LDS Church plans to decrease missions; utilize tech savviness to locate religious-minded people

[nuclearfuels]

On 10/30/2017 at 6:10 PM, california boy said:

The problem is, very few people still believes natural disasters wars and plagues are sent by God to punish people.  They know what causes earthquakes, hurricanes, tidal waves war, plagues, etc.  So if the plan is to scare everyone into submission, I doubt very much it is going to be effective.  

Not sure events of the last days are conditioned on the collective belief of the people on earth.

Just my own view here - truth exists independent of conformance, like gravity, math, science, etc.  Absolutes exist in a world that increasingly disdains absolutes. 

[rongo]

10 hours ago, Hamba Tuhan said:

Thanks for that clarification! So apparently most missions in the world are functioning as your desired 'control group'. Do you honestly believe that when Church leaders would look at technology-free missions (currently 339 in number) and then look at those missions with technology, they see that the former are more successful (in reference both to the work of salvation and to the well-being of the missionaries) than the latter but then still choose to shift more missions from column A to column B? What could possibly be their motivation for doing this?

Quite simply (and mainly in North America), to pacify many missionaries who struggle tremendously with device withdrawal. We have been told point-blank by visiting authorities that this is such a big problem that it is one of the reasons for technology missionary work --- so that going "cold turkey" doesn't result in even more missionaries struggling with anxiety and depression and/or going home early. I think this is a much bigger issue with American (and possibly Canadian) youth than for youth elsewhere. For example, observing the 18 foreign exchange students at my high school compared with the Americans, while they are just as tech-savvy, they culturally are much more situation-appropriate and respectful in not being on their devices for social reasons at school. We (including stake youth I have in class or otherwise observe) are embarrassing by comparison! Watching boys and girls suffer from withdrawal at boys' or girls' camp in the summer (I go to the full week of both, and always have) is telling. Man, that week away from the device does them good, but how they struggle!

Our ward list has to be updated pretty much every week. After just a few weeks, paper copies are obsolete. Having access to online tools just makes sense.

What in the world did we do before? Do you remember the old dot-matrix printer MIS days? Somehow, leaders were able to manage their flocks with obsolete paper lists until . . . the current generation. 

Yes, electronic updates are useful and serve a purpose, and I don't begrudge anyone that. Personally, I print a new ward list out for myself every week, customized to include ages and priesthood office. I keep old ones filed away, and they come in handy when I need to look up information later for people who have moved out of the ward, sometimes even years ago (happens more often than you would think). The interesting thing is that this information is not available electronically. Once a record is gone from your ward, you have no access to the information. That isn't true with paper.

Our missionaries already frequently integrate short video clips into their teaching, but it requires bringing a flash drive and hoping that the people being taught have an appropriate screen. (I don't actually own a TV, and often people still have older-style televisions.) Being able to use a device to smoothly integrate the video clip sounds so much smoother and easier.

A kindred spirit! We don't have a TV, either (that makes us a real outlier in the U.S.). 

Our missionaries overuse the video clips to become the meat of their teaching (I try to teach them to teach people with their experiences, words, and knowledge). It's like treating condiments as the meal itself, and serving a meal of ketchup and mustard. I remember one missionary who grew extremely frustrated when he couldn't get the video on his tablet to play, and I gently asked him to just tell the story the video was going to show. He continued to try in vain to get the video to play. 

I think a lot of the Mormon Messages things are more powerful when told by the missionaries than having people watch them, anyway. This is another symptom of the decline in storytelling and communication skills --- and reliance on technology to teach and tell the gospel/Restoration story. Consider the teaching and storytelling we all did as missionaries, compared to now.

Yet we also have large numbers of local missionaries who serve here as well. If anything, our American missionaries are better prepared and more resilient.

Which mission are you in? In Oceania somewhere, right? Again, the Brethren are careful about sending missionaries with red flags (propensity for anxiety/depression, underperforming seminary record, tepid bishop and stake president endorsements, etc.) to areas of the world with big cultural differences. This is even more the case with the new scrutiny recently implemented. I have no doubt that the American missionaries you get are outstanding, and they are serving with missionaries who are from the local culture or have life experience navigating great cultural diversity. 

Send them over, please! I'd be happy to work with them. We've had a few Elders come to our ward who were struggling. In four years, only one of them has gone home early.

Yeah, we have a much higher rate of missionaries who go home early here, or who are closely monitored for mental health concerns (the Brethren have stated as much that such will be kept close to home where ready access to such treatment is available).

And yet we got heaps of additional missionaries during the 'surge'. What do you mean exactly by 'overflow'?

What our mission president said. During the surge, he was asked monthly to take 10-20 additional missionaries that needed to be put somewhere. These were missionaries that there really wasn't a place for, and they were put in wards with one or two companionships already. 

I have a boy who is currently in queue for his call. The Missionary Department notified us that there is currently a delay in all mission calls, but that this should happen within the next couple of weeks. We were told as an aside that during the surge, 800 calls were made per week, but that this has calmed way down. 

The surge overwhelmingly expanded missions and missionaries in the U.S.; not nearly as much abroad. Again, this is because the increase was largely younger missionaries, many of whom would not have gone on a mission if not for the positive peer pressure of the surge (this is going back down to pre-surge numbers). Most of these were not going foreign.

We had four companionships at one point, as I mentioned. I actually asked for the fourth one because our poor Elders were overwhelmed at that point. Does your ward not have many less-actives to work with? We have stacks, many of whom have come back owing to the efforts of our good missionaries.

We do, but not enough for two of three companionships' worth. Our elders do a great job with the workload they have, but you reach a tipping point where there isn't enough work (even visiting people within the ward), and that is tough. Doubly tough when you are told not to find people yourself. At all hours of the day, every day, there are four to six cars with bike racks at the church, and elders looking at tablets. All day Friday is district meeting and planning, required by the mission. For hours and hours. 

[rongo]

10 hours ago, sjdawg said:

My nephew is in one of the missions currently testing using facebook, snapchat, and instragram to try and do missionary work.  From what I have seen I don't believe it will be overly successful.  Some of the teaching attempts and live broadcasts I have seen on facebook are pretty cringe-worthy.  

Yeah, Skype teaching is bad. Really bad. 

What bugs me the most about it is that missionaries usually teach and talk to people when they have missionaries in their areas. Why don't they get them to meet, face-to-face, with the missionaries in their area? When I've asked that, the missionaries tell me that they don't want to meet with them; they want to Skype with them. That, to me, is a big red flag that this person is not going to remain active after baptism, if they are baptized.

Edited November 1, 2017 by rongo

[rongo]

8 minutes ago, Rain said:

I neglected to say those experiences I talked about were done through Skype. I've gone back and edited that now. 

Skype does have its place (for example, in the examples you mentioned). I think these are not very common, though, and where possible, in-person is always best. 

[Rain]

2 hours ago, rongo said:

Skype does have its place (for example, in the examples you mentioned). I think these are not very common, though, and where possible, in-person is always best. 

Oh I agree. The missionary was there in person. He was trying to learn Arabic (and had permission) because so many of the people he was teaching knew it best or only,  but finding English/Arabic materials to learn from in Germany was almost impossible. His whole mission was pretty unusual though.

Edited November 1, 2017 by Rain

[rongo]

39 minutes ago, Rain said:

Oh I agree. The missionary was there in person. He was trying to learn Arabic (and had pwrmission) because so many of the people he was teaching knew it best or only,  but finding English/Arabic materials to learn from in Germany was almost impossible. His whole mission was pretty unusual though.

My parents' Polish instruction before their mission was done from the mission home in Warsaw via Skype in the months leading up to the MTC. They were very impressed with both the quality of the elders and the teaching (Polish is hard).

I served in Hamburg 1994-1996. Four elders in the early 1990s were taken from the Hamburg Mission and sent to Albania to open it up. They had no language training or materials, and there was not even an Albanian Book of Mormon yet, and there were no members yet, either. They were told to do the best they could to learn the language, talk to people, maybe baptize some people if possible, and serve as the vanguard in opening it up. What an adventure! (but difficult).

[Avatar4321]

20 hours ago, Hamba Tuhan said:

I spent six years as the Young Men president in my ward (and then served as the bishopric counsellor over Young Men under two successive bishops). As I've shared before on this board, when I was first called, we had three young men who were at all active at church, and only one of them regularly attended Mutual. We had no organised Aaronic Priesthood quorums and no quorum leadership.

Within weeks of being called, I travelled 300 km to attend a regional training meeting for Young Men presidencies, bishoprics, and stake presidencies, provided by a member of the Young Men general presidency. The first thing he told us was that we needed to stop pretending to be exceptions to the rules. He then went on to give clear guidance, such as, 'One boy is a quorum, and unless the Spirit constrains you, he's called and set apart as the quorum president'. 'Bishops must take seriously their callings as presidents of the priest quorums; they should preside over presidency meetings, attend all quorum meetings, sit in council with the assistants, attend all activities, etc.' 'Quorum advisers are coaches, not leaders. Train them to get out of the way of the key-holders in the quorums they advise'. Etc. He then promised us that if we would follow the handbooks and the training he'd given us, we would see success.

I went home and asked to chat with my then bishop. I laid out from my detailed notes everything we needed to do differently. He resisted. We politely disagreed. I kept at it. For months. Over time, he started to capitulate. Eventually we had a deacons quorum president with no other active deacons and a teachers quorum presidency consisting of two boys. We started to get all three of them regularly to Mutual. We also let them understand their priesthood keys. From that point forward, no one in the ward passed the sacrament unless asked by the deacons quorum president or a member of the Aaronic Priesthood presidency (the bishopric). Ditto for preparing the sacrament. And on we went.

Eighteen months after I'd been called, our bishop moved away, and we got a new one. I was the first ward member her interviewed after he'd been ordained as bishop. He said, 'Hamba, I trust you. Let's do everything the handbooks say and everything Bro Burgess said in his training'. Phew! No more having to push and prod.

To cut a long story short, within a couple of years, we were averaging nearly 50 boys at Mutual each week, many of them non-members. Our trained quorum presidencies went to the rescue and started to bring boys back. I remember counting one Sunday, and fully one-quarter of the people in sacrament meeting 12 and older were young men. I picked them up, sometimes in two loads. Some of them came by bus. Some of them got their inactive families to drop them off. But they came. Soon we could hardly fit all our active priests into Bishop's office. Things were good.

One evening, the bishop of the ward that we share our building with caught me in the car park and asked, 'What are you doing in your ward? Will you come train my Young Men presidency in your secrets?'

I knew this Bishop and his ways. I knew what kind of men he'd called to serve in the Young Men presidency of his ward. I said to him, 'Bishop, we have no secrets. All we do is what is in the handbooks and what we've been trained to do'. As I'd predicted, he shook his head and walked away, frustrated that I wouldn't tell him some secret but easy shortcut.

That ward still has so few active Young Men that they keep begging the stake to let them just attend our ward's activities (something Bro Burgess expressly forbade).

So I have a similar answer. What have the prophets asked us to do? Have you read/watched all the training materials on lds.org? What has your area president told you to do in your priesthood leadership training meetings? Do we have faith? Do we really want the church to grow?

Or are we cynical or critical? Do we murmur and complain? Do we see what the prophets are seeing, even if only with the eye of faith? Do we think the only way to do things is the way we're familiar with?

I think those are good places to start.

Wow. I love that. How did you get the non members to mutual?

[Hamba Tuhan]

6 hours ago, Avatar4321 said:

Wow. I love that. How did you get the non members to mutual?

The member boys brought them.

[Avatar4321]

4 hours ago, Hamba Tuhan said:

The member boys brought them.

you've given me much to think about. I'm going to check out the handbook for my calling and check out other instruction and training.

[Atheist Mormon]

On 10/26/2017 at 11:28 PM, carbon dioxide said:

Perhaps that is so.  However if one believes in a second coming, one has to believe and look forward to all the stuff that comes before it.  If what people claim about climate change is correct, this could play a big role in events leading up to the second coming.  So I am not worried about climate change.  I am looking forward to it.  I see this rather exciting even though many are trying to avoid it.  

When yo say "I am looking forward to it" (climate change), I'm seeing 6'th extinction, large mammals disappearance is accelerated...Not a pretty planet to live in. 

[Ushuaia]

1 hour ago, Atheist Mormon said:

When yo say "I am looking forward to it" (climate change), I'm seeing 6'th extinction, large mammals disappearance is accelerated...Not a pretty planet to live in. 

Atheist Mormon,

What carbon dioxide wrote is pretty reflective of contemporary Mormon (and general Christian) cultural attitudes, especially in the U.S., when it comes to the Second Coming. It’s almost seems as if we deflect responsibility to better care for our planet-home - or to address international conflicts with something other and better than war and weapons - because we expect the Savior to make his appearance to the world any day now and he’ll quickly fix everything just the way we want.

Bottom line, Christians have been expecting the prompt return of Jesus Christ ever since he died and was resurrected 2000+ years ago.  Most every generation of Christians have believed that their generation would be the time when the Second Coming would really happen.  We in the modern generation are no different.