It’s interesting to see this from another perspective. Growing up, I always understood “missionaries” to mean religious recruiters. I figured that was the purpose of the old European missions to the new world. Elderly Mormon “service missionaries” who build hospitals, feed the poor, and house orphans seemed like a bit of a misnomer from the perspective of a LDS kid planning to become a preaching recruiting missionary.
Interesting. In Christianity missionaries hope to create converts by offering assistance, building schools, digging wells, educating children, building hospitals and clinics. Not just roaming suburbs, knocking on doors and talking.
As a Buddhist it’s strickly forbidden to try and convert others, you have to come to it on your own.
I have no problem with the sorts of missionaries that go out and do something concrete to help people, as long as they aren’t preachy and weird about their religion. “My religion impels me to offer assistance to my fellow human beings” isn’t a bad thing as long as said assistance is concrete and non-conditional.
But the door-to-door types? I won’t be rude to you, but I want you off my doorstep. Just go. What you are doing is insanely rude and my religion is none of your business.
My nephew is on his mission right now, in Alaska. My sister-in-law forwards his weekly email to us (edited, lol - we’re not LDS), so we get a pretty good picture of what he does on a daily basis. They do a LOT of service. They do canvass occasionally (difficult in rural Alaska), but they mostly seem to meet with either inactive Mormons or people who are related to members of the local ward. They spend a lot of time, though, volunteering at the local senior center and library, and helping people who need it - everything from taking elderly women grocery shopping, to clearing a dead moose off of someone’s land, to chopping wood for someone who isn’t physically able to do it.
I disagree immensely with the idea of LDS missionary work and with my nephew partaking in it, but they do more than cold calling.
Door-to-door soliciting (tracting) is discouraged, not because of any ethical qualms but because it is extremely ineffective. And don’t think hardly anyone sets up a soapbox on a street corner any more. If the LDS missionaries are knocking on your door, it’s because the local membership have not been helping them enough to find people to teach. Most converts are the friends, family, coworkers, and neighbors of Mormons. Quite a few are the results of service projects. For the most part, the missionaries offer service with no strings attached. Of course, some people will be impressed and want to learn more about the church.
ETA: which also adresses the OP’s question about why missionaries are needed where there is already an LDS presence.
Clearly not in these parts, I encountered a couple, when I was walking my dog two days ago. And they were just cold calling, knocking on doors. And not even on doors that haven’t already been contacted, several times. How this is considered ‘service’ is beyond me.
That may well be the case. I was raised Catholic; everyone else may as well be goat worshiping homosexuals drinking human blood out of monkey skulls (and everyone knows that this is how HIV came about; the Kennedy family was about to leak the secret to the media, and that’s why the CIA started killing them off); so perhaps I got them confused.
Strikes me, FBG, that you’re probably right. I hung out with some Mormons who lived up the street when I was about 4-6 years old, and may not have really knowingly encountered any/many since then. It’s not very common where I’ve lived. I tend to lump them into a single group, I suppose; probably because of the door-knocking missionary work both are associated with.
Believe me, if the boys were getting any good leads from the local members, they’d be teaching those people rather than knocking on doors.
My first assignment was in a particularly un-cooperative ward. After we’d met with every LDS family in town to try to persuade them to set up meetings with their friends, we started knocking on doors. After we’d knocked on every door in town, we helped people with their yardwork and home repairs full-time. We’d help both Mormons and non-Mormons without being pushy to the non-Mormons. (With as much restraint as could be expected from a couple of 19-year-olds, anyway.)
I’m sorry, this had me in stitches. Poor Baltimore, being a punchline.
Correct. UP to the bishop and stake president level are unpaid, lay members. The leadership above them are paid clergy.
This is a difference between being a missionary in a small place that gets “tracked out” and working in Japan where there are always more doors to knock on. We did offer free English conversation classes as a method of getting people to come to church. Sort of a bait-and-switch approach.
Since missionaries are primarily for recruiting to the church, I’d imagine that the service is more like our free English, a tool for recruiting.
When I went on my mission, there were four of us in our ward (local unit) who put in our papers close together. I got called to the Japan Fukuoka mission and my friend went to Oklahoma. We would be together and the members would ask where we were going. I would say Japan, and people would comment on how cool that was. Then my friend would say Oklahoma, and there would be a long pause. Poor kid.
I tried to teach English, but without an organised curriculum I didn’t know where to start. Those meetings were a bit awkward. The classes were also officially no-strings-attached, but of course it was a good way to get non-Mormons to meet with the missionaries inside a church building.
Similar here. I got my call the same day as another kid in my ward.
Me: DidYouOpenYours?IOpenedMine.I’mGoingToTahiti!WhereAreYouGoing?
Him: [long pause] Omaha.
It probably didn’t improve his morale much when I learned the language and told him that omaha is the Tahitian word for piss.
Reading some of these posts is enlightening and amusing. As a former missionary, I can say that being a missionary is often a difficult task. Of course, priority number one is to convert people. There is no denying that fact.
But missionaries are taught to use a variety of methods to meet potential converts. This is done through service work, working with existing members, and knocking on doors. Most missionaries are given a small geographic area in which to work. They are asked to work only within that area and so opportunities to provide service can be limited based on the area. For the same reason, doors can get knocked on many times over the years.
As a missionary I always appreciated a nice “No thank you” and I would leave it at that. There is not sense in arguing or forcing one’s beliefs on another. I think that you will find that 99% percent of Mormon missionaries are respectful, courteous, and generally interested in your well being.
I don’t think this is ignorance on their part, I think it’s part of their bit. They ask you to explain your religion, assuming you won’t be able to, which then gives them an in to talk about theirs.
I was in Salt Lake a few weeks ago for work and went to walk around the Temple Square. Two Sisters led me around and gave me the tour. They asked if I was active in any religion and when I said I was, one of them said “I’m not familiar with that denomination, can you tell me a little bit about it?”
Then on the plane going home I ended up seated next to a young guy on his way to his mission. He did exactly the same thing, asked if I had a religious background, then asked me if I could explain it to him.
All three were very polite when they saw I wasn’t in the market for conversion.
Or it could just be curiosity. I grew up in Salt Lake and when I got on my mission, I had my first real chance to see different religions. And while I’ll admit there was a bit of “I’ll let you show me yours, if you’ll let me show you mine,” I was genuinely interested in other churches.
Of course there is something about being in a mono-cultural situation. Missionaries spend nearly all waking hours focused on religion. What isn’t spent on proselytizing, is spent on study and worship. And everyone you spend time with is either another missionary, a member of the church, or a potential convert. After a couple of years of that, it is hard to break out and have normal person small talk, without falling back onto religion. “How 'bout them Mets?” becomes “How 'bout them Ephesians?” because you have no idea how the Mets are doing, but you do have a fairly good grasp on the scriptural basis of maintaining unity in a diverse church. Thus questions about your religion become not an actual attempt at conversion, but just small talk because they have run out of anything else to talk about.