And yet many more people will say their missions had a positive impact and and many more people will share positive reflections of meeting LDS missionaries and having them in their community.
I will agree that missions are a very unusual experience and most youth are inadequately prepared for it. This has been made all the more challenging given (1) the lowering of mission age and (2) missions becoming a rite of passage expected for all LDS youth. A further complication is the cultural change that institutions should be responsive to emotional feelings. Missions are inherently hard. It would serve the church better to emphasize this than to soften some aspects of missions (ie more frequent phone calls) and create the impression to youth and parents that the task will be easy.
If I had failed at my mission – either by coming home early or by returning with a negative attitude – then I could add to the voices saying missions are harmful. But quitting was not an option. No matter how much I struggled at times with fear & disappointment I stayed. And that resolve was greatly rewarded. I had spiritually significant experiences. I saw the Lord working through me to do good. I learned to be less judgmental, more patient, more compassionate. I learned to think less of myself.
Knowing how difficult a mission was for me, I have been cautious in my recommendation of them. I did not encourage my daughters to go unless they went with an appreciation of what would be demanded of them. I did not encourage my sons to go unless they would be willing to make the sacrifices required.
The Church leadership is in a bind. They are expected to be egalitarian and non-judgmental, but reality is the social, emotional, spiritual and physical demands of a mission limit who can be successful at it. Leaders saying going on a mission is an absolute Church requirement is inconsistent with the reality that not every young man has the disposition to be a missionary. I think it is fair to challenge the Church on this inconsistency. Why do they create false hope? Why do they send kids to experience failure they are unprepared to handle?
When my kids asked me about playing tackle football, I was honest with them. I said it would be hot and it would be smelly. I told them they would experience pain. I explained to them if they were willing to deal with that discomfort I would support them. None of my kids played tackle football. I do not think it would have been fair of me to require them to play. Now if they wanted to play but had fears and doubts, I would support them to overcome those concerns. This is how I wish church leaders approached youth about missions.
Excellent discussion; thx for posting. Another potential ‘harm’ caused by taking time for a mission is the impact on college access. We tend to downplay this in BYU-affected areas, but at ‘real’ universities, this is often a real problem when the expected college sojourn is interrupted. This was excellently explored in a 13 May 2023 post in “By Common Consent” titled ‘Missions and Universities: https://bycommonconsent.com/2023/05/13/missions-and-universities/
I would like to second most everything A Disciple wrote but add one nuance to his final paragraph. I have told all my children and anyone else who asks that my mission was hard and that I did not particularly enjoy it in it’s totality. I had some real stinkers for companions (a literal bi-polar companion who decided to stop taking his meds and an entitled son of a current Apostle were two of the worst) but I also had some real gems. I had some real disappointments with some of the prospects and converts with whom I worked but I also have had the opportunity to witness lasting joy and happiness from others. I got robbed at gunpoint 3 times and held hostage at gunpoint once but also had the opportunity to enjoy lunch with some very famous non-LDS people who were curious about my current vocation. I also tell everyone that despite the fact that I did not particularly enjoy my mission it was absolutely worth it and that they should serve one as well– not merely that I will support them if they choose to go. The lessons learned in the process of serving my mission have served me well my entire life and everyone would do well to learn those same lessons (i.e. how to deal with rejection and disappointment, how to make the most of a living situation you cannot change, how to deal with difficult co-workers, how to identify BS, etc.). Few other experiences offer the plethora of life lessons condensed into a 2 year period quite like a mission (or military service).
Perhaps the greatest tragedy of LDS missionary work is the high opportunity cost it presents to the missionaries and their families and the Church itself. Look at it this way:
1. what else could a young person do for 18 months to 2 years to help his / her community or the world?
2. instead of spending $9k -$12k ($500 x 18-24), how much money could a young person earn / save by working instead?
3. how taxing is it for a typical LDS family to send multiple kids on missions IN ADDITION to college?
4. what good could the Church do with a workforce of 60k young people available for 198-24 months willing to serve? Imagine the positive image and PR that could be earned if these young folks were truly serving in communities.
“The church must be true or ignoramus missionaries like me would have ruined it a long time ago.” –
J.Golden Kimball
(cited from Deseret News https://www.deseret.com/2013/3/7/20515672/kued-review-uncle-golden-recalls-stimulating-church-leader )
As a missionary 20 years ago in Brazil, I think on the whole we did more good than bad for members, converts, investigators and missionaries. There are a hundred things that could be improved about my mission, and my mission doesn’t seem to have been half a crazy and some peoples. But we still did good. There was community service (not enough). We spent a ton of time with people in their homes, and they largely welcomed us back, so it couldn’t have been too bad. I assume that most of the people I baptized did not remain active. But there is one 9 year-old boy I baptized that is active, and I think his parents are still semi-active. But more than him, I think of the many people we would visit. There were a lot of very poor, semi-literate people in Brazil that were happy to have us visit; they probably didn’t get many social calls. Sure, we wouldn’t shut up about the BoM while we were there, but we also listened to them, and laughed with them, and on occasion developed real friendships. I think there was real value in all of that. Yes, it would have been better if we felt empowered to focus more on helping people rather than baptizing them, but the fact that we could have done more doesn’t mean that we didn’t do anything.
For missionaries, the question is more complex. Josh makes excellent points about the opportunity cost of serving a mission. I grew up greatly over those two years. My college transcript from before and after can attest to that. Hopefully I would have grown up at some point even if I hadn’t served a mission! (The point about counterfactual is well made.) It seems like every time I peek in on old mission friends on facebook, another one has left the church. I don’t think it is reasonable to assume that 2 years of missionary service will still be the most important part of a missionaries “conversion” 20 years later.
josh h hits this nail on the head. The irrefutable fact is that the church has an ENORMOUS resource at its fingertips that it is wasting by 2 years of knocking on doors. And before someone comes in and says that’s not what they do these days and the Q15 are trying their best to change the culture, no they are not. I have two kids on missions and I also am close friends with our local mission president. It is still all about wasting time trying to find people to teach and baptize. What should it be about instead? Community service!! Almost everybody realizes this except our highest church leaders.
One can easily align service areas with values that the church has (or should have):
1) Stewardship of God’s creation: conservation efforts. This would appeal to so many young people today and would probably bring in more real converts anyway.
2) Education and research: Is not the glory of God intelligence? And education the means of lifting people out of poverty?
3) Food, water, and housing: Charity is true religion. And think of all the credit for financial giving the church could take using creative accounting techniques!
4) Working alongside youth: This would give the youth something to do other than the existing non-program, and would prepare them for their own service.
5) Gathering of Israel you say? = refugee assistance
Send kids on missions doing something like the above in the daytime when people are at work anyway, then in the evenings they can have teaching discussions with people who want to learn more. That would solve 90% of the above issues and would probably be at least as successful at bringing in converts.
Jake C: I’ve thought a bit about the counterfactual trap, and it is just not as easy to predict as some of these Marvel (and other) movies would like us to think. There was a heroin addict we taught who, as a result of our intervention and influence, ultimately went to a rehab program, but then he left the program and fell off the wagon again. We supported the family (the parents were doing whatever they could for him, but were also a little bit too unwilling to get tough). I feared that he had probably died (thanks Nancy Reagan), but no, he did eventually get clean and he’s now a happily twice-divorced dad with adult kids. What would have happened if he never met us? Maybe the same thing. It really wasn’t due to our efforts alone that he was able to get clean, although we definitely did our best.
Likewise another convert who left a cheating husband who was somewhat abusive. She left in large part due to the support efforts of some missionaries, starting with me (but then some of my “colleagues”), but would she have eventually left him if not for us? Could be.
And those people who are so sure that their lives would be terrible if not for the Church or their mission service, is that really true? What other experiences would have happened? What other people would have influenced them? What other service could they have rendered if they didn’t go or weren’t involved in Church activities and callings? It’s just not possible to know really.
All we can do is just try to be the best people we know how to be at any given time, and to listen to others and be supportive to them in their struggles. I worried my kids would not be living lives of service without the Church, but that’s kind of dumb. There are plenty in the Church who don’t live lives of service, and many outside the Church who do.
I absolutely agree with those who believe that incorporating significant community service into missions would be a game changer. Not only would it make missions much more rewarding for missionaries, it would be the greatest PR move the church has made since the 1978 revelation on priesthood. I even believe that both the number of missionaries and convert baptisms would increase over time. It would make missions noteworthy on resumes and college applications. I would hope that the service would include partnering with other faiths and humanitarian organizations.
One thing I would add: university credits earned through BYU pathways for coursework completed in connection with the missionary’s field of service during the mission (religion, language, history, world religions, CNA, etc ).
About all this hypothetical community service … trying to do community service while on my mission is when I learned that volunteering is not universally a good thing. We got yelled at by someone accusing us of putting other people out of work. If we were so rich that we could afford to work for free, then get lost, people need jobs. After that, we stuck to teaching an occasional English class. Volunteers were NOT a positive thing when unemployment was high and people were scraping to afford food. Community service could work, but you’d have to adapt it by culture and country so as not to cause problems for the local workforce.
I’ve also seen (on social media) some pushback against the white savior complex of American missionaries. This has taken the form of people from third-world countries joking about sending missionaries to America to convert people away from worshipping guns (I am not trying to turn this into a gun debate; just pointing out that sending someone to change culturally embedded beliefs could go both ways). Another individual expressed anger at how American volunteers expected to be adored and thanked for condescending to come to their country, which had been exploited and impoverished by colonialism, and offer to help. They just wanted the Americans OUT.
As for my own mission, I fondly believed it was a time of growth, hard work, and astounding spiritual experiences. And it was. But then I tried to reread my mission journal and remembered that my mission was also a neurotic guilt trip plagued by scrupolosity and a couple of emotional breakdowns. I’d blocked out those memories. I’ve never picked up my mission journal again, and I packed the pictures and mementos away. I’ve lost track of most of the people I taught and converted, though I do know one family is still very active. That whole family joined at the same time and it was definitely one of the high points of my mission. Others quit Church as soon as I was transferred, and one memorable mother/daughter pair gave back the Book of Mormon the week after they were baptized — they left it hanging on the door knob. They wouldn’t even answer the door. So it was quite a mixed bag.
Two years of community service would be pretty awful. I volunteered at a hospital once, and they had me filing papers. I got bored and quit. There isn’t much meaningful service that an untrained teen can do. You’d be looking at physical labor – like picking trash up from the side of the road. Or maybe working on a farm. Our youth group did that once. We spent three days at a Church farm doing things like fixing fences and killing time. Apparently, it’s a huge task for adults to supervise untrained teens and our “service” cost the farmer a lot of time. Also, can you imagine the liability? I don’t think the Church sends teens to work on farms anymore. The Church would have to leave the missionaries in the same place for two years, just so the investment of training them to do something would be worth it. Otherwise, whoever is supervising religiously zealous teens is going to get sick of having a new batch rotate in every three months.
I am a retired librarian, and one of the constant issues we had in our particular public library was the idea that all we needed to do to stay open was recruit volunteers! As one who both worked with and supervised several (including older women wanting a community connection and those on probation for minor crimes), I learned several valuable things:
1) volunteers need to be trained, which takes time.
2) volunteers need to be supervised, which also takes time.
3) not all volunteers are equally suited for all assignments. In one department we had a lovely woman with mental disabilities. Once she was asked to sort coins and roll them. They all had to be redone. Eventually with our almost total reliance on computers, she had to be let go because there weren’t enough projects to keep her busy.
4) the volunteers who came as a social outlet often spent as much time chatting as working. Which is OK if that’s what you expect, but can be rather disconcerting otherwise.
5) “volunteer” means what it says. They can pick and choose what they do, how often they show up, and if they head south for the winter.
6) because we were unionized, volunteers were (supposedly) not allowed to do anything that paid staff could do. (How much this was enforced depended on the location.) They were also not allowed to do anything that would infringe on staff or patron privacy.
All of this being said, many of our volunteers were wonderful and extraordinarily helpful. They pretty much did most of the gardening and constituted our Friends of the Library group, which organized programs and ran book sales and two used bookstores. However, the bulk of these people are older retirees and dwindling.
Despite many of the issues with volunteers, which Janey also mentioned in her post, I firmly believe that missionaries should be spending at least 50% of their time in community service. It would also be great if they could be “screened” and assigned to tasks that suited their talents and interests, then be given credit for their work which could serve them well in college applications and on resumes. With the Church’s ample resources, this definitely could be done successfully.
The missionary in my social network who had the best experience as a whole on his recent mission served in New Mexico and spent most of his time providing service on a rural reservation. But…he is from a ranching family and knew how to do much of the work before he left.
Mixed bag for me.
I have lasting health problems from living in Nicaragua in poor conditions where I dropped to only 110 lbs from parasites, food poisoning, amoebas, E. coli and undiagnosed mosquito born diseases. I also was robbed multiple times and assaulted. We often had poor food choices and quality.
Personally I learned a lot about people d myself as well as leadership skills that have helped me in my career plus a second language that has been a personal and professional advantage.
For impact on Nicaragua. Some people we converted had good outcomes from adopting Mormon values and life style as well as connection to the church. People I baptized served missions themselves and became leaders in the ward or branch. Some though had a hard time with family and friends and lost a lot of community. Others left the church quite soon after joining and may not have lasting impact. We also were most of the church leadership and had a lot of mentoring of new members and leaders to build the church from the beginning.
We volunteered a lot at hospitals and that was a net positive. Mostly helping with paperwork but also in emergency rooms and with patient care. We also taught PE at a grade school for a while. I was in a missionary musical group for 6 months and we gave concerts and music lessons. These are some of my best memories.
More volunteering would make missions better for everyone in my opinion. Better for the missionaries and for the community. If we want missions to be actually good for both missionaries and the world that is the change I think should happen.
Janey: Your comment reminded me of something else I’ve thought a lot about. I did a post ruminating on the selfishness of altruism (original post was 2013, but a revised version in 2014 here): https://bycommonconsent.com/2014/12/01/gratitude-selfish-altruism/
There is always a downside to service. I’ve recently noticed an increasing trend for wards to put limits on the service acts they will perform for a few reasons: 1) as stated above, why are we doing something with amateurs that is competing with paid labor (that ward members might actually perform for money)?, 2) liability, the biggest anti-service motive we have as a Church due to how litigious we are in the US, and 3) mostly unstated, but the limited resources for free work. Most families have two careers now, and there isn’t a lot of free labor sitting around. If you spread it out too much, you’re not going to help anyone, and you’ll burn everyone out.
When we were moving in 2020, the missionaries offered to come over and do “twenty minutes” of yard work. It would have taken me twenty minutes to explain to them what to do! Also, this wasn’t the kind of yard work that is normally charity. We were doing some minor landscaping fixes to increase the value in the sale. Basically, we just ended up doing most of it ourselves and hiring out some of it to our regular lawn care guys.
I literally could go on for hours and opine about missions and my experience. In summary my LDS mission was physical, emotional and spiritual abuse. My mission President was delusional and psychotic. One of his many unique programs was that we need to get the President of my mission country to convert to “Mormonism”. Once he became converted, the rest of the citizens would flock to the church. We prayed daily that he would convert. We were taught, if he did not convert the country would be invaded due to its’ “wickedness”
Leaving that aside, lets imagine that it works. The mass the the population becomes a member and gets on the covenant path. What do a few basic statistics show us?
Start with Tonga. The LDS church shows 60% of the population is LDS with members of record. However, the official census shows 18%. (Again church inflated numbers) OK having 1/5 of the population as a LDS member.
What do stats show unique about Tonga? 60% of the population is obese……what about the word of wisdom blessings?.
Poverty has improved compared to the past….however only because of a large migration of youth to US/NZ/Australia and sending home $$. So converting eventually leads to leaving your homeland?
The current GDP is -2.7% (yes negative), 27% of the population is poor……….what about tithing blessings?
Crime is higher per capita compared to USA….and could go on and on. Its not Sub-Sarahan Africa, but its not Singapore.
OK lets look at Rexburg, ID
92% of the population is LDS.
Rexburg obesity 32.4% better than the 41% for USA—maybe word of wisdom works
Poverty – household income is 44K, compared to 71K in rest of USA.- Again, tithing blessings?
Crime. OK its low in Rexburg for most, but not to the Ryan/Vallow kids.
Again stats can be deviated to show your point. I could throw lots of stats, but show me a true stat where Mormonism benefits a whole community for the better. Is Rexburg better having a 90% LDS population?. Is Tonga the best place to raise a family? Utah’s economy is improving, while the percentage of members decrease. Missionary work can help some individuals improve their lives, but I would propose no better than any other religious teaching that teaches self improvement. The missionary program harms everyone involved, including the GA’s who use the program to ladder climb.
My 2-1/2 yr mission in the mid-60’s to Belgium/France was a mixed bag. The missionary work was hopeless, and pretty much a waste of time. Living in Europe and learning French were a plus. Learning about existentialism and absurdism was eye opening. I particularly enjoyed the writings of Camus and the Book of Ecclesiastes. In a way, France converted me.
The missionary lessons were full of half truths. Our salesmen tactics were depressing. I wish we had been encouraged to do more volunteer work. I wish I would have delivered a more general Christian message. I love Christ the rebel, champion of the poor and displaced.
I don’t think we did much damage. My mission presidents were reasonable and earnest. One became a GA.
Developing countries are labor rich and cash poor. So volunteer work that does manual labor is problematic. It is better to hire the labor. But young missionaries can be easily trained in a variety areas that can be usefully applied. For example, water treatment, solar installation, teaching English, playground design and installation, etc.
With 10,000’s of volunteers and a relative small investment, the Church could have a major impact on the world.
I agree 100% with the comments by A Disciple.
Your Food Allergy nailed it! An army of service missionaries throughout the world. Especially working with refugees.
I don’t think I’m trying to pick a fight here, but I’m going to push back directly against one aspect of A Disciple’s comment.
I utterly reject the notion that coming home early or returning with a negative attitude constitutes failing at one’s mission. This notion is absolutist, one-sided, and simplistic. It suggests the only successful mission is one which results in continued loyalty to an institution known to have faults and to cause damage. One of my best friend’s in high school came home early from his mission. Today he is a remarkably successful professional, devoted husband and father, and tireless contributor to his local community. He is also completely inactive from the Church, and the break began on his mission where he learned some very painful things that ultimately wizened him up.
Yeah, I’m with Jake. I was not what one would call a successful missionary as I did not believe in what I was doing. I struggled mightily just to stay in the field, but stay I did and am better for having done so. As to Disciple’s characterization, I came home with an attitude about the church, and it was something other than positive. I am also indebted to the experience for that because I was able to see the church for what it is. My separation with the church started when I visited the temple and only became more pronounced during the mission.
So, did I have a failed mission? Some may say so, and because I don’t really care what they think but also don’t believe that binary characterizations of the mission as successful or a failure begin to capture the experience, I would suggest a little more nuance. It is not one thing, even in a church replete with binaries and simplistic definitions.
That said, I was a LOUSY student before the mission and a passable one after. One could argue I would not have a college degree now if I had not left for a while and engaged in some kind of challenging task. It could have the military, but it wasn’t. In that way, and in many others, I benefited from going, but I did not come home converted, which is what I’m led to believe the church wanted for me.
As for the people I was involved in teaching and baptizing, very few were what you would call happy and successful. One couple in particular–lovely, happy folks–investigated for a while before the husband one evening said he wanted to be baptized. His wife was not ready. He was baptized, and on the first visit after his baptism, she said to us, “I feel like you have him now and I’ve lost him.” My heart sank into my stomach. We were active participants in creating a divide in their marriage, and I knew at the time that they had not yet begun to scratch the surface of what the church actually teaches and believes. I told them at that time that their marriage was the most important thing in their lives. I don’t think the church actually believes that, though.
Jake C
That is a fair criticism. In that particular sentence I was sharing what I was thinking at the time I was experiencing the challenges of my mission. I have no standard and I should have not implied such judgement can be made of others of what constitutes a successful or failed mission. For me, completing my mission and returning with a positive assessment of it made it a successful personal accomplishment.
We shouldn’t wonder too much that missionary work doesn’t come off without a hitch. It’s been prophesied that the fulness of the gospel will “be proclaimed by the weak and the simple unto the ends of the world…”
It is interesting to read all of the comments about doing more volunteer work with our teen missionaries.
Some feel like this is a good idea and some a not so good one.
One poster brought up the excellent point that volunteers need to be trained and then supervised.
This is pretty much exactly what the LDS missionary program is.
Young volunteers who are taken in, trained and then sent out under strict suprervision.
Over the last 70 years or more the LDS church has fine tuned this into a proselytizing situation almost exclusivly.
They do not seem to be interested in trying to change their vast resources or to try to make the changes of training and supervision to make a more service situation.
They also are set in the idea that all or almost all ( except for a handful of older couple missionaries) our missionaries will be young and single.
The one size fits all attitude, one that really does not work well.
I have never really understood why there is not a lot more , and I mean a LOT more, charity work done with the money and people in the LDS church.
I am a convert, never been on a mission, so I am speaking from a different point of view than life members who served one.
I could, however, write a lot about how my family was affected by my joining.
It was not a positive experience for any of us.
I am not sure that members who serve missions and feel as though they have helped people find a better life because these investigators have been looking for something anyway can understand that maybe their might be a better way to help people than dividing them and their families for many many years and sometimes forever.
Most missionaries do not go back and keep track of their baptisms and how the people are doing for the next 20 to 30 years, they just do not know or understand the life of a convert.
They can not begin to understand where we come from and what they have left behind for us to deal with.
Some here speak of being happy to learn a language and experience a foreign culture.
The same experience can be obtained without going on a mission easily and many people do so.