Mrs. Cal just told me that Mormon Misionaries volunteer at the blood bank in Peabody. They don’t proselytize you while you’re helpless on the table – they give out the cookies and juice. Their only problem is that they don’t know how to make coffee (Mormons don’t drink coffee – it goes against the Word of Wisdom). So they DO do some voluntary good stuff.
I’ve seen one of those elusive female missionaries, and I feel it is my duty to report that they gave me popsicles nad let me color in their coloring books.
Granted, I was eight years old at the time.
I would assume…
I have a question for the Mormons around here. I could never get a straight answer on this from the Mormons I know IRL.
In high school, I was good friends with several LDS members, and through them visited the local Temple, went to church, met missionaries, etc., etc. I have a good handle on what Mormons believe, I think. I also know a number of people who went on missions in all sorts of places (inluding New Jersey, Eve!). Anyway, one acquaintance, who was the older brother of my friend, was originally sent on a mission to Australia. He was there for a couple months before the Church required that he return to the U.S., and he was sent on a second mission, this to Spokane, Washington. Although I asked several people, no one has explained to me why this happened. The most I could gather was “he wasn’t trained correctly.” Then they changed the subject quickly.
So what gives? What would you have to do to get recalled from your mission?
No one said the three most common things young missionaries do:
They ride bicycles, they wear white short sleeved button-up oxford shits, and they carry books.
ReKyla’s statement and a nitpick or question from some of the LDS posters here: Can she go into the temple nowadays? Last I heard the church didn’t let gentiles set foot in the temple proper, but just attend seeker services until conversion ocurred. I did used to attend regular services when I was a child (My great grands are in “the church” and I guess they assumed I was even if my mother was going to hell). But when I made it clear that I held my mother’s faith as an adult I no longer got phone invitations to attend services. There was some other “official action” at the time, my great’grands made a fuss but I hardly recall any of it now.
What is this? You think I’m a gentile? Oy!
Heh, just kidding, I know what you mean. Anyway, I didn’t actually get to go inside the Templey part of the Temple. I just walked around the grounds and went into the auditorium, for a play. That’s in Oakland, CA. I’ve done the same thing at the temples in Provo, UT and Salt Lake City. When a Mormon friend got married, they had a ceremony at the Oakland Temple to which I was not invited, and a second ceremony at the local Mormon church, to which I was. The two ceremony thing made me sad - my friend had converted to Mormonism, so her own parents had not been able to attend what I’m sure she considered her “real” wedding.
I admit to a little religious bigotry about LDS / Jehovah’s Witness missionaries. I avoid the Jehovah’s Witness types, but always enjoy seeing the Mormons. Partly this is because the LDS seem more low-key – they will take ‘no’ for an answer – while the Jehovah’s Witness types are more foot-in-the-door. But, largely, I enjoy the Mormon’s because I have an LDS connection. I come from a medium sized town in Northern California with a very large Mormon population. In fact, my brother-in-law’s family is Mormon. All of Kurt’s siblings have been on missions – 5 brothers and 1 sister. Also, after Kurt’s dad retired, he took his second wife on a 4 year mission. Kurt’s mother is saving for a post-retirement mission, herself. My sister and Kurt married in their senior year of high school, so Kurt didn’t take a mission. The only person he ever converted was my sister! And, that didn’t last – their whole family (Kurt, Terry and their 3 kids) left the church about 8 years ago. They still live in the Provo, Utah area.
I enjoy talking to the LDS kids when they come around. Once, when I was living in Rhode Island, I actually was visited by a missionary from my home town. He was the younger brother of one of my high school classmates. Someday, I expect to meet a missionary who knows my sister or her family – Terry teaches high school in Springville and her kids are all missionary-age or nearly missionary-age.
So, I second what Squidwife said – in my experience LDS missionaries are friendly, helpful and not at all pushy. The last time some came to my door, I was out in my yard digging out a tree stump. They offered to help. I declined, and took a break so I could chat with them. One of them was from Utah, but from a different area than my sister’s family; the other was from Connecticut. We had a nice talk – both of them commented that since my brother’s family hadn’t managed to ‘get’ me, they didn’t have much chance. They further offered to answer any questions I had about their faith, but backed off cheerfully when I said I had none. When I said I needed to get back to work, they insisted on helping me. I am a small woman and they were both big strapping boys and they got my stump out of the ground in no time – I had been struggling with it for several hours. I made them a nice lunch in repayment. They were nice, helpful boys and I very much enjoyed meeting them
Hey—I’ve lived in New Jersey for twenty years now, I’m ALLOWED to make fun! Besides, who wouldn’t prefer the south of France to Weehawken?!
The lady I know is 60-ish and by “family” she might have meant just she and her husband. She’s quite delightful: told me she moved to NY from Utah because “I’m a Mormon—but there are just TOO DAMN MANY of them in Utah even for me!” She stayed at my house one weekend and all I had to drink was tea and coffee . . . Imagine my embarrassment! When she explained she couldn’t drink those, I said sweetly, “Oh . . . I guess that lets out the heroin, too, then?”
Speaking of Utah, did you read that they just passed a resolution naming Jell-O the state “official snack food?” I am not making this up . . .
If I recall correctly, Mormons considers Jews to be Gentiles as well.
Well, I served a mission to Chile for the calendar years 1993-1994. The first 8 weeks was language/religion training in the MTC (at the time, if no language training was necessary, the stay was 3 weeks, but I don’t know if that’s been changed). My brother-in-law is currently serving a mission in Korea (Pusan), and his stay in the MTC (Missionary Training Center–the US campus is in Provo, Utah, with other smaller units around the globe) was 10 weeks (Korean is very hard apparently). The language training is pretty intense. About 9 hours of class per day, and you’re supposed to only speak the language you’re learning after a certain degree of proficiency has been achieved.
So to answer a few questions that have been raised, in no particular order:
[ul]
[li]Young single missionaries, aged 19-27 for men when they start the mission, 21-27 for women, are the majority of the ~60,000 missionaries currently serving in the field.[/li][li]Married couples whose children are no longer at home often serve missions.[/li][li]Men serve 2 years, women 1.5 years.[/li][li]When we asked one of the Quorum of the Twelve about the discrepancy between the service of men and women, he said that the primary reason was that there were fewer and fewer places they felt they could send women, and more and more are desiring to go. (Anecdote: a pair of sister missionaries in my mission were confronted by a man with a knife who hollered some obscenities, etc. at them–the area was closed for female missionaries–the harassment doesn’t happen as much with men.)[/li][li]The ratio of male/female missionaries in my mission was about 5 to 1 IIRC.[/li][li]The most secular activity pursued on a mission is probably sports to get some exercise. Missionaries are not supposed to watch any TV, read any non-religious materials, etc. (Anecdote: I personally found this rule simply superfluous. I was spending 2 years of my life and money on it, the last thing I wanted to do was waste that.)[/li][li]I almost never rode a bicycle (our areas weren’t large enough, and it made it very hard to contact people on the street).[/li][li]Knocking on doors (commonly referred to among missionaries as “tracting”) is the least effective way to find people who are interested in the message missionaries have. It is typically only used as a last resort to find people if you have nothing else.[/li][li]Most missions are proselyting missions. However, some are (as noted) family history missions (running genealogical libraries, etc.), service missions (rebuilding disaster areas/helping underdeveloped contries with food/health/education), church history missions (missionaries staff various historical sites and act as tour guides, etc.), and I’m sure there are other categories. In each of the non-proselyting missions, the primary goal is to perform the service in particular, but missionaries will not hesitate to teach about the LDS church if an appropriate opportunity arises.[/li][li]The only case I know of in which an entire family goes is when the father is called as a Mission President. One of my companions on my mission was in the Dominican Republic when he was 14 and his father was a Mission President. That call is for three years.[/li][li]Missionaries are strongly encouraged to perform service that is not necessarily proselyting in nature (physical labor, staffing blood donor centers, etc.).[/li][/ul]
Parenthetically, the term “Gentile” has been used historically in different ways. See http://bible.crosswalk.com/Lexicons/Hebrew/heb.cgi?number=01471&version=kjv. In the past 2000-2500 years it has typically referred to non-Jews (Jews being composed of the tribe of Judah and Benjamin, with a smattering of other tribes), though earlier it referred to any non-Israelite (descendant of one of the original 12 tribes), or any who wasn’t a descendant of Abraham. In LDS circles it is sometimes used to refer to those not in the “spiritual” house of Abraham. I haven’t heard it used to refer to modern-day Jews ever, and it is rarely used at all in that context now. (Brigham Young used it frequently, and he is oft-quoted as such, however it should be noted that he was speaking largely to Mormons, especially those who had fled Missouri for their lives, and it took quite a while for the bad feelings to subside, so the term was used sometimes with some hostility.)
The lessons the missionaries teach are structured to build on basic ideas. There are six lessons that are intended to last about an hour each. The missionaries attempt to share their beliefs, testify of their own spiritual experiences, and when the listeners feel the witness of the Spirit, the missionaries invite them to follow that prompting–to pray, to read the scriptures, to be baptized, etc.
And I can honestly say, some of the most welcome words I heard on my mission were “I’m really not interested.” It was the people who would tell us to come back (and not be home, or pretend to not be home) that drove me bonkers.
Whew! Any more questions?
I can only speculate Kyla, but the most common reason for a re-assignment is health considerations. A family in our ward had their son re-assigned from the Marshall Islands to Arizona (I think it was) because he developed some odd spinal disorder that he couldn’t get treatment for except in the U.S. Another missionary I know was re-assigned from the Solomon Islands to Australia (temporarily) and then Hawaii because the coup in the Solomons made it unsafe for Americans to remain there. Finally, a missionary is sometimes assigned temporarily to a U.S. mission while waiting for a visa to come through for a foreign mission.
None of these, however, seem to be the case for your friend – it seems to me that if it were they would have told you so. A couple of other less likely but more embarassing possiblities exist: 1) He did something really wrong (by Mormon missionary standards). You can get sent home for serious sins such as sexual immorality. If this were the case, though, he almost certainly wouldn’t be sent to another mission, he’d just stay home. 2) Some sort of cultural mismatch. I’ll admit I’ve never heard of this happening but I suppose it’s possible somebody simply couldn’t adapt to the culture in another country. This seems unlikely too, especially for Australia. And then to send him to Spokane? (I grew up there. I can say what I want!)
So there you have a lot of guesses and no real information. What you described is definitely an uncommon situation and maybe they were just embarassed that there was a glitch of any sort.
The foreign language training lasts for a couple of months, and the results can vary wildly: some missionaries get a decent command of grammar and pick things up easily when they get to their country of destination, others have difficulty with the language for the entirety of their mission.
Either way, the theory is that missionaries are supposed to “teach by the Spirit,” i.e. allow God’s influence and help to inform their proselyting efforts, and not teach through sheer intellectual mastery of the language or the religion. Does this happen? Sometimes yes–you can encounter missionaries who barely speak a foreign language yet manage handily while teaching about their beliefs. Other times, you find American missionaries who don’t even speak their native English that well. 
Akash
P.S. Linguistic nerds in Utah (like me) used to make fun of less-gifted former missionaries who took pride in their hamfisted command of foreign languages. Nothing is funnier than hearing halting, imperfect German spoken with a Utah accent…
Ever see Orgazmo? Well, its kinda like that, except in a third world country.
I get Mormons at my house about once a year. Last year it was 2 women. My question is: Does anyone ever invite them in? To me it seems like a lot of work for very little return. I can’t imagine that they get very many converts by knocking on doors. I would think a success rate of 0.1% would be great for them. Which means they knock on 1000 doors for 1 person converted. Maybe I am wrong though.
I also get the Jehovah’s Witnesses about once a year too. Both groups are nice and leave when I say I am not interested.
Dolphinboy,
The lessons are concentrated on the subjects the church leadership wants the missionaries to discuss in the mission field. A similar system is used at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey. The lessons there, after one is taught the basics, tend to concentrate on the military and political terminology.
FTR: I have not attended the MTC (Missionary Training Center); however, I have graduated from the DLI (Defense Language Institute) Vietnamese language course.
If one is not interested in what the door-to-door seller is selling (or preaching), then why doesn’t one post a sign on one’s door to that effect?
The missionaries who converted me whilst I was stationed in Germany (I resided in “on the economy” housing, so there was no issue of tracting on base) related to me the trouble they got into about half-way through their mission:
An American movie (the name escapes me) was beeing screened downtown, in English, with German subtitles. The missionaries really were hankering to see an American movie in a theater setting, so they went there when they were supposed to be doing someting else.
Turned out the mission president had picked that night to take his family to the movie so they could get the American movie in a theater experience also.
The next morning, my missionaries (as I’ll always consider them) had to go see the mission president and he asked them something along the lines of “Exactly how many people did you share the Gospel with at [whatever its name was] theater?”
I’m willing to bet real money that my two missionaries aren’t the only ones who’ve pulled that stunt.