Missionaries detained by police

[Avatar4321]

I've known alot of missionaries over the years and I don't know any who did this stuff. I can't imagine its widespread.

but its sad if it did because it totally misses the point we are called on missions to begin with. We are called to bring people to Christ. Padding numbers and lying doesn't do that.

as for the original story id like to see the other side because it doesn't sound right.

[JAHS]

7 minutes ago, Avatar4321 said:

I've known alot of missionaries over the years and I don't know any who did this stuff. I can't imagine its widespread.

but its sad if it did because it totally misses the point we are called on missions to begin with. We are called to bring people to Christ. Padding numbers and lying doesn't do that.

as for the original story id like to see the other side because it doesn't sound right.

I have never personally known of this happening; only the stories told about it. The four elders who did this are themselves from Mexico. I wonder if there is a cultural factor involved in the reasons for them doing this? Had they experienced something similar in their families while growing up, so they thought it was worth trying?  Hard to believe all four of them agreed to do this.

[UtahTexan]

On 6/11/2016 at 6:57 PM, VideoGameJunkie said:

No wonder the number of Mormons is 15 million, but active is only around 5 million.

so?  negative folks are obsessed with numbers.  Too bad.

[readstoomuch]

I think any mission anywhere can get caught up in numbers.  I know elders in my stateside mission got caught up in numbers, though the president wasn't pushing that.  I had people accuse me of baptizing people too quickly and the convert had been to church for a month and had all the discussions, often more than once.   If retention is the goal. Then the more hoops, the better the retention will be.  I know most of them kept going to Church, but I have lost track of them.  

[Hamba Tuhan]

3 hours ago, Avatar4321 said:

I've known alot of missionaries over the years and I don't know any who did this stuff. I can't imagine its widespread.

Same here. The closest I can come up with from personal memory is an Elder from my mission who always seemed on the fringes of the whole mission experience. About six months after he'd returned home, he sent a letter to our mission president that he wished to be shared with the rest of the missionaries. The mission president honoured this request by reading it out in the zone conferences that month. In the letter, the former missionary apologised for his behaviour -- specifically, skating along the edges of the rules -- and explained that he'd made himself feel better about his lack of commitment by trying to 'charm' people into baptism, the idea being that he wasn't really slack if he could still see 'success'. He then begged everyone's forgiveness and talked about how wrong he'd been.

[Hamba Tuhan]

11 hours ago, SteveO said:

They copied names and the birthdates off gravestones when they filled out the baptismal certificate...It was getting into the territory of interference of work for the dead for obvious reasons.  

I'm still confused. Do you mean that they claimed to have baptised people but really just used names from tombstones? Or did they actually baptise people but use false names? Why not just make up names then?

In either case, I don't see how this would work since the bishop/branch president who presided over the baptismal service would still need to sign the form and then handle the confirmation and its recording.

[jbarm]

This type of activity crops up in various places and times over the years in missionary work.  Missionaries, district leaders, zone leaders, AP's, Mission Presidents and even regional leaders have been caught up in this type of activity.

Church leaders try to tamp this behavior down, but it tends to pop up every once in a while.

This happens when you have humans running the Church.

D. Michael Quinn had a rather extensive article about this phenomenon in Sunstone back in 1993.  This kind of thing happened using baseball, basketball and beach activities.  One thing that was clear is that senior Church leadership shut them down and actively try to discourage such activities.

Never saw this kind of thing in my mission in the US midwest (but saw other crazy things that 19 - 21 year old kids can do).

But when success is measured by number of baptisms, things can go off of the rails at times.

jb

[Rain]

4 hours ago, webbles said:

I went and pulled out my mission journal to track down my thoughts of the time.  I wrote "He told us to not plan everything because we can't.  Just decide who we will be and trust in the Lord."  That brought back some more memories of what his talk was about.  He had talked about how he and his first wife planned out their life together.  They planned for him to retire one day from the Utah Supreme Court, to go on a couple mission, retire and be happy together.  Then, he was called as an apostle, she died, he remarried, etc.  So, his original plans were pretty much useless at this point.

So you can make goals/plans that involve other people.  But if you don't achieve the goal or follow the plan, that's ok as long as you are following Christ.

This is also what he said in the BYU talk.  From the way he talked in what was quoted here I assumed he talked more about actual missionary goals at the missionary meeting. 

[VideoGameJunkie]

Are missionaries pressured to get numbers of baptisms? If they're pressured like a boss would pressure someone to get sales, then I can see this happening quite often.

[VideoGameJunkie]

2 hours ago, CountryBoy said:

so?  negative folks are obsessed with numbers.  Too bad.

What?

[Hamba Tuhan]

9 minutes ago, VideoGameJunkie said:

Are missionaries pressured to get numbers of baptisms?

I wasn't. I was 'pressured' to live a life of holiness and devotion and to earnestly seek to share the message of the Restored Gospel in the hope that people would discover the truth of our message for themselves and make covenants with Christ through baptism.

[The Nehor]

23 minutes ago, VideoGameJunkie said:

Are missionaries pressured to get numbers of baptisms? If they're pressured like a boss would pressure someone to get sales, then I can see this happening quite often.

Depends what you mean by pressure. My Mission Presidents would sometimes share particularly high baptism with the intent that we could rejoice in success. The Book of Mormon authors even indulge in this a little. I have seen missionaries take that as pressure even though it was not intended to be. Teens who just left school come out and see numbers and start equating it to school grades with all the stress that can include.

Then you occasionally have Mission Presidents and other leaders going off the rails and pressuring for more baptisms for any number of reasons.

[jkwilliams]

8 hours ago, VideoGameJunkie said:

What?

Apparently, pointing out an issue makes you negative.

Noting that there may still be a problem with numbers-based missionary work is not an attack on the church, nor is it being overly "negative." I posted the OP because I figured it would be discussed at some point, and I thought the whole episode was best understood as some missionaries trying to get their numbers up. Apparently, I'm not the only one who saw it that way.

My mission in Bolivia was very much numbers-driven. I wrote about this a long time ago on my blog.

https://runtu.wordpress.com/2008/04/18/the-numbers-game-more-from-my-mission/

Quote

 

But there was constant pressure to “bap” (mission slang for baptizing). Our mission president, a tired man from Argentina, came up with an inspired program of setting and reporting goals. He called it “Buscando las Ovejas” (seeking the sheep). Each week at zone meeting the zone leaders would draw a huge table on the chalkboard (the mission president called it “la pizarra magica” or magic chalkboard); on the chart would be goals (metas) and accomplishments (logros). We were supposed to set goals for the number of door approaches (called “mini-charlas”), discussions (charlas), and baptisms for the next week. At the next meeting, we would write down what we had achieved and then the next week’s goals. If your goals weren’t sufficiently aggressive, the zone leaders would tell you so, and you would be encouraged in front of the other missionaries to have more faith and work harder.

Once a month we received a mission newsletter (“El Chasqui,” which is Quechua for “messenger”), which contained the monthly results in baptisms for each companionship. The top baptizing companionship was displayed in a large box (called the “Rocky Box” after the boxer) in large, bold print. Below that was the list of baptisms by companionship in descending order. Those who had no baptisms had their own separate “zero” page, and nobody wanted to be on the zero page.

Reactions to the numbers game varied. One of my companions would ask me on the way to zone meeting, “How many door approaches sound good? How about discussions?” and then he’d make up names for the investigator pool. Other missionaries went the other way. One missionary in our zone reported 27 baptisms in a single month (he made the “Rocky Box,” of course). I asked him about it, and he told me that the chapel in his area had a nice volleyball court, and a large group of preteen kids would play there every day. He asked them if they were church members, and they said they weren’t. “You can’t play here unless you’re members of our church,” he said. They asked how you became members, and the rest followed naturally.

The pressure to baptize also resulted in missionaries baptizing people who had no clue what they were getting into. I remember as a district leader interviewing people who couldn’t tell me who Joseph Smith was. I told the missionaries these people weren’t ready for baptism, but they went to the branch president, who cleared the people for baptism.

Once my companion and I baptized a couple of older women who pretty much had no idea what we were talking about. I told him I wasn’t sure it was a good idea to baptize people who didn’t understand the gospel, but he said, “Well, they want to get baptized, so it’s not up to us to deny them.” Sounded OK to me, so they got baptized, but I never did feel quite right about it. At church the day after the baptism, they came up to us, giggling. “You tell them,” the one said. “No, you tell them,” said the other. Finally they told us that they had enjoyed the baptism so much they wanted to do it again. Until that day, they had never been completely immersed in water.

Missionaries baptized a lot of children in our mission. It was quite common for the missionaries to contact a family, but only the children would be baptized. The parents would say that they thought the church sounded like a good thing for their kids, but the parents would remain Catholic. Most of these kids faded away rather quickly. I would say that it was most common for missionaries to baptize a person after he or she had been to church a single time, and then after the baptism, we would never see him or her again.

 

I did my best to do things the right way, and as I said, in my last area, it was just me and my companion for several hundred miles. We had no phone contact with any other missionaries or mission leaders, and we just did what we thought was right. When we received the letter that the mission goal was 1,000 for December (my last full month in the mission), we decided to do things right and not worry about numbers. We had a really wonderful experience with a young couple, who truly embraced the gospel and were touched by learning about the atonement and the love God had for them. The day before I left to go to Cochabamba for my exit interview and flight home, we took them to the registro civil in the morning so they could be legally married (common-law marriage is the norm in Bolivia, as it costs too much to marry for most poor people), and then we went to the chapel for the baptisms. The small branch had a picnic prepared, and we had a great time on the lawn at the chapel. 

So, out of the 960 or so, we contributed 2 baptisms, but in my view, we had done things the right way, and it was a perfect way to end my mission. If it's negative to hope that mission presidents and missionaries get away from the numbers game and focus on making a difference in people's lives, then I am happy to be negative. 

Frankly, I was a little taken aback at some of the responses here. For me, these kinds of practices aren't surprising, and there's way too much of it going on. I guess I should be heartened that a lot of people have never heard of anything like this. As SteveO said, it likely depends on the mission president and the mission "culture." 

[jkwilliams]

8 hours ago, The Nehor said:

Depends what you mean by pressure. My Mission Presidents would sometimes share particularly high baptism with the intent that we could rejoice in success. The Book of Mormon authors even indulge in this a little. I have seen missionaries take that as pressure even though it was not intended to be. Teens who just left school come out and see numbers and start equating it to school grades with all the stress that can include.

Then you occasionally have Mission Presidents and other leaders going off the rails and pressuring for more baptisms for any number of reasons.

In my mission, you had to set "metas" (goals) weekly at zone meeting on a grid called "la pizarra magica" (the magic chalkboard). You set goals for door approaches (they were called "mini-charlas" (mini-discussions), first discussions, second discussions, and so on, and baptisms. Then you would fill in the "logros" (accomplishments). All this was done in front of the whole zone, so everyone could see if you were producing. The monthly mission newsletter (El Chasqui) published baptisms by zone and by companionship. On one page, the baptisms were listed by companionship in descending order, with the top-producing companionship in large letters in a prominent box at the top of the page. This was called the "Rocky Box" (I think a reference to the Stallone movies). The following page was the "zero page," which was sort of a hall of shame for those not getting any baptisms. So you had incentives for the zone leaders to encourage numbers and for individual companionships to produce. And there was tremendous peer pressure, because no one wanted to be on the zero page or on the lower end of the baptisms page. 

[Gray]

On 6/12/2016 at 9:13 AM, omni said:

It's always been amazing to me that the Church allows converts to make covenants affecting their eternal salvation after just one or two weeks.  

It would be interesting to see if the requirements for baptism became stricter if a country began requiring a $2,500 fee for every convert baptism into a church.

Yes, it's not a responsible practice. At the end of my mission we had a family get baptized. They had been investigating for more than 6 months. They were much better prepared to be active members of the church. 

[Gray]

On 6/12/2016 at 9:17 AM, jkwilliams said:

That's pretty much how it was with us. That last month when the mp set the goal of 1,000 baptisms, my companion and I were in the far north, about 800 miles from the nearest missionaries. We decided we weren't going to do anything differently. We baptized a young couple the day before I left to go home, so I guess we underperformed. But we felt we really had made a difference in their lives. 

I didn't pay much attention to the gimmicky goals. I tried to meet the goals we could control, like number of contacts.

[jkwilliams]

14 minutes ago, Gray said:

I didn't pay much attention to the gimmicky goals. I tried to meet the goals we could control, like number of contacts.

We got into a little trouble in one area where I was. It had traditionally been one of the lowest baptizing areas of the mission, and before we arrived, there hadn't been missionaries there for a few months. When we went to church the first Sunday, no one was there at the appointed hour, and the gate to the "chapel" (a rented small house) was padlocked. So, we sat on the curb for about 10 minutes before an elderly cholita showed up, and then a few minutes later a teenage boy arrived. About 20 minutes after the hour, the branch president arrived, late because the buses weren't running, and he didn't live within the branch boundaries. So, out of 250 or so on the membership records, only 3 attended, and one of those had been brought in from another branch to lead.

After a couple of weeks of very unsuccessful tracting, we instead got a copy of the membership records and spent half the day visiting inactive members. The welfare missionaries noticed that the church had a large piece of property within the branch boundaries that would someday be the site of a chapel. It was fenced and had a water source, so they got permission to dig it up and plant a large garden. So, we started invited the inactive members to come and choose a section of the garden to plant. The sisters obtained seeds, sprouted plants, and fertilizer, and the members just had to supply labor. So, we stopped tracting and instead spent half the day working with the members and the sisters in the garden, and the other half of the day visiting inactives. We were honest in our weekly reports, and when the mission president visited, I had an interview with him. He said, "I hear you and your companion don't want to work hard." I said we were working harder than I had ever worked, and we were having a great deal of success. He pointed to the lack of official proselytizing hours, no door approaches, and so on, so I told him what we were doing. He said it sounded like we just liked the sisters too much. I told him we had 6 baptisms scheduled for the next day, so I thought we were doing just fine. We ended up baptizing 14 people that month, and we did almost no tracting. But all of those baptisms were ones where lives had changed, not just the ones that get people wet and then forget about them.

My brother-in-law's father was a mission president in Canada, and about six months after he arrived, he was visited by a General Authority, who chastised him for a dramatic drop-off in baptisms. He replied that the previous mission president had encouraged missionaries to go into poorer areas and baptize Haitian immigrants in the kind of hurry-up baptism process we're talking about. He told the GA, "If that's the kind of church you want to build in Canada, then I'll do what you ask, but I'd rather have a church built on real conversion and long-term commitment." The GA agreed with him.

I don't think most people consciously cut corners for numbers, but unfortunately, it's often how missionaries and mission leaders get noticed. Here's hoping that is changing.

ETA: I should note that our mission president may have been right, as my companion married one of the welfare missionaries, and I married the other.

Edited June 13, 2016 by jkwilliams

[Gray]

10 hours ago, Hamba Tuhan said:

I wasn't. I was 'pressured' to live a life of holiness and devotion and to earnestly seek to share the message of the Restored Gospel in the hope that people would discover the truth of our message for themselves and make covenants with Christ through baptism.

I was pressured to do all those things, plus get a lot of baptisms. 

[jkwilliams]

Just now, Gray said:

I was pressured to do all those things, plus get a lot of baptisms. 

Exactly. Clearly, it doesn't happen everywhere, but it does happen. I hope it's becoming less common than it was in my day.

[SteveO]

I wonder if economics plays a factor?  People know the church has money and the church funded school in Mexico City was a big draw for impoverished families. But sometimes you'd have people walk in off the streets during Sunday services wanting money for this thing or that. I always remember the one middle aged lady who had half her teeth rotted out asking for money to get dentures...I didn't know what to do so I referred them to the bishop.  Never knew what came of them or what the church's policy was.  It never seemed right to baptize in exchange for charity, but on the other hand, you can't just hand out money to everyone who walks in off the streets--especially when so many ward members were already struggling...But what are you supposed to do?  

[Jeanne]

32 minutes ago, Gray said:

Yes, it's not a responsible practice. At the end of my mission we had a family get baptized. They had been investigating for more than 6 months. They were much better prepared to be active members of the church. 

This is as it should be.  So it takes six months..but this is a life decision not to be taken lightly.

[Gray]

1 minute ago, Jeanne said:

This is as it should be.  So it takes six months..but this is a life decision not to be taken lightly.

100% agreed. I see it like this - join the church lightly, leave it just as lightly. 

[mapman]

I got home from a mission in Argentina a little over a year ago. I wouldn't say that my mission as a whole was numbers-driven, but there were some APs and zone leaders that definitely were. I heard of some questionable stuff, but I only saw truly egragious stuff in my last area in my last transfer. I was in a little town pretty far away from anyone else. My area also had a few small towns about an hour from where we lived where we had a few members. Just before I had gotten there the zone leaders had just baptized a guy in one of those little towns the same night they met him because "he had felt the Spirit" and wanted to get baptized. I was able to find him one time and taught him about the Book of Mormon and the Restoration. First time he had heard about that. We were never able to find him again and supposedly was an alcoholic the whole time. During that transfer the zone leaders tried to get us to baptize some kids we were teaching with their unmarried parents despite the fact they had only been to church once. They would ask us about it every night, and it really was a lot of pressure. The area had about 200 members on record, but only about 20-30 active members. I told my mission president what was going on, and he told me that I was right about sticking to the church's policies and treating baptism as something sacred, but I don't know what happened after that because my mission was over.

So from my experience, this story could have totally happened, but I don't think it is something very common, and can only happen in certain situations (distance from other missionaries, naive members, mission leaders that are ok with what you are doing, etc).

Edited June 13, 2016 by mapman

[Jeanne]

Question for you return missionaries old and young..because I really don't know..but what is the objective of leaders there or the greatest asset to having big numbers???  Do they win prize or something?  Do these people get on a list for General Authorities or something?

[Gray]

1 minute ago, Jeanne said:

Question for you return missionaries old and young..because I really don't know..but what is the objective of leaders there or the greatest asset to having big numbers???  Do they win prize or something?  Do these people get on a list for General Authorities or something?

I'm not sure exactly, but I suspect some MPs are trying to impress general authorities with baptism numbers and thereby get called to be a member of one of the quorums of the 70