Missionaries detained by police

[Stargazer]

On 6/11/2016 at 8:10 PM, CountryBoy said:

I never said I was in your mission.  I simply pointed out I served at about the same time as you did...and also South of the USA.  Mine was not like that at all.  But, Most posts I see from you are negative.  So, I was not surprised at your take of the mission field

This kind of thing has happened in the Church, and it does no good to hide it.  It MUST NOT be done.  Mission presidents and missionaries should never baptize anyone in order to fulfill quotas.  In fact, the very idea of quotas is repugnant to the Spirit, in my humble opinion.  In my mission, Germany Duesseldorf in the mid-70's, our mission president would have had a coronary if he thought we were doing things like this.  He expected us to honestly report our work efforts, but there was no expectation that we would baptize a certain number per month.  I lived in England 1969-71, and discovered as the membership clerk that there were quite a number of members of record who never showed up at Church, and a large percentage of these were "basketball baptisms", who when they were teens were lured into being baptized for the sake of participating in Church basketball, with no real foundation in the Church.  This was not going on when I was there -- it was part of an aberrant program many years previously under a particular mission president.  A later mission president had had some of these suspect converts visited in order to find out what they knew about the Church, and as it has been reported in this thread about some Latin American missions, most of these folks had no idea that they had joined a church.  I don't know if they ended up doing something about some of them -- but I heard that some had been administratively removed from the membership rolls after asking if they wanted to participate in the Church.

 

[Calm]

I think I read about this and the investigation in the David O McKay bio, SG.

[flameburns623]

5 hours ago, Hamba Tuhan said:

I see. Well, the God of Calvinism clearly loves some of his creations more than he loves others, then.

The God of Calvinism is said to be Sovereign and absolutely unanswerable to His creations. He saves whom He wills, to shew forth His mercy and love; he condemns whom He will to shew forth His justice and holiness. We humans are entitled only to the answer He gave to Job: "I am God: you are not. Shut up!"

God, within this scheme, is the only free agency in any universe, the only truly free Being possible. His very omniscience and omnipotence make it impossible for any other being to have free choice.

The theodicies created by this are pretty well known.

If God created beings predetermined to damnation, how can humans using ordinary language understand Him to be omnibenevolent?

WHY would such a God create automatons at all? If He absolutely MUST create, knowing that at least some of His creations will come to a bad end--how can He be said to be "free"?

Why create us in such a manner that we perceive ourselves to have freedom? 

Yada.

Yada. 

EDIT: Calvinism was an attempt to create a coherent, consistent soteriology. Many people satirize the idea without ever really trying to understand it. I went through a phase of embracing Calvinist theology: if you want to "rescue" Scripture from it's own messiness, Calvinism, tag-teamed with Creationism and perhaps also with Dispensationalism and Presuppositionalism, creates a sophisticated, coherent, and pretty impervious formation. Not many are prepared to enage this confluence of concepts, although to those who are not thoroughly indoctrinated True Believers, a zealous Calvinist will almost invariably project a rigid and even repellent face. 

Edited June 15, 2016 by flameburns623
Added a paragraph.

[Hamba Tuhan]

1 hour ago, flameburns623 said:

Yada.

Yada. 

I'm grateful for the simple and elevating doctrines that came back with the Restoration!

[flameburns623]

10 minutes ago, Hamba Tuhan said:

I'm grateful for the simple and elevating doctrines that came back with the Restoration!

Note my edit.

Calvinism is actually a pretty simple construct. Whether or not it is "elevating" depends upon whether you feel youself part of the Elect.

It isn't that hard to find theodicies and paradoxes in any sort of religious construct. There are a lot of factors at play determining if and/or how one resolves such matters for oneself.

Some historian of ideas has suggested somewhere that the LDS practice of praying for a testimony may have roots in the practice of some Calvinist-influenced groups to encourage people to seek out an "inner witness" of their own Election. And the Mormon idea of foreordination has some parallels to Calvinist predestination. 

[Scott Lloyd]

4 hours ago, Rain said:

I agree. When I was young I used to think of missionaries as so mature and spiritual. Now that I am a parent of children of this age I am amazed at what they can accomplish with the little experience and knowledge they have.  When I look at my 3 children I can see each of them handling what happened in these missions in very different ways and I know I would handle it very differently now than I would have when I was on my mission.  

It's interesting to me now how different I have felt about things as a missionary back then and a ward missionary and wife of a ward mission just awhile ago.  While I didn't want to rush people to baptism then I was worried about them taking too long.  Now I'm worried about investigators taking too short.

 

4 hours ago, Hamba Tuhan said:

Amen! As ward mission leader, it is my privilege to work at any given time with six young men and young women, and I'm repeatedly amazed by what good they pull off -- and with such grace and goodness -- despite their youth, inexperience and, in many cases, genuine goofiness. The Lord wasn't joking when He stated, repeatedly, that he would confound the wise by means of the weak and the foolish. How I love our full-time missionaries ... and, when this is the case,* the good families that willingly and cheerfully lend them to us for a season!

------

*We currently have an Elder serving in our ward who has been a member for only 18 months. His mum vehemently opposed his conversion and his decision to serve a mission, and she has unfortunately continued to make it hard for him to serve. I emailed her when he first arrived in our ward to share a photo and tell her how grateful I am for her son. No response.

Based on the immediate and astounding growth that came upon our son who began his mission nine months ago, I still believe missionaries are, by and large, amazingly spiritual and mature for their age. I believe it is a gift of the Spirit that is bestowed upon them by a wise and loving God in whose service they are engaged.

Which is why I believe most are capable of helping put a stop when they observe it to the kind of silliness that has been recounted in this thread. And why I don't believe such is as pervasive and widespread as we are being led to believe here. 

I've not heard the term "kiddie baptism" since I first encountered it as a ward mission leader back in the early '90s, and it did not have the meaning then that is being applied to it now on this thread.

In the ward and stake where I served -- and, I believe, elsewhere in Utah -- it was fairly common for some children in member or part-member families to get past the cut-off age of 9 years old without being baptized, when it became the role of the full-time missionaries to teach them as investigators, assisted by what were then called stake missionaries and ward mission leaders. Their baptism services were thus planned and conducted by the ward mission leader rather than the stake Primary organization, which would have been the case with children still under age 9. Technically, they were regarded as "convert baptisms," because the children had passed the age of accountability, and it was the responsibility of the full-time missionaries to teach them, even if they had already been attending Primary.

That is the meaning that "kiddie baptism" has held for me up until now. I never dreamed it had any other meaning or connotation or slang usage.

And, except for the infamous basketball and English lessons "conversions" that took place in the '60s, I've not heard of anything like that happening before or since -- until now.

So again, that is why I'm skeptical, notwithstanding the  urban-legend type anecdotes that gushed forth on this thread after smac97 early on was shouted down for suggesting that there may be more to this incident in Mexico than was clear from early reports.

 

 

Edited June 15, 2016 by Scott Lloyd

[flameburns623]

5 hours ago, Hamba Tuhan said:

I'm happy to be corrected, but from what I've read from Jim over the past 12 hours or so, he doesn't need to worry about 'lost sheep' since, if they're lost, then clearly God has elected them for destruction, so worrying would be pointless.

Per Calvinism, God ordains the MEANS as well as the ends.

His 'lost sheep' are sifted from Satan's goats by the medium of proclaiming the Gospel.

As people respond and hearts and lives change under the preaching of clear Scripture, it is revealed who are the Lord's flock. Those who turn away in hardness and impenitence are not of the Elect but are "ignoble vessels", necessary for their purpose but not created to be brought into the House of God.

[jkwilliams]

3 hours ago, Scott Lloyd said:

 

Based on the immediate and astounding growth that came upon our son who began his mission nine months ago, I still believe missionaries are, by and large, amazingly spiritual and mature for their age. I believe it is a gift of the Spirit that is bestowed upon them by a wise and loving God in whose service they are engaged.

Which is why I believe most are capable of helping put a stop when they observe it to the kind of silliness that has been recounted in this thread. And why I don't believe such is as pervasive and widespread as we are being led to believe here. 

I've not heard the term "kiddie baptism" since I first encountered it as a ward mission leader back in the early '90s, and it did not have the meaning then that is being applied to it now on this thread.

In the ward and stake where I served -- and, I believe, elsewhere in Utah -- it was fairly common for some children in member or part-member families to get past the cut-off age of 9 years old without being baptized, when it became the role of the full-time missionaries to teach them as investigators, assisted by what were then called stake missionaries and ward mission leaders. Their baptism services were thus planned and conducted by the ward mission leader rather than the stake Primary organization, which would have been the case with children still under age 9. Technically, they were regarded as "convert baptisms," because the children had passed the age of accountability, and it was the responsibility of the full-time missionaries to teach them, even if they had already been attending Primary.

That is the meaning that "kiddie baptism" has held for me up until now. I never dreamed it had any other meaning or connotation or slang usage.

And, except for the infamous basketball and English lessons "conversions" that took place in the '60s, I've not heard of anything like that happening before or since -- until now.

So again, that is why I'm skeptical, notwithstanding the  urban-legend type anecdotes that gushed forth on this thread after smac97 early on was shouted down for suggesting that there may be more to this incident in Mexico than was clear from early reports.

 

 

No one shouted anyone down. Smac97 said what was described was "far from ordinary" and I and others replied that the practice of such "kiddie baptisms" was pretty common in our missions. 

You asked for a firsthand example, and I provided one. Rather than acknowledge I had given what you asked, you attacked my "hubris" for "complaining" about it now after not having gone over my mission president's head in reporting it back then. 

By all means, feel free to attack a naive 19 year old and the middle-aged man who looks back with regret, but it doesn't change what happened and apparently is still happening in some places. 

[jkwilliams]

It's obvious things didn't go by the book in my mission. Most baptisms came as a result of knocking doors. Bolivians often let us in out of curiosity or because culturally it's rude not to invite callers in. A lot of times the adults in the home were not interested but didn't object to the kids being baptized. Again, I don't think a lot of people really understood the implications of baptism. Too many missionaries were happy to baptize the children without the parents. I never did that. 

As far as the actual baptismal services, it was rare to have anyone from the ward or branch present. Usually, baptisms were being performed every week, so local leadership wasn't going to give up more of their time to attend. The service was almost always conducted by the missionaries. I can recall only a few instances when that wasn't the case. My favorite was when our tiny little branch got on a flatbed truck and drove out to an abandoned New Tribes Mission settlement by a lake, where we did the baptisms, and then had a big picnic afterward. 

Most missionaries I saw took no longer than 3 weeks from contact to baptism (we were encouraged to go fast), and if it took longer than that, a lot of missionaries would drop people from the investigator pool for not "progressing" as they should. Most often the baptism was held after church, which was usually the first time the investigator had attended church. Confirmation almost always occurred immediately after.

I'm sure a young man of courage could have come in and cleaned house, but I was not made of such moral fiber. 

My total number of baptisms (around 60) was far below average in my mission, but I saw lives change, and that was what mattered to me. When I went home, a young woman of around 20, whom we had baptized a year previously, came to the airport to see me off. She brought her entire family (parents and 9 siblings) because she wanted me to know that, from her example, they had joined the church. She was also serving as a stake missionary then. A man I baptized (we did the discussions in English because he had been raised in Atlanta) also came and told me he was serving on the high council. I'm not saying any of this to boast, just that I feel like I did things right and feel good about it. I'm not like Scott or Hamba Tuhan in that it wasn't in my nature to come in as a green elder and raise a stink about how things were done. I can live with that.

Edited June 15, 2016 by jkwilliams

[Hamba Tuhan]

1 hour ago, jkwilliams said:

As far as the actual baptismal services, it was rare to have anyone from the ward or branch. Usually, baptisms were being performed every week, so local leadership wasn't going to give up more of their time to attend. The service was almost always conducted by the missionaries. I can recall only a few instances where that wasn't the case.  

... Most often the baptism was held after church, which was usually the first time the investigator had attended church. Confirmation almost always occurred immediately after.

More layers of complexity to blow my mind!

From the Handbook:

Quote

For Converts. If possible, a member of the bishopric attends each convert baptismal service. When the services involve only one ward, he presides unless a member of the stake presidency attends.

Under the direction of the bishopric, the ward mission leader usually works with the full-time missionaries to plan these baptismal services. A member of the bishopric or the ward mission leader usually conducts the services. If none of these ward leaders are available, full-time missionary district or zone leaders may plan and conduct the services with the approval of the mission president.

From what you've said, I'm assuming that your mission president authorised missionaries to plan and conduct baptismal services, but was it at least under the directions of district or zone leaders? Where was the ward mission leader, at least? And if 'it was rare to have anyone from the ward or branch' attend, how did anyone even know who had been baptised?

Quote

The mission president holds the keys for confirming converts. However, the bishop oversees the performance of this ordinance, whether it is for an 8-year-old member of record or a convert. The bishop ensures that it is performed soon after baptism.

...

Converts are confirmed in any sacrament meeting in the ward where they live, preferably on the Sunday following their baptism. Converts are not confirmed at the baptismal service.

At least one member of the bishopric participates in this ordinance. When missionary elders have taught a convert, the bishop should invite them to participate.

How exactly did you manage to skirt this whole situation considering that at least one member of the bishopric is required to participate in a confirmation and the bishop oversees the ordinance?

For what it may be worth, we followed these instructions exactly in my mission. The ward mission leader planned the service in council with us missionaries. The bishop always presided (and usually the entire bishopric would be in attendance). Our goal was to approach the same level of attendance as a sacrament meeting, and most of the time we did.

I now serve as the mission leader in my ward, and we still follow these instructions. I plan and conduct the baptismal services. The bishop is always there to preside, though now and then the stake president attends. Converts are confirmed under the direction of the bishop. We usually have at least 50 ward members at a baptism, and often over 100.

Edited June 15, 2016 by Hamba Tuhan

[Kenngo1969]

10 hours ago, Hamba Tuhan said:

Yep. I had a period of six consecutive months when I didn't teach a single lesson to a single person.

Discussions are one thing, but gathering the Elect is another.  If there are Elect to be gathered, they will be gathered; if there are no Elect to be gathered, then those who are not Elect will not be gathered.  As I saw it, my job as a missionary was to stand as a witness.  Perhaps people would heed my witness, perhaps not: they had their free will and moral agency.  I'm reminded of Abraham's conversation with the Lord over Sodom in Genesis 18.  The Lord agreed to save the city if even one righteous person could be found there.  As Paul wrote the Galatians, "A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump" (Galatians 5:9).

[Kenngo1969]

1 hour ago, jkwilliams said:

My total number of baptisms (around 60) was far below average in my mission, but I saw lives change, and that was what mattered to me. When I went home, a young woman of around 20, whom we had baptized a year previously, came to the airport to see me off. She brought her entire family (parents and 9 siblings) because she wanted me to know that, from her example, they had joined the church. She was also serving as a stake missionary then. A man I baptized (we did the discussions in English because he had been raised in Atlanta) also came and told me he was serving on the high council. I'm not saying any of this to boast, just that I feel like I did things right and feel good about it. ...

Edited 20 minutes ago by jkwilliams

Gracias por compartir, Hermano

[jkwilliams]

20 minutes ago, Hamba Tuhan said:

More layers of complexity to blow my mind!

From the Handbook:

From what you've said, I'm assuming that your mission president authorised missionaries to plan and conduct baptismal services, but was it at least under the directions of district or zone leaders? Where was the ward mission leader, at least? And if 'it was rare to have anyone from the ward or branch' attend, how did anyone even know who had been baptised?

How exactly did you manage to skirt this whole situation considering that at least one member of the bishopric is required to participate in a confirmation and the bishop oversees the ordinance?

Yes, we had authorization from the mission president to conduct baptisms, but usually the zone leaders or district leaders were busy with their own baptismal services, so most missionaries conducted their own services. As I mentioned, activity rates were absymal (around 10%, if I had to guess), so there usually wasn't a ward mission leader. Attendance at wards I was in averaged probably 30 members, with branches being smaller, though our ward in Cochabamba was a large, pretty well staffed ward (they even had stake and ward missionaries there). I was there 6 months and had 6 baptisms, but these were all the kinds of life-changing experiences one hopes for--and I recall our bishop conducted the baptismal services in that ward.

In a lot of areas, attendance was so low that missionaries often ended up giving impromptu sacrament meeting talks and teaching lessons in the other meetings. In two branches I was in, we were lucky if the branch president showed up to meetings, and we conducted sacrament meetings, blessed and passed the sacrament, and taught Sunday School. Relief Society, and priesthood meetings. Come to think of it, some branches only had a branch president and no counselors. So, even if you wanted to go by the book, you had to choose between waiting for a branch or ward representative to come, which was unlikely, or just go ahead and do it. This is also why it was most common for DLs and ZLs to do the baptismal interviews.

As for how the ward or branch knew the person was baptized, hopefully the missionaries would introduce the investigator/convert to someone in ward leadership when they attended church, but again, this did not happen every time, as far as I can tell. I tried to do things by the book, but it was often difficult. We baptized one guy of African descent--a rarity in Bolivia--who had recently been thrown out of a Catholic seminary for expressing disbelief in a particular doctrine. Teaching him was a highlight of my mission. When the day came for him to be baptized, the bishop and several members took the bus with us to the stake center, where we discovered they hadn't been able to get a truck to come and fill the font. So, we had to wait a week. The following week, it was just us and this guy, Juan Carlos. On the way to the stake center, he said he was worried about being accepted because of the church's history with the priesthood ban (this was 1985). When we arrived, the only missionary of African descent, who was not in our zone, was waiting on the steps of the church. He said he had come to baptize his cousin after receiving permission from the mission president. The cousin showed up, and to me it was a minor miracle in that our investigator could see firsthand that he wasn't alone and that he would be accepted.

Baptisms were usually held at the branch or stake center, but many chapels had their own font, so missionaries would hold the services there, mostly because investigators and members didn't have a lot of money to spend on bus fare. 

It's funny that I hadn't realized until now just how "normal "it was in our mission to skirt the rules. 

Edited June 15, 2016 by jkwilliams

[Rain]

9 hours ago, Monster said:

How about we stop baptizing children altogether unless the parents get baptized first. These kiddie baptisms are blight on the whole missionary program.

My mission president would have a problem with that since he was baptized when he was 9. Everyone said he shouldn't be baptized,  but changed their minds after he walked several miles to and from church week after week.  

I have seen great wisdom in some children.  The problem is just making sure they are ready as you would expect someone older to be ready when they are on their own.  

[jkwilliams]

In our mission there were 8 stakes and 13 districts. The mission president who was there when I arrived had essentially delegated responsibility for the districts and focused instead on missionary work. He had a system whereby, if you crossed him, you were sent to a "castigo" (punishment) area, usually somewhere remote, with poor living conditions, and most importantly, no telephone, so you couldn't bother him. This led to a lot of problems with missionaries, such as drinking and sleeping around, and one mental breakdown and suicide attempt. But most of all, it decimated the membership of these remote branches. Some of them had not seen any outside visitors in years. Our new mission president requested two senior missionary couples and assigned half of the districts to one couple, and half to the other. When the one couple went out to a remote branch in the altiplano, they were surprised to see women blessing the sacrament. The branch had somehow heard that the RLDS church had granted women the priesthood and thought it applied to them as well. 

My last "area" was 3 remote towns in the northern jungle of El Beni, where we were called "roving" missionaries. The first place we went hadn't had visitors from church leadership--other than sporadic missionaries assigned--in 7 years. The second place we went, the branch president told us to move on because, in his opinion, the missionaries had always done more damage than good. The third place was the district center, only the district president and branch president were inactive (they were father and son). The counselor in the branch presidency was a wonderful and dedicated man, and he ran things. Since we had no phone, I could only communicate by letter with the mission president. I told him about not having an active branch or district president, but I never received a reply. In some ways it was wonderful to be on our own and not really having to answer to anyone but ourselves and God. I remember thinking that we should feel good about how hard we worked when no one was watching.

Sorry, this thread has just dredged up a lot of memories. 

 

[jkwilliams]

38 minutes ago, Kenngo1969 said:

Gracias por compartir, Hermano

No hay por donde, p's.

¡Viva mi patria Bolivia!

Edited June 15, 2016 by jkwilliams

[Rain]

6 hours ago, Scott Lloyd said:

 

Based on the immediate and astounding growth that came upon our son who began his mission nine months ago, I still believe missionaries are, by and large, amazingly spiritual and mature for their age. I believe it is a gift of the Spirit that is bestowed upon them by a wise and loving God in whose service they are engaged.

Which is why I believe most are capable of helping put a stop when they observe it to the kind of silliness that has been recounted in this thread. And why I don't believe such is as pervasive and widespread as we are being led to believe here. 

I've not heard the term "kiddie baptism" since I first encountered it as a ward mission leader back in the early '90s, and it did not have the meaning then that is being applied to it now on this thread.

In the ward and stake where I served -- and, I believe, elsewhere in Utah -- it was fairly common for some children in member or part-member families to get past the cut-off age of 9 years old without being baptized, when it became the role of the full-time missionaries to teach them as investigators, assisted by what were then called stake missionaries and ward mission leaders. Their baptism services were thus planned and conducted by the ward mission leader rather than the stake Primary organization, which would have been the case with children still under age 9. Technically, they were regarded as "convert baptisms," because the children had passed the age of accountability, and it was the responsibility of the full-time missionaries to teach them, even if they had already been attending Primary.

That is the meaning that "kiddie baptism" has held for me up until now. I never dreamed it had any other meaning or connotation or slang usage.

And, except for the infamous basketball and English lessons "conversions" that took place in the '60s, I've not heard of anything like that happening before or since -- until now.

So again, that is why I'm skeptical, notwithstanding the  urban-legend type anecdotes that gushed forth on this thread after smac97 early on was shouted down for suggesting that there may be more to this incident in Mexico than was clear from early reports.

 

 

Oh,  I do think most of them are pretty mature - for their age and I've never doubted it comes from the Spirit. I was one of them and I hope my children to be one of them.  And I see it in my son's friend.  But now that I am older I see it as pretty amazing. 

I've  never heard of "kiddie baptisms". My first thought when reading the article was also "there is something more to this".  

I just know in my mission there had been some huge problems. My mission president was said to age 10 years in his first year there.  I saw a big change in my mission my first year there that came after that.  So I do think that something like this could happen especially if communication is a problem.  

And you know what?  They could be perfectly honest in their experiences,  but not have all of the knowledge they need to get a full picture.  So there may be something more to their stories as well. Not that I am trying to trap them. I just find it more effective to look on a person's heart.

[Hamba Tuhan]

5 minutes ago, Kenngo1969 said:

If there are Elect to be gathered, they will be gathered; if there are no Elect to be gathered, then those who are not Elect will not be gathered.

This is certainly one factor, but there are others, including the readiness of a ward/branch to accept and nurture the 'elect'. For most of the time that I went without teaching anyone, I was assigned to a ward that was riven with 'progressive' apostasy: women were angry over lack of priesthood ordination, and the ward held joint priesthood/Relief Society meetings to appease those who were offended by the 'gender discrimination' and patriarchy inherent in separate meetings. Same-sex 'marriage' was still hiding back in the dark shadows of the gay rights agenda, but we had a fair few ward members who were vocal supporters of this agenda broadly.

I can't imagine that the Lord could feel comfortable putting a newly minted Saint into such an environment, and I have to admit that I breathed more than one sigh of relief when people refused to listen to me. If anyone had listened to us and wanted to attend church, I would have had no idea how to explain to her/him that, though we were teaching about the importance of latter-day prophets, s/he would be attending church with members who reviled the same.

[Hamba Tuhan]

52 minutes ago, Kenngo1969 said:

Gracias por compartir, Hermano

El mismo de mi!

[jkwilliams]

6 minutes ago, Rain said:

Oh,  I do think most of them are pretty mature - for their age and I've never doubted it comes from the Spirit. I was one of them and I hope my children to be one of them.  And I see it in my son's friend.  But now that I am older I see it as pretty amazing. 

I've  never heard of "kiddie baptisms". My first thought when reading the article was also "there is something more to this".  

I just know in my mission there had been some huge problems. My mission president was said to age 10 years in his first year there.  I saw a big change in my mission my first year there that came after that.  So I do think that something like this could happen especially if communication is a problem.  

And you know what?  They could be perfectly honest in their experiences,  but not have all of the knowledge they need to get a full picture.  So there may be something more to their stories as well. Not that I am trying to trap them. I just find it more effective to look on a person's heart.

I would assume that most young men adapt to the circumstances where they are. As I said, it would have been extremely difficult to do everything by the book, though that's not an excuse. For me, coming into an established system was a little shocking but I did the best I could within that system. One of the things that surprised me when I arrived was how little real oversight there was. I remember my trainer saying, as we filled out our weekly report, "We could be doing just about anything, or nothing at all, and no one would know." He was right. As long as we reported our numbers at weekly zone meetings, no one would have known what we or anyone else was up to. Of course, we worked very hard.

Lack of communication was a huge problem. When I was in the office, there was a nationwide strike that lasted more than 3 weeks. Because there is only one union, the Central Obrera Boliviana, when there is a strike, everything shuts down except maybe the electricity and some phone service. We heard rumors that the miners had blockaded downtown La Paz, but we had no way of knowing, and we couldn't communicate with anyone outside of Cochabamba to tell them to stay inside and not go tracting. In the middle of this, 16 missionaries arrived from the MTC, and we had to scramble to get them temporarily situated (which led to my almost getting killed by angry mob, but that's another story), because we didn't know until it landed that their plane was actually coming. In the midst of all this, the phone rang in the office--it hadn't been ringing for weeks. It was a lady from New Hampshire who had seen footage of rioting and tanks in the streets of La Paz. She was justifiably worried about her son. I have no idea how she got through to the office, but her son was serving in my first area, so I knew he was far from the action, but then we hadn't heard from anyone in La Paz for almost 3 weeks. I told her that, as far as we knew, all missionaries were safe (a lie by omission), and then I told her I knew where he was working that it was a safe area outside of the city. She was relieved. When the strike ended, we found out that most missionaries had gone about their normal activities without thinking about it. It could have been a disaster, but thankfully nothing serious happened. Well, a bomb went off outside the Palacio Quemado just after some missionaries had walked by, by they weren't injured.

[Rain]

3 hours ago, jkwilliams said:

No one shouted anyone down. Smac97 said what was described was "far from ordinary" and I and others replied that the practice of such "kiddie baptisms" was pretty common in our missions. 

You asked for a firsthand example, and I provided one. Rather than acknowledge I had given what you asked, you attacked my "hubris" for "complaining" about it now after not having gone over my mission president's head in reporting it back then. 

By all means, feel free to attack a naive 19 year old and the middle-aged man who looks back with regret, but it doesn't change what happened and apparently is still happening in some places. 

At the risk of changing the subject of this thread (please don't) the bolded was what finally helped me be ok with the children of gay parents policy last November. While our ward had no baptisms of children without parents this last year we had an awful lot of children being taught without their nonmember parents.  The missionaries did get permission,  but it still made me uncomfortable enough for me to question the sisters farther and they asked their mission president about it who okayed it. My biggest problem wasn't that they weren't teaching the children without their parents, it was they were teaching when the parents were not even home.

  As a parent, it made me see the teaching of children in a whole new light.  I'm still ok with teaching and baptizing of children, but we must be very careful of it for the children's, family's and church's sake. 

[jkwilliams]

51 minutes ago, Rain said:

Oh,  I do think most of them are pretty mature - for their age and I've never doubted it comes from the Spirit. I was one of them and I hope my children to be one of them.  And I see it in my son's friend.  But now that I am older I see it as pretty amazing. 

I've  never heard of "kiddie baptisms". My first thought when reading the article was also "there is something more to this".  

I just know in my mission there had been some huge problems. My mission president was said to age 10 years in his first year there.  I saw a big change in my mission my first year there that came after that.  So I do think that something like this could happen especially if communication is a problem.  

And you know what?  They could be perfectly honest in their experiences,  but not have all of the knowledge they need to get a full picture.  So there may be something more to their stories as well. Not that I am trying to trap them. I just find it more effective to look on a person's heart.

It's interesting to me that my first thought when reading the article was "oh, great, missionaries are still doing kiddie baptisms." I guess it depends on one's experience. If you served in an area where they had fully functioning wards and stakes, it would definitely be a major violation of the rules to conduct baptisms without the participation and approval of ward or branch leaders. In my mission, there simply wasn't any leadership to speak of, and even if there had been, it was difficult to get people to travel to a stake center for such interviews and meetings. I was in only one stake where I knew there were stake and ward mission leaders, and that was in Cochabamba, when we were in a wealthy ward that was also our mission president's ward. I don't ever remember meeting a ward or stake missionary anywhere else. They might have called someone to do that, but I never heard of any. I also was never once invited to a ward council or PEC meeting or any meeting like that. I'm not even sure they held such meetings (I know they didn't in at least 3 branches I served in). In my first area, the branch president would show up just before the meeting time--or send one of his sons--to unlock the gate of the rented house we used as a chapel. A few times he was drunk or hungover. But he was the only member of the branch presidency. His older son, a returned missionary, was the elders quorum president, and his younger son, who was 16, was the Young Men president.

It's kind of bitterly hilarious that people are criticizing missionaries for not following rules that were a virtual impossibility in my mission. If you had told us, You can't have the baptismal service without the ward mission leader, we would have asked, "What ward mission leader?"

ETA: I should note that it was sort of a self-perpetuating problem, as there were very few priesthood holders in any of the wards or branches I served in, with the only exception being the ward in Cochabamba. The membership skewed very young (a direct result of baptizing so many kids), and most adults were women. 

Edited June 15, 2016 by jkwilliams

[ERayR]

11 hours ago, jkwilliams said:

Would you have made a handwritten copy, as I'm told would be the normal response in such a situation? I wouldn't have. 

no

[jkwilliams]

2 minutes ago, ERayR said:

no

It never occurred to me. I suppose if I had known that 32 years later, someone would ask for documentary proof of this incident, I might have made a copy. In fact, I can't remember the last time I made a handwritten copy of anything. We lived without so much of what i had taken for granted--running water, reliable electricity, sewers, phones--that having something like a photocopier would have been just a dream. I'm glad I lived the first 6 months of my mission like that, as it taught me that I was tougher than I thought, and it helped put in perspective what matters in life. And it didn't hurt that I met my wife by going to her apartment for my weekly shower.

[stemelbow]

I was stateside in the mid-90s and the type of activity described here happened, but it wasn't wide-spread it was in certain areas--inner city areas, we called them.  And not all missionaries participated.  It wasn't because of pressure.  When I got transferred to one area, we were in the inner city branch.  The branch had over 1100 on the roles and less that 50 that attended.  MOst of those listed that we could find had no idea that they were on the records of the Church--having been baptized as young kids, quite often, or were at the time young kids (like under 12).  They would describe missionaries as taking them to swimming pools and having a blast for a few weeks.  Then they'd (the missionaries) would disappear.  Other times addresses would be non existent.  Meaning the address listed might be 213 East Sycamore.  But when you went to find 213 East sycamore you'd find house number 211 and then 215.  The names would often be made up, like Bikehandle MOlassses or something meaningless.  I remember at one point we had accounted for each name on record save for a small handful.  Went to the Branch President about what we determined and concerned he decided to just leave the records as they were.  We were like, "of course Bikehandle Molasses at 213 East Sycamore is non existent, why not just drop it from the records".  He was like, "it's more complicated than that".  So after I left the next set of missionaries re-did what we did with the roster, or so they said.  on the flip side this type of stuff was not tolerated in the suburban and rural areas, so it happened very rarely but I know there were some instances.