(photo of non-wimpy missionary above)
I served a mission to Concepcion, Chile in 1976 to 1978. I have posted about that experience many times here at W&T. Missionary life has changed significantly since my days, and one aspect that struck me recently is the practice of calling home.
During my mission, we rarely had the opportunity to call home, even on special occasions like Mother’s Day or Christmas. Calls were only permitted in emergencies and with the approval of the Mission President, usually at his office. For over 22 months, I didn’t speak to my parents. The only time I was allowed to call was at the Salt Lake City Airport after spending two months in the LTM, waiting for my flight to Chile. The next conversation with my parents happened almost two years later when they picked me up at the airport.
The reason given to us was that talking to our family would interfere with our missionary work and make us less successful servants of the Lord. We were encouraged to immerse ourselves completely in the work and avoid distractions. Of course, practical reasons like the high cost of international calls and the lack of phones in some places also contributed to the restriction. But that reason did not hold up for domestic calls, yet even stateside missionaries could not call home.
Since none of us could call home, it wasn’t a major concern. Nobody complained about not making calls; instead, we communicated through weekly letters, which took about a week to reach us. If I asked a question, it could take 2-3 weeks to get a response.
Today, missionaries can Facetime every week! Not just a phone call, but they get to see mommy’s face every week! Maybe this explains why baptisms are down? Since we were told that we couldn’t call home because we would lose focus of our purpose, if missionaries are calling home every week, they must be losing focus, dwelling on things at home, and overall not losing themselves in the work. That must be it!
Or maybe the kids nowadays are more mature, more focused, and can call without losing their spiritual focus? Maybe if I had been allowed to call, since I was less spiritually committed than current missionaries, I would have gone off the deep end, run amuck, and not had all the baptisms that I did?
I get the impression that the only reason I was not allowed to call was it was not possibly due to technical/financial constraints, yet they had to make up a spiritual reason. Just like the no swimming rule. It is purely practical, keeping stupid kids from drowning, but the devil on the water is still making the rounds.
What are your thoughts on the current practice of allowing missionaries to Facetime weekly with home?
Wheat & Tares 
Generally, they probably would have been fine in previous eras, but they are a product of their era. Yes,
By their nature, missions are psychology stressful. Missionaries face daily rejection and sometimes mocking. These young adults are often in a place where the culture is unfamiliar (this can even occur when they’re assigned within their own country). Many are learning a new language. Food is different, safety issues exist, they’ve been cut off at a level from family and friends, and they’re experiencing levels and types of isolation.
As teenagers and young adults they are in a time period in life when serious mental illnesses often emerge and are sometimes triggered.
It is a responsibility of the sponsoring organization, the church, to do everything it reasonably can to minimize the stress and effects of stress that missionaries experience.
Many companies have employee assistance programs where employees can access mental health services without going through their employer.. This would be appropriate to set up for missionaries who currently have to go through their mission presidents to obtain mental health care and we all know that some mission presidents are more likely than others to facilitate this (and it is also set up so that mission presidents have access to some of the content of the counseling sessions—these sessions are not fully confidential).
Phone calls are great but really only a start. Daily downtime would be ideal, recognizing that missionaries are adults. The church could work to minimize the gap between the freedoms that senior missionaries and young adult missionaries are afforded. We forget they are adults and ought to be treated as such.
So yes, weekly calls home are wonderful. They are a great start. But only a start!
“ Not just a phone call, but they get to see mommy’s face ”
I find it bothersome that, when someone is looking to diminish another person, they bring up that person’s mother and use a diminutive of HER name. Stop it.
Moving on ..
The church leadership made a decision about phone calls long ago — when phones were still uncommon. The young missionaries did not have a vote in that decision-making process. That has not changed. The rules are now different but the current young missionaries still have no voice in the decision-making process.
While phone service had been common in the US since the early 1900’s, an out-of-area phone call remained expensive until cell phone technology arrived. In the past, calling to the next town might involve a long-distance phone charge. Those charges were significant. International call were hard to make and were extremely expensive. In the 1970s, I remember paying $1.34 a minute to call from Latin America to the US. This was back when minimum wage moved from $2.10 to $2.30 an hour.
Because I grew up in Latin America, I interacted with the missionaries of the late 1970s as a teenager. Due to who my parents were, we had a large number of LDS missionaries pass through our home. Were they better than the current crop? No. Were they more diligent? No. Was it really easy to find people to baptize in Latin America during that era? Yes. Did most of those newly baptized people completely disappear within a week or two? Yes.
Society has changed. Church attendance for all denominations is dropping. The average person is not looking for any sort of religion, mormonism has a complicated past and the religion expects a very high level of personal engagement. That triad makes current missionary work extremely difficult.
Are more missionaries coming home early due to depression, anxiety and other mental health issues? Yes. Does that make them wimps? No. I see the increased rate of easy returns due to a couple things: The missionaries are younger than they used to be. They are younger in actual age and younger in life experience. They have less life experience because they have mostly been raised in a more stable socioeconomic environment. The work is harder. The level of rejection is higher and people are less tolerant. Society is less tolerant.
I feel simply very sorry for these current missionaries.
Cost for sure. Back in 1990 calling Japan from the UK was roughly £1 per minute. With similar expense doing the reverse.
Another factor to consider is equitable treatment of missionaries. Its possible that not all missionaries came from families with a phone, or had ready access to a phone (depending on the mission location). I remember as a child in the 1970s getting a telephone installed at home, and it was a good few years later that my grandparents had a phone installed. It wasn’t that common for everyone to have a phone in their home.
The mission is a topic that still affects me and many of us to this day (my next blog talks of such).
My opinion is some missionary somewhere, some time did something dumb/immature or did not really want to be there, and instead of letting bygones be bygones the church leadership swings the pendulum to the extreme and cements P&P in stone.
On the phone too long and too often.. everyone can only call 2x/year.
Taking 3 hour dinner appointments….no eatting unless you have an investigator present.
Saying you do not want to knock doors because your tummy aches….no doctor or dentist appointments.
The real underlying problem is not or ever been the missionaries. It was a system that culturally forced and guilted us to go, and then creating stupid illilogical rules.
The wimps are the uncompassionate adults who did not serve missions or Alvin Dyer types. The current generation is smart enough to say NO, when we were not allowed to.. We also suffered mentally but were pushed back at with any complaint.
Ex: I had an series earthquake in my area with the entire region evacuating, and the MP would not let us leave and we were to work with the few residents who stayed behind He loved his numbers over people.
A synonym of wimp is without character. The wimps are the system and the idiots who created it and the uncompaasonate ones who allow it to remain in place.
Missions are hard. They were hard 25 years ago when I went. They are hard now. If you need evidence for that look at how many missionaries go home early.
What makes a mission hard?
1. Forced companionship – being 24/7 with another person, even one you like is very stressful. Worse when you have one you hate. I had some terrible companions and it was so stressful.
2. Time management – having to plan every minute of every day with absurd “goals” around teaching and baptism stats stresses me out still. I have nightmares about trying to fill out those stupid cards with work to meet my mission goals.
3. Tracting and knocking doors – people don’t want to talk to missionaries. Rejection. Rejection. Crazy people. Finally once in a while someone nice.
4. Stupid mission rules. There are rules for everything. It’s like prison.
5. Mission leaders. District leaders, APs, presidents. So much hierarchy senior companion. Junior companion. Trainer. Some of them were good some just made the job harder
6. New culture and language – not all missions do you have to learn a language but all of them have a new culture to adapt to.
7. Food – we ate in Nicaragua with members 3 meals a day. I had diarrhea for 18 months. I dropped to 110 lbs and was hospitalized. That is extreme but all missionaries I know stress about food. Arranging meals with members. Not having enough money. Disagreements about what to eat with companions. Not enough time to cook and eat well.
8. Being cut off from your life. Even with being able to cal home. You are cut off from friends and family and not give. Freedom to actually live a normal life.
I loved people I got to know on my mission and I learned a lot of things that were good for me. But I don’t think missions are good for missionaries. Be nice to them when you meet them because they have a lot of stress for 18-21 year olds.
I believe my comment is stuck in the spam filter.
Missionaries should have been able to call home, take time off for mental health days, have some fun, learn balanced living, etc. They were there voluntarily, right?? Depending on which definition of agency you’d like to use – see Bednar for that mind game.
The Mormon mission fits all cult dimensions of the BITE model – I felt compelled to serve and did so out of fear, like most things Mormon, as well as obligation. It’s a cultural norm and is very unhealthy for the wrong people.
Social pressure and unethical use of authority to serve – done out of duty, guilt, anxiety, or even desire for some.
Yes, I do believe Gen Z is more fragile today but that’s a different issue – the mission was required regardless of the apologetics and other excuses given.
Just use common sense – if something is really that great, you don’t need to demand, manipulate, pressure, etc. The proof is in the pudding.
Leaders should emphasize ‘volunteer’ and shout it so loudly, consistently, and continuously that the culture shifts to accept ‘volunteer’ with gratitude – and shifts away from obligation with social punishment for coming home if they don’t like it.
Better yet, create even more types of missions, including service to other organizations.
The premise of this post and some of the comments frankly really irk me. Full disclosure I write as a former MP in South America within the last decade. The notion that missionaries in the olden days were “tough” is bunk. The weekly call home started shortly after we returned. I think it is awesome. The idea somehow that missionaries will get distracted with more contact with home is bunk. Some missions had rules that the Mother’s Day and Christmas call had to be limited to 30 min. That was dumb and was not a policy of the church. Here is the fundamental reality as to why it takes so long to change the culture of missions and the Church. In the MP Training Seminar, the training is loud and clear that you should not run the mission the way your mission was as a young person. What happens in reality is that MPs arrive and their mission muscle memory kicks in and they start doing things the way they did 30+ years ago. That is why there can be such divergent approaches from mission to mission. When we were at the MP Seminar a GA, a former MP of our mission told us that every missionary would baptize every week. You see that GA was still living in the “glory years”. The sad thing is some MPs think missions should be a Spartan army. That is there flawed thinking and not coming from Church leadership.
Where we served it was ground zero in the 80’s for the massive baptism wave that swept South America. I won’t get into the details but suffice it to say that the reality on the ground was shocking. Baptisms were less than single digits, missionary mental health was a concern, and overall morale was rough. We had 50,000 members on the rolls and 8 stakes. My first week there I met with a wonderful young SP. As we discussed the stake I learned that of the 8000 members of record that the total stake attendance was less than 250. I got in the car that night and wept. I thought I knew a lot about missionary work. I’d served as a counselor to 4 MPs and had a lot of other leadership callings. That night as I prayed I simply said “God, I don’t know what to do.” The answers came. We massively increased the number of service hours, changed P-day so they could go to the temple and museums (both are closed on Monday), and made missionaries available to the Bishops to use them in ward callings, and a lot. We called two additional APs to make contact with community leaders to find, and organize service projects. Our missionaries even built an Assembles of God chapel. The results were astounding. baptisms increased, activity rates increased 20+x , every missionary statistical measure increased, mental health visits decreased, and we had the lowest return rate on the continent. (BTW we never reported any numbers to missionaries),
The point I am trying to make is to stop thinking that missionary work is somehow written on stone tablets and should never change. That is utter nonsense. Who cares if you were a tough guy and called home for 15 min twice a year? With today’s, technology it makes total sense for missionaries to have more contact. It takes so long to turn the aircraft carrier that the church is (a metaphor that a member of the 12 used on a visit to our mission.) And calling home is one of those practices that some look down on because it was different in their era. I have little concern for the future of the church after seeing the quality of the young people in our mission. They were rock stars not babied and pampered kids. And the resource the church deploys (mental and physical health) to support them is unbounded and never limited. The decline in church growth is pretty much universal across all faith traditions. Lots of reasons for that may be a future post will get into.
Sorry, if I come across as a bit strong on this topic. But it really ticks me off when I hear the old RMs claim that the living in the past, denigrate this generation. I suppose it happens with each generation to some extent.
Lawrence, thank you for your input. If the MP’s were thoughtful like you we would not be having this discussion. Rare is the MP who gets it.
One big problem of the system, is that the missionary does not have a voice. They are told follow the MP and every rule with exact obdience. The exact obidience phrase needs to be ran over by a truck. My MP threatened to send me home for not working on Pdays. The exact obedience phrase from our SP was it for my spouse, in not returning to church. Who can a missionary speak to about the zealous MP. Unless it is the Puerto Rico MP or Austrialian one trying to seduce the sisters, No one from 50 North temple bats an eye.
The Q15 are to blame because they blame church culture, but come on, every one knows the problems and just say it takes time to change. There are ongoing casualties in this system. Calling non qualified people to be mental councilors and having the MP wife in charge of missionaries health is one of so many ongoing issues.
When the decision makers did not serve missions or were the contributors to the system., it will not change. Listen to Ted Lyons mormon stories episode. Listen to the thousands of returned missionaries there is on going pain and physical with mental trauma
None of the past or current generation of missionaries are wimps. We are all victims of a broken system
The best thing about Lawrence’s comment is the critique of the “Spartan army” approach to mission and church life. As one SP friend said, “Brethren, stop trying to send other members through hell.” Compassion and loving-kindness have been getting shoved aside by this approach for far too long. Church should not be a boot camp. Life provides enough challenges on its own. Church should be a M.A.S.H. unit, a place to bind up our wounds, rest and commiserate with others.
Faith – I agree with much of what you write. Some of what you write is more perception than reality. I can tell you that nothing gets the attention of the leadership like letters or calls from concerned parents. I’ve seen MPs released that was the result of such letters. Anyone that teaches exact obedience to the MP doesn’t understand the gospel. That is not taught to MPs. Again culture that needs to be ripped up and burned.
Sorry your MP sounds like a dope. As to mental health professionals. We had a outstanding resources in country with super qualified professionally trained folks. Gone are the days of mission leaders (BTW I love that change) being solely responsible for missionary health. They have access to the best docs in the area and spare no expense.
We taught our missionaries the law of exceptions. Meaning there are rare conditions when there are exceptions to the rules. (Maybe I should do a post on that). I had a missionary who came in to an interview. He asked me forgiveness because he had spent the day eating pizza and listening to heavy metal with his comp. His comp was from a very challenging violent environment. He was closed to his comp, and everyone else. In an attempt to connect with his comp he asked him what kind of music he liked. That led to an afternoon of music and pizza. I asked him how it went. He said his comp is now open, smiling, and enjoying his mission. I stood up and hugged the Elder and said good bless you, don’t do that every week.
BTW I know Ted well. We’ve corresponded and compared notes. i I know exactly what he dealt with.
Great post, Bishop Bill! I served under two mission presidents (stateside, New Hampshire Manchester Mission). During my first Prez’s last year in the mission, the policy was we could call home on Christmas and Mother’s Day. Those calls definitely disrupted our proselyting mindset for the complete day on which they happened. Head out of the game, on the phone for 2+ hours (then sitting around doing nothing while your companion called home for 2+ hours), feeling all the homesick feels. When the new Prez began his tenure during my 2nd year, he changed the policy so we could also call home on the lame and purely obligatory holiday known as Father’s Day. (don’t think it’s lame and obligatory holiday? Ask my dad.)
My suspicion is that letting those calls happen weekly over video normalizes them, so they aren’t a big deal and the missionaries can get in and out of them without all the melodrama I experienced. Only being allowed to call home 2-3 times intensified it and made it the distraction the brethren feared. But I also don’t think we were tougher/less-wimpy missionaries in the 90s. Let’s not be too hard on the current crop. I remember a whole zone-conference session, which got very intense, where we deliberated how many CDs a missionary should be allowed to have in their apartment, let alone what music those CDs could contain. Whiniest mission meeting I ever sat through. School of the prophets? Nope. That day it was school of the wimps.
Apparently my satire is not as well written as I had hoped. I in no way think that todays missionaries are any less or more wimpy than I was as a missionary, or any harder or easier. That must have got lost in translation. And yes, the comments from Damascene prove what I l always thought, that the only reason for the “no call home” rule was financial/technical. The problem was that was NEVERE communicated to us as missionaries in Chile. We were told it was because calls would distract us from the work. So when the rules change, and the reason we were told goes out the window, one could conclude that the missionaries today are weaker, and need their call home (to their Mother, nod to Damascene) to survive. I do not believe that, and was trying (and failed) to be funny in drawing that conclusion. If only the church could be honest with us!
Lawrence, thanks so much for your comments. Having lived it, you have a unique perspective, and I’m glad you spoke up. We would love to hear more of your experiences. Please reach out to us at the guest post e-mail if you would like to share more with everybody.
Bishop Bill. Email me when you have a moment.
Kudos to Lawrence for his frank comments.
Back on my mission, Southeast US 1978-1980, my first MP would not let us call home for any Holiday or event, unless it was an extreme emergency with prior MP approval. There were some other things done, like have missionaries stand up in Zone Conference & be berated in front of the other missionaries, if we had no baptisms for a while. We were allowed only one meal a moth at member’s homes.
Knocking on doors resulted in few contacts most daytimes, for often both parents were out working. Thanksgiving, Christmas, & New Year’s day were also a total washout for knocking on doors.
Faith-Alvin R. Dyer’s “The Challenge” was one of the books on our list of approved books. Yes, there was an official list of books that we could read. Funny that biographies of GA’s were not on that list, despite that books like “An Abundant Life” & “Spencer W. Kimball” I found to be uplifting & helpful to faith.
While some zealots might say to look at Hugh B. Brown baptizing most of that one independent church congregation, remember that some missionaries that went on the be GA’s, like Spencer W. Kimball, had no such mass baptism success.
Mental health was also a problem in the past on missions, it was hinted that there was no forgiveness for those missionaries going home early, for any reason. Long after my mission, I was diagnosed with depression. One of my Bishops at that time (1994) told me depression could not exist, yet, a few years later his son came home early from his mission, due to depression.
@Lawrence. By no means am I criticizing you, I would like an open discussion; which only happens here and not at church or even it’s leadership meetings. LDS missions along with early morning seminary were the 2 shelf breaking items for myself and get my attention. What is one person’s perception can be another person’s reality and vice-versa. The MP can have the perception the missionaries are happy, thinking it is reality, when if you asked the missionaries, it is not. What I have lived, seen, and experienced is not my perception, it is my reality. From my mission alone I could rattle off 100 + stories, then another 100+ as an observing member that would be qualified as abuse and illogical thinking cloaked in “Faith”. These are not isolated incidents.
When I was a missionary my parents did call SLC and speak to our GA friend. However, my MP was protected by his GA former mission president and nothing changed. When my son was in Arizona on his mission we requested for him to go to the MD and DDS for checkups and cleanings, under our own insurance and cost. The MP said, NO! It was a MP power play. We told him to disobey and go anyways. (should one prioritize obedience to their Parents or MP ? ) When another son was in Mexico during the pandemic, we called to speak with the MP. His wife reprehended us and said there was no COVID in Mexico and we were overreacting and all missionaries were to continue working and would finish a full 2 year mission. My son was home 48 hours later and did not return on the joke COVID mission the church designed for home. How many stories and MP’s does it take to finally no longer accept it was the person, but the entire system. Your approach and Ted Lyon’s are the exception. Also Ted Lyon is a Saint, and if he would have been made, along with others like him a Q15, the system would be getting fixed. Sorry, but Bednar types are just repeats of the same pattern.
There is too much nepotism and cliques regarding all these church callings. One of Pres. Monson former missionaries was MP in our area and was a poor leader, but protected and praised by Monson. Another of my childhood bishop/SP was called to be a MP, after only serving 6 years because all the local members complained and church sent him to Mississippi to cause pain and suffering for the members and missionaries there. My SP brother was a GA and protected any complaints to SLC. They protect their own and throw the rest of us away.
I have lived in 4 time zones, 5 states, 8 stakes over the past 35 years. I have seen the pattern over and over. I stopped attending church after being in stake leadership, because of the same patterns of abuse and illogical thinking on our stake level. Unless the church has radically changed in the past 5 years, I think your perception is only a temporary reality in a few pockets, but then the pattern repeats its self. The changes made by Ted Lyon were erased after he left Chile, and all improvement your made as MP were or will be erased by your predecessors. And when the system really really, really changes it is too late for many of us. Ask your self why are so many stalwart members walking away from church ? The church owes us all an apology and needs to repent !
Think about how many times the missionary system has a new program saying we are now doing it better and the Lord’s way. Then it is scrapped until the new reinvention of the system. In the end they keep changing to a new program every 5 years because of the problems with the previous one.
Mike H
Alvin R. Dyer did more damage to the church than anyone else in modern history.
We served in the same era. I’ve heard other horror stories like those you share. I’m so sorry your MP was a dope.
I was lucky to have an MP
Missionaries are not wimps. Mission work was hard in 1999 and it seems even harder now because our missionaries are out answering questions nobody is asking.
Our neighbor is serving a service mission at home. She got to go to the Taylor swift concert this week. Another missionary serving in Central America got to join his family in hawaii on a trip right before his mother passed away from a known terminal illness. Things are changing.
As for calling home, in my Asia mission in 1999 calling cards were cheap. We could call home for 5 cents a minute. Yet we were still told to limit our two calls a year to thirty minutes. I won’t bother defending the indefensible.
Bishop bill I get you and your satire. It wasn’t lost on everyone.
News from the pews – today a new YM leader in my ward bore his testimony and admonished the young men to tell themselves they will serve a mission and not be content until they actually believe this. Yuck.
My Brother and Uncle lived in my mission boundaries. Early in my mission my Uncle invited my companion and I to dinner along with my brother and SIL. They took us to the Nut Tree in Vacaville, CA. It was in my district. Another time I was able to have Easter lunch with my brother as he lived near the Stake Center and Easter was on Conference weekend. I only talked to my Mom once on my mission though. I got chicken pox. I called my brother who called mom, who called the MP who gave her permission to call me. The senior sisters in my district took off their missionary hats and put on Grandma hats and took care of me. I also had a companion who had severe asthma and was hospitalized twice while as was with him. I had replacement companions while he was in the hospital but when he was recuperating I spent a lot of time just sitting in the apartment. I spent a lot of my mission in the remotest location in the mission and during that time I only had contact with other missionaries on P-Day. That was nice. I never had great “numbers” and never had a leader call me out on that. I guess that was unusual based on what I am hearing. This was 84-86 Northern CA. What I really wanted to comment about what the comparison of “Spartans” and missions. The Spartan army was a tough group of men, and homosexuality was extremely common, possibly required. Adds a different perspective to a Spartan mission.
Are they wimps? Are you serious?
At 65 years of age you are making false equivalency statements to make the work you did seem harder, and by extension your intellect and ethics better. Want to show them how it should be and get a taste of reality, go serve a proselytizing mission now with your chosen companion. Go do the same things you did in the late 70’s and see exactly how much “success” you have in the realm of converting people to the gospel. While your at it tell your wife she can’t talk to her kids for 18 months or 2 years, and see how far you get there.
So much has changed, the methods you used then don’t work now. The arguments you used then don’t hold weight now. The work being different doesn’t make it less hard. Just because you were great at the 100m dash on your mission doesn’t mean you could compete in the marathon they run now. Those missionaries running the marathon you would fail to complete aren’t wimps for getting a drink of ‘water’ on a regular basis, They are replenished by the regular contact with positive supportive lifting them up.
Makes me sad to think that any missionary now might actually have you as one of those people they turn to for replenishment.
Younger mission ages and allowing missionaries to call home or FaceTime weekly keeps the youth in the church longer. Mission presidents couldn’t do it because so many missionaries were going home early and once missionaries get home and don’t contact their parents weekly and begin to think on their own, they leave the church in droves.
I am going to disagree. I don’t think calling home to parents, unless there is a problem to worry about (dad has stage r cancer) is going to distract. Calling girl friends would, but I think calling is only for parents.
But, YES, missionaries are “wimpier” but it is because they are younger. The one year difference in growing up is huge. Even making them wait until they are 21 would not even put them equal to the sister missionaries because girl brains mature at younger age than boy brains. So, little 18 year old boys are not really old enough to be away from mommy. Sorry, boys but you aren’t. They are barely old enough to go away to college and come home every week for mommy to do the laundry.
Boys, like many in the upper classes, who go away to boarding school for high school might be mature enough….but that is just to be away from mommy. To be a good missionary when they have to do all the other tasks of living, such as cooking and laundry on a tight budget, no.
So, are boy missionaries more immature than when Bishop Bill went out. Yup, but not their fault. Nor is it that society has changed or any of the other reasons given above. They are just one full year younger than they used to be and male brains are not mature until 22.
So, no wonder they can’t emotionally cope with missionary life. It is HARD for the sister who went 20 years ago at age 21 and girl brains mature about 20. So, if it is hard for a mature brain, it is going to be even harder for a child’s brain.
Crocs<flip flops that gave you a blister between your toes with that thin strap thing.
Dua Lipa<Barbara Mandrell or Bon Jovi
video games<kick the can
Timeless classics: honky-tonks, DQ, 7-11, sweatpants, hot dogs
My early-90s mission had the rule to call home only on Mother’s Day and Christmas. There wasn’t a time limit on the calls imposed by the MP, but the expense limited the time on the call. Crazy expensive, and for some reason, we had to take cash to one specific location downtown to pay for the phone call. International calls were really tricky unless you had things set up a certain way. The mission home could make international calls easily, but for everyone else, it took half to most of a day to pay for an international phone call, depending on how far away you were from The Building. If we didn’t pay, then the landlord got notified and we’d get evicted, so everyone was very careful to pay.
I think docjohn51 brought up a really good point about the new rules about family contact nowadays. LDS Missions operate like a cult. Restricting contact with family and friends is a huge red flag for controlling and abusive behavior. My mission had a story about a missionary not going home for a parent’s funeral, and that was apparently a sign of incredible faith and dedication. Actually, that’s just really messed up. That probably didn’t figure into the Church’s decision.
“That is there (sic.) flawed thinking and not coming from Church leadership.”
Lawrence, the GA and MPs of whom you speak are Church leadership.
Current missionaries are not wimps but I think the title is meant tongue in cheek. The missionaries I’ve met lately are more thoughtful and introspective than most on my mission in the 90s. They are more emotionally sensitive but that’s probably a good thing.
Todays missions are a mixed bag of MPs from what I’ve seen. My daughter served in Brazil under two MPs in 2021,2022. She lived in an apartment without a functioning door lock (!) and demanded her MP fix it immediately. He said he would get to it soon and she said today or I’m staying in a hotel. He also told her not to tell her parents about the situation and she responded that the mere fact he said that is a red flag. Apparently he didn’t have the same training that Lawrence mentioned. Her 2nd MP was the model of Christ-like love.
My own MP was a counsin to a member of the first presidency at the time and he said that missions are meant to be boot camps and that we didn’t have any agency. At least we knew where we stood. I just kept my head down for two years, perhaps an apt comparison for fighting in the trenches.
We recently had our local MP come speak to our wards youth – big mistake. The MP wife got up and said that if the MP said to go stand in the corner facing the wall for hours that the missionaries were expected to do that. I think Lawrence is an exception to the rule.
On a somewhat inflammatory but related note I recently read a meme that got me thinking. Do missions today still take passports away from the missionaries? Maybe there’s a legitimate aspect of protecting 18 year olds from losing them… but does that fit the definition of human trafficking??
I got the satire, but it’s sad that satire coincides with so many actual attitudes in the Church.
No, missionaries are not wimpier now. In fact, missions are much harder now, despite the fact that my generation wasn’t allowed to call home. The Church in the age of the Internet is a much tougher sell.
All the hard questions about history and doctrine are just a Google search away, and it’s much harder to avoid talking about polygamy and racism and nonsense “translations” of Egyptian funeral papyri. Religion as a whole is on the decline, so it would be hard enough even if we weren’t trying to sell queerphobia and bigotry to a generation that knows better.
In short, the missionary program is fundamentally broken; the fish stinks at the head, and too many members are pretending it’s all the missionary’s fault.
One way to improve missionary morale: service, service, service.
Like Damascene I wondered a bit about the idea that missionaries have to see mommies face.
Thanks to Bishop Bill for recognizing this and correcting.
Not all Mothers are suffocating helicopter mothers fussing endless over their children all through their lives.
Many of us are strong women who made a real effort to raise our children to be independent, mature and able to stand on their own two feet when they are old enough to leave home after high school.
On these calls the missionaries also see Dads face and Fathers can be just as much a problem with the “apron strings” attitude that grown children have.
I am not sure that missionaries now are wimpier than those decades ago.
Some might be and some might not be.
That is a bit of the problem with almost everything our church does.
It has a one size fits all approach to so many aspects, thinking we all can be jammed into that square peg hole.
Even those of us who are round or star shaped or triangular, created by our loving Heavenly Father.
I believe they liken it to how a diamond is created from coal by pressure.
Humans are not coal.
Stewart Irwin, my post today was satire. I do not believe missionaries are wimps today, or I was any better in 1977. Look up Poe’s law.
ji makes an interesting point, suggesting to an earlier poster who, defending the Church leadership, said that the bad actions from some GAs and MPs were “their flawed thinking and not coming from Church leadership.” ji suggested wisely that those people are the church leadership, and I think he’s right.
The MP holds plenary authority with virtually zero oversight, and in a missionary’s mind the MP holds almost life and death. Thus the MP is the entire church leadership in that mission and for those missionaries, because the MO speaks and acts for and in the name of the church, without any review. What if area presidencies or other GAs in the missionary department spoke regularly to random missionaries without the mission president’s knowledge to see if the mission president is building an environment of trust and respect? When our leaders appoint a MP (and the same can be said for a SP), and give him plenary and unchecked power, then that MP is the church leadership to those underneath him. Similarly, an individual GA who speaks or acts is the church leadership–that’s what the “general” in GA means. We say that they all speak the same message with the same authority, and we don’t have Bendarites and Oakites and Soaresites or other types of -ites. Any one GA is the voice of the whole church leadership when he speaks or acts, is he not?
We’re all wimps today.
My daughter is currently serving a mission. There are a lot of missionaries currently in her mission who had to be temporarily reassigned to a state-side mission until their visas were processed. As a result, there is a lot of knowledge about how the communication rules are handled right now in many missions. It appears to be a real leadership roulette situation. Some mission presidents are very open to allowing missionaries to communicate with home, going so far as to not place time limits on calls on P-Day, allowing missionaries to call people besides parents, and allowing missionaries to text/email outside of proselyting time on other days. On the other side of the spectrum is my daughter’s mission president who limits P-Day calls to one hour only to parents and doesn’t allow the missionary to send texts/emails on any day other than P-Day (and even on P-Day only a single text/email may be sent to any given recipient).
My daughter and I are pretty tight. In fact, I consider the close relationship that I have with my daughter to be one of my greatest accomplishments in life. Prior to my daughter’s mission, my daughter and I would typically communicate via text or call pretty much daily, even when she was off at college her freshman year. Most of this communication was initiated by my daughter since her college schedule was much busier and unpredictable than mine. Most days, our calls/texts were pretty brief since we were communicating so frequently, but we really enjoyed being able to keep in touch this way.
When my daughter left on her mission, she and I both felt a real loss since we could only communicate weekly instead of daily. When she first arrived in her mission, she, like many missionaries, had a very hard time adjusting to mission life, culture shock, homesickness, etc. The weekly calls helped a lot with that, but I’m convinced that if she could have communicated with her parents daily, instead of weekly, that she would have done much better (in fact, she did do much better when we figured out some stealth ways of communicating daily). With the internet, this type of communication is now free. I don’t understand why missionaries can’t spend a reasonable amount of time communicating with family on a daily basis.
The Church is now requiring all missionaries to purchase a Samsung phone to bring on their mission. They then force all missionaries to install Samsung’s Maas 360 management software so that the phone can do very little other than place calls and texts, use Facebook, access the Church website, and use a few Google android apps (Drive, Photos, Maps, etc.). Maas 360 prevents missionaries from accessing any search engine to do a web search, looking up a weather forecast, reading the news, accessing any web site other than the Church website, etc. Missionaries are also required to do weekly and “random” audits of their companion’s phone usage where they have to allow the companion to go through their entire phone searching for any “unauthorized” usage. It’s nuts!
My daughter and I have worked out a few stealth workarounds that allow us to continue to communicate on a daily basis. Many missionaries in her mission are aware of the workarounds and are also using them to communicate with their friends and family outside of P-Day. According to my daughter, there are a lot of parents who are more than willing to assist their missionary in using these stealth techniques to communicate. They are also frustrated that they are limited to a single call or email per week and don’t understand the reason for such limitations.
I really enjoyed my mission and experienced about 20 seconds of homesickness in those two years. I think my last call home was for about 10 minutes because I was going home soon and had gotten used to not having phone calls.
I was a prolific writer of emails and letters though and absolutely loved getting post from my family. There was a lot of them so it was a steady stream.
In short, I was super unbothered by calling home, but I’m am pretty certain that I was an outlier and it would be so much better to have the choice. My Mum recently said that it caused her serious upset not being able to communicate with her children and to know where they were on their missions.
I was thinking recently about how my mission did teach me diligence in the face of adversity and some pretty thick skin, and I wondered how I could impart this on my kids without a 2 year mission. My answer came to me yesterday. I was stopped in the street by a chugger (charity mugger). He did a great 20 seconds stop on me and almost persuaded me to donate to his charity. 18 year old lad with stacks of confidence and charisma.
In terms of comms though; its all about choice.
We are told as members of the church that it is imperative to communicate with Heavenly Father not only daily, but multiple times a day. Then we think less of missionaries for communicating with their own parents once a week. Well, which is it?
When my son went on his mission to Spain the two calls per year was in place and it was murder on my wife. The only consoling that she would get was that my son would make a cassette tape twice a year and tell us a lot of information. Through his entire mission she would go to bed once or twice a week two hours early, turn off the lights and listen to his tape over and over. So it’s not just the missionary that benefits from the face time/texting change.
Anna, I can’t tell if you’re being completely satirical, but I detect more than a hint of true belief in your post. If so, please put away the broad brush. Many, many of us “boys” went away to college at 18 and didn’t see family until Christmas break (just like the apparently superior and more mature girls). Many of us not only managed to show up to class on time but do so in clothes we washed ourselves. Heck, some of us even went to church, made the dean’s list, and not only enrolled in but actually attended Institute classes as freshmens! It’s (not) shocking what we boys could do with such obviously undeveloped brains.
Not a cougar, Yes, I followed BB’s example. I know that has to be a mistake
While the part about brain maturity is scientific fact, young men’s brains are not fully developed until about 22. But that final maturity is talking about higher reasoning skills and abstract thinking, not basic life skills. So, yes I was following Bishop Bill’s example in the satire about just how immature young men are. They should be perfectly capable of taking care of themselves as far as laundry and cooking and all necessary life skills, even on a budget by 18, most are quite capable even younger. If not their parents failed them. So, I was taking a fact, and exaggerating it to the ridiculous. Girls brains, like their body’s do mature about two years younger. That last bit of brain maturity helps with things like understanding a complicated math problems, not how to microwave your cheerios.
I guess if people didn’t get Bishop Bill, I should have known not to follow his example, and people had already shown they were taking him seriously. I mean, Bill doesn’t normally call people things like “wimps” and talk about their “mommy.” He is much kinder than that. So, I thought it was pretty obvious he was trying to get people to react to his exaggerated wording.
As soon as I saw this post I thought “Bishop Bill is on Twitter or whatever fresh Hell Elon’s X is” because this post (which I immediately knew was satire) is exactly like a very real conversation happening there in which a bunch of right wing trolls (aka normal church members who would flee from W&T as if from Potiphar’s wife) were discussing this exact proposition. They were lamenting how many young people are going home early from their missions, then lauding themselves for having been the *real, tough, hard-working* missionaries, and wondering why young people today just aren’t up to scratch. It was a classic bad faith argument with a dash of self-aggrandizement thrown in. But I do think having the underlying conversation (without the name calling and chest beating) is worthwhile.
Missions are tough. College is tough. Jobs are tough. Relationships are tough. Being a young adult is tough. As a Gen X-er, I do often wonder about what seems like less resilience among my Gen Z kids, but I also didn’t have live shooter drills at school, and Nazis (skinheads in the 80s) were actually considered to be fringe, not valuable protected members of society. And I was 21 and 22 when I served a mission, not 18 or 19 like they are today. It’s just not apples to apples.
I do think that calls home can be a great source of support, but I also know from my own time as a missionary (and it sounds like Lawrence would agree) that concerned parents are an important thing to MPs. I can state from personal experience that my parents didn’t know even a fraction of the things that happened on my mission, the conditions I lived in, the crimes (being robbed twice), the areas I taught in. I’m not sure I would have told them even if we had regular phone calls, but maybe. I suspect that more contact with parents means more likelihood that those types of things are revealed to parents. If my daughter (esp at 19) was robbed at knife point or found a dead addict in the hallway of her apartment and I as a parent found out about it, I’d probably be calling the MP or encouraging her to come home, even though I’m no helicopter parent. When one of my friends (an elder) gave his mother a glimpse into the conditions they lived in, our mostly great MP got an alarmed call from her; he pulled the elder aside and said, “There are some things we don’t tell our mothers.”
As missionaries, we shrugged this stuff off and had faith we’d be protected, but when my parents came to tour at the end of my mission I suddenly saw things very differently, feeling responsible for their safety. It was the first time that stepping gingerly over discarded needles in the street made me think “Maybe this isn’t the best neighborhood.”
Full-time missions are much more psychologically draining now that they were in years past, I believe.
Back in Bishop Bill’s heyday of the 1970s, in the U.S. and elsewhere there was a lot of growing awareness about religion and spirituality (this was also around the time that destructive cults like Scientology, The People’s Temple and others were getting established and growing rapidly, but that’s another topic entirely). People were genuinely curious about the Mormons because most people knew nothing about them back then. So missionaries in those days had an easier time finding people who were at least willing to listen.
Nowadays, in the information age, pretty much everyone in the developed world knows at least SOMETHING about the Latter-day Saints (with varying degrees of accuracy but nearly always with a kernel of truth). Add to that growing societal suspicions about organized religion in general (and high-demand religions in particular, which they really brought on themselves), and the result is that most people have already made up their minds that the LDS Church is not something they want to be a part of, long before their first chance encounter with any missionaries.
So the Church continues to send young people out by the thousands using a proselytizing model that may have worked 50 years ago but doesn’t work today. On top of a culture that routinely blames the individual missionaries for their lack of success. The Church is setting missionaries up for failure, while trying to reframe it as a “character building experience” or some such gaslighting. So it has nothing to do with an individual missionary’s toughness (whatever that means) but everything to do with a system that is less and less compatible with good mental health.
Angela C said “There are some things we don’t tell our mothers.” Sounds a lot like Fight Club! The first rule of mission living conditions is we don’t talk about mission living conditions!
I served my mission in Ireland starting in 1968, at the time there was a shootin and bombing war between the Catholics and the protestants. We lived in guest houses or places where we had a room in a house and our meals were provided. My first area was Portrush near the Giants Caseway. We stayed in a guest house (but winter so no other guests) we were served 4 meals a day, and every meal included fried potato bread; I put on 20 pounds in 6 weeks. In most places we shared a double bed, but not with innerspring mattresses, the kind before that with a woven spring, and kapok mattress, if you did not sleep on the wooden rail along the edge the bed sagged in the middle. Sleeping but not relaxing.
Our mission president was believed to be a sheep farmer/herder who was called on a mission to reactivate him. I don’t remember ever having an interview with him.
We were required to have a tape recorder so we could play inspiring messages to investigators. Some of my companions had very big reel to reel tape players with separate speakers? Before casette players. One had a collection of all the current music, Beatles, monkeys, beach Boys, etc. Another had a collection of playboy magazines,
One of my district leaders, from California, had his girl friend come to visit and they went off together for a couple of weeks.
In Northern Ireland most intersections had a machine gun post, and most side roads were blocked off with car bodies, so military vehicles could not follow people. Suburbs were divided by religion, so in a protestant area the kerbstones were painted red, white, and blue, in a catholic suburb kerbstones green and white, If a catholic person were seen with a protestant their house was likely to be fire bombed. The MP didn’t understand that he had members who lived in protestant areas, and others catholic, and that they could not be seen together. So the members organised themselves to have only one lot at a time at church.
I baptised one family and one university student in my 2 years.
I had not seen poverty before my mission.
I had not seen bigotry before.
I had not seen mental illness before.
I felt very sorry for our missionaries during coved, unable to tract, and cooped up in a small flat together.
I believe my mission made me a more resilient person.
What type or organization is this that teaches its missionaries to hide serious matters?. We are not taking about Sally sticking her tongue out at Bobby. But then this same organization is having missionaries do checks on each other’s phones and bathroom habits.
At what point do we all wake up and go “What the Hell??” (I rarely swear)
I know most of us were born into this culture, but these practices are no where close to defensible. Then the Q15 distances it’s self saying we did not teach this, we do not know where it came from, our hands are clean. Many TBM are resorting to name calling saying the ones that speak up are “wimps”. Then again we are all “lazy learners” although most of us would have a PhD In Mormon studies and most TBM’s are still in 2nd grade.
No wonder only 1/3 of the current slc kids are going on missions with zero informed consent.
Where are the adults in the room that stand up for right and wrong?
Then again the Q15 is hiding the church history and Ballard deceives us stating “we are as transparent as we know how”. It is laughable !!!!, but then again it is not…these are people’s lives and feelings, lest they forget.
Faith – well said! It’s sad to see 18 year olds go on a mission and think they are “all that and a bag of chips.” Then they are pumped up to believe the innocent will confound the wise. Those that go on missions go because they haven’t had an original thought or question, just accepting the call. The church lowered the age of missionaries because to many were leaving the church during their first year of college, now they just leave after their mission with either guilt or anger. They go to convert the world, the church hopes they convert themselves, and many times neither happens.
Steven – The area between the Central Valley & the Bay Area can get smoggy, not a good area for a asthmatic missionary to serve in!
Lawrence & Faith – Another GA who did a lot of damage was Henry D. Moyle. He pushed hard on the sports team baptisms. This led to things like activity rates of less than 10%. He also wanted the COB to be 50 stories tall. While a few would be impressed with that, many in the public would be disgusted.