I am typically hesitant to speak critically of my experiences within the Church. To me, it is patently obvious that the Church is a force for good; in almost all cases, I have felt the Spirit working through its leadership and organizational structures. Furthermore, there is a certain Internet cottage industry that traffics exclusively in negative experiences, and in my observations that path rarely leads one toward more of the shiny fruit.
And yet, less savory things do happen. While these instances are often blown out of proportion by critics, pretending they don’t exist creates its own set of problems.
In my own case, while most of my mission was wonderful, I served under three different mission presidents (the result of being a “visa waiter”). One of them maintained an atmosphere that was almost cult-like, if not emotionally abusive.
One example among many, we were told it was unbecoming of a missionary to use the word “guys.” New missionaries were constantly corrected on this point. While that might seem merely eccentric, and it would have been fine if we were simply being trained to speak with the precision of a Barack Obama, the abuse began if you found the rule silly.*
I remember agreeing to play ball while privately maintaining reservations, but that wasn’t enough. I was eventually subjected to a struggle session where my district sat in a circle and took turns explaining that it wasn’t enough to just go through the motions—I had to believe in the rule wholeheartedly for the Lord to bless our mission. We were the chosen ones because of our mission president’s system; by far the top baptizing mission in Western Europe (it was delicious to find out with the next mission president that we were actually something like third, not first), with general authorities around the world visiting our mission to see how things were done. Everyone else had “gotten with the program” except me.
There were a bunch of other small eccentricities. In another instance, to show God our willingness to sacrifice, the mission gave up our medio-día (midday) break in exchange for meeting a baptismal goal. (I was relieved years later when the new missionary handbook explicitly forbade such practices.)
The looniness of these rules would have been fine on its own, they weren’t big deals, but they were paired with a rough socialization process to ensure compliance. There was an intense, guilting “why are you on a mission?” rhetoric that took on the character of hazing, with older missionaries dishing it out to the younger ones in a cycle of breaking down the newbies. It was a lot of fire for very little light. (The first book I read after my mission, while I was in Russia visiting family interestingly, was 1984, and I was astounded by how accurately Orwell captured the psychological toll of a highly controlled, sealed-off environment.)
When the time came for a new president the mission was whipped into a frenzy. “Nothing is going to change” became the mantra repeated at our final Zone Conference; to believe otherwise was treated as anathema because that would imply that the system wasn’t written in stone by God’s own hand. By then, I had learned to keep my head down, but it was fascinating from a socio-psychological perspective to watch the mission-wide malaise settle in as changes inevitably occurred. The elders and sisters slowly lost faith in that particular president’s “-ism.”
People often think they would be the ones to stand up to such silliness, but they almost never do. Usually, they are just loyal to a different group (what sociologists call “subcultural deviance”). True independence, when everyone around you thinks you are crazy or apostate, is incredibly rare. As the famous Asch conformity experiments demonstrated, most people will deny the evidence of their own eyes (such as the length of three lines on a page) just to match the group consensus. Out of the twenty or so missionaries I knew well during that era, I can think of only one sister who recognized it was all baloney. Everyone else was a true believer.
However, in the middle of all of this I was granted a vital landline to reality. During a call home (either Christmas or Mother’s Day, I can’t remember which), I was able to touch base with an outside perspective, puncturing the hermetically sealed ideological bubble that had been so carefully curated and enforced. My father agreed that these mission eccentricities were indeed weird and unproductive, and his validation provided the breath of fresh air I needed to get my bearings and I knew I could outlast the crazy.
I don’t regret serving under that president. It was one of those experiences I’d rather crawl through broken glass than repeat, but I wouldn’t trade it for the world. The anchored thinking I developed while serving under that mission president served me well later in life.
I don’t want to exaggerate the scale of this issue. Based on my discussions with others, I’d shoot from the hip estimate that perhaps 5–10% of mission presidents go a little overboard with the extreme power they hold over young, zealous missionaries. This is very much a minority experience.
However, with the newer policy allowing missionaries to call home weekly, I doubt my experience would happen today. Maintaining that level of tight control requires sealing out external influences; you cannot allow people to triangulate their position against an outside source.
To be clear: I am not implying the Church is a cult. I am saying that specific missions can occasionally exhibit those characteristics. There are very few places in the 21st century developed world where you can find the level of information lockdown and intense socialization possible in a mission. In the right hands, this intensity is transformative for good; but in the wrong hands it can make the bad consequences all the worse.
I suspect the weekly call policy was implemented primarily for mental health reasons. But, much like the requirement for stake presidents to read patriarchal blessings, it serves as a structural check on the occasional “bad apple.” Out of 450+ missions, the law of large numbers suggests there will always be a few outliers, and it is great that there is now an additional built-in hedge against such potential abuses.
*(And it was quite silly; the missionaries simply started saying “y’all” instead of “guys.”)
Comments
28 responses to “Weekly Calls as a Safeguard Against Mission Abuses”
It’s much more than the call home; missionaries are in frequent almost-live contact with other missionaries outside their own mission via Messenger. They have a live compare-and-contrast going on.
Just 5-10%, eh? Drawing from my own rather large family as the population, I’d estimate it was more
like 20-30% in the 90s and early 00s. But of course, perhaps my family has its own issues.
“And yet, less savory things do happen. While these instances are often blown out of proportion by critics, pretending they don’t exist creates its own set of problems.”
Amen. However, it seems there are many among the faithful who “pretend they don’t exist” whenever someone else, even another among the faithful, raises the reality of the less savory happening. And they do so thinking that they are doing a hero’s work of protecting the faith.
I believe open and honest dialogue is healthy for any organization.
The church is not a cult, but the members/leaders take sections of the church, such as missions, and turn them into cults. My first mission pres was a sports fanatic which in itself is not a big deal except for the fact he ran the mission like Bobby Knight would. (minus the throwing of chairs) His favorite pastime in all our meetings was to do what he called stand-up-sit downs. He would ask if anyone in the crowd happen to break a random rule that he picked since the last time we met. If you were crazy enough to stand up, he would “bobby knight” you in front of everyone until he told you to sit down. At one mission conference, the APs told me that pres wanted to talk to me in room 14. I had recently broke a mission rule that the pres was made aware of. I got in the room and he started going all bobby knight on me as usual. It was just me and him. This was before the conference started. I stood up right when he started to go off and told him that I was not going to stand here and take this unless he was willing to calm down and speak to me like an adult, then I walked out of the room.
Later in the conference he got back at me by going bobby on me in front of the entire mission, for several minutes.
On another occasion I got his wrath so bad that his wife came up to me after the meeting and apologize to me.
Missions are cult-like in almost every way. I dont think the brethren want it this way, I think the leaders below them want to please the brethren with #’s. That’s my guess. And the people picked to lead missions are all (for the most part) uber successful biz execs that are results driven. Hence the problems IMO. I served in the early 80’s.
It is still happening. The Tallahassee Florida Mission president has imposed a “goal” of a baptism per week for each companionship, or 52 per year per companionship. Of course, this means every single missionary in the whole mission is a failure. I do not understand why a mission president would do this.
I named the real mission because I believe in honest dialogue. The mission president should not be embarrassed by his own decrees. If I am misunderstanding, I hope someone will correct me.
It took some phone calls home to stop the mission president who abused female missionaries in the Puerto Rico San Jose Mission in 2014. He was excommunicated.
Ben: Interesting, didn’t know that.
Dr. Cocoa & REC 911: That’s another variable, I suspect this happened more in the past. My family’s experiences were during the 2000s, so already they’re kind of dated.
ji: I’m fine with baptism, contacting, and teaching goals, the issue is how it’s framed if it isn’t achieved.
JC: I wasn’t aware of that, interesting.
Unfortunately, mission presidents can go pretty far off the reservation. Just look at the scandal with Philander Smart, former mission president for the Costa Rica San Jose Mission back in 2014. He groomed and likely sexually assaulted several of the sister missionaries placed under his care. Just pure evil.
Mission presidents make a huge difference. My first was a doctor, and it was clear that his top priority was the spiritual growth and well-being of the missionaries. The second was a business executive, and his focus was on results (though not in a bad way). My wife’s mission president had a military background. I don’t know if she would have been able to finish her mission if she’d had my first mission president–her mission was when she had to confront that her anxiety was a Problem and not something she could white-knuckle through–but she would not have come home feeling like a failure. (This was quite a while ago, and the Church has gotten much better about this.)
More recently, my stake president’s son had one of the problem mission presidents. If they didn’t meet their baptismal goals, they had to explain to their district why that was. The expected answer was some way they had been less than completely obedient or diligent. You’d think the mission president had never heard of agency.
The calls home help, but the lower missionary age makes it even more important that mission presidents stay on track. Missionaries now have had almost no exposure to the adult world before serving. I’m not surprised it was a sister who also saw through the baloney on your mission: I presume she was 21+, and that makes a difference. I recall once we were working with the sisters in our area when one of them had to take a call from the mission office. As we were trying to rearrange the phone cords to allow her to take the call without entering our apartment even for a moment, she rolled her eyes a bit and said “tell them we’re dealing with a Law of Moses problem.” That took some of the air out of my rule-following zealotry, which was a very good thing.
Stephen C, I am fine with reasonable and attainable goals, but my example was both unreasonable and unattainable. Please remember your own words: pretending [unsavory problems] don’t exist creates its own set of problems.
Goals were huge in my mission, and they were supposed to be ambitious and yet something you were expected to reach, not to aim for. I recall the time when I fell just short of my goal for first lessons for the day, and in my report/dressing down (which happened every day, or rather every night) my zone leader told me, “That’s just the kind of person you are, Elder —-. When you want to get into heaven after this life, God is gonna tell you, ‘Sorry, you’re almost worthy.’” That was a long time ago, though. There were no weekly calls home then, or any calls home.
@Not a Cougar: I think you’re referring to same incident JC is referring to. That was obviously a DefCon 5 case, which by all accounts was handled well by the institution once they got wind of it, but there are a lot of DefCon 3 or 4 cases. Not nearly enough to send a Mission President home but still damaging to the missionaries.
@RLD: Yes, I’m more okay with goals for things that don’t involve other people’s agencies for major life decisions. Number of people talked to in the street, lessons, etc. Also, your SP son’s experience shows the quid-pro-quo, be obedient and I’ll bless you with baptisms idea is still circulating, which is interesting.
@JI: Yes, you’re right that it was unreasonable and unattainable, so it sets things up for disappointment.
@SDS: That’s another point I’ve noticed. Adults are usually much more mature and thoughtful, but some of the worst offenders are zealous 19-year olds who think the only thing preventing their District from being Dan Jones is that one Elder who doesn’t tie his shoes the right way.
True about 19-year-olds. In this case, though, the ZL was more like a 25-year-old, and his leadership approach (if perhaps not his specific words with me) was completely in sync with what the mission president encouraged and rewarded.
As a missionary four decades ago, I never called home (except when my mother died), but for the first third of my mission I didn’t have constant contact with other missionaries either. For the first couple of assignments my companions and I had towns to ourselves. With the first town, we would take a bus eight miles to district meeting one morning a week. There were zone conferences with the mission president twice while I was there for four months. With the second town, the nearest other companionship was 160 miles to the south, and the zone leaders were 400 miles to the north (and the mission office was 550 miles north of the zone leaders), so we went three months without seeing any other missionaries. The zone leaders wrote us a nice letter once. We had no phones, and any communication faster than postal mail was handled by sending a telegram to our post office box either telling us what we needed to know (“Travel to your next assignment starting Monday.”) or instructing us to call the mission office via payphone.
The limited and sometimes sparse contact was not fertile ground for the problems the post above addresses. That was long ago, and far fewer missionaries today enjoy such conditions, which helps with some issues and creates others. It is good to deal with the conditions of today with tools available today, such as extremely cheap long distance phone calls.
I agree that many of the old mission rules were too strict and too easily turned into tools of control.
In theory, I would love to treat missionaries more like senior missionaries, with real adult autonomy and trust for balancing mission and home. But the reality is that we are calling missionaries younger and younger. Many now arrive on their 18th b-day, having never lived away from home. Joseph F. Smith may have been a super-missionary at 15, but I promise you that “Chad”, from Riverdale who is missing his playstation, is no Joseph F. Smith.
At the same time, helicopter parenting has become the norm. I see it vividly in higher education, and it’s hard to imagine it hasn’t followed young adults into missionary service. How many of my fellow profs are still shocked at the amount of work they do with parents?
Instead of creating more rules around parent–child communication, we should just re-do the model.
Many missionaries already attend home-based MTC. Why not call families to missions and have integrated family service?
Imagine with me, parents coming along with their missionaries as the member missionaries supporting new and struggling wards. Imagine parents who may have rusty language skills, but language skills nonetheless, digitally or physically tagging along to lessons managed by little Johnny or Janie? Imagine parents helping problem solve or advise on those issues that frequently stymie young missionaries.
Maybe missions don’t have to be places to “grow up” by restricting resources and creating austere, suffering starving-artist-like environments. Maybe we approach missions as an “all-hands-on-deck” time to consecrate all available resources instead.
Just saying, if ya can’t beat ’em, join ’em.
Calling home isn’t my pet peeve with missionaries right now. My pet peeve is the sisters who, although they have updated new wardrobe options (including PANTS), continue to dress like they belong in our fundamentalist sects.
Good post. In my experience weekly calls do help missionaries to level set and avoid excesses zealotry. Frequent emails with their friends in other missions do even more good on this front.
FWIW, my daughter is currently in Spain and has really great mission leaders. She’s heard stories along the lines discussed in these comments and is grateful that’s not her experience. So while I believe it’s important to call out problematic mission leaders and policies, it’s also important to keep perspective. I believe the strong majority of mission leaders are really good, just like my daughter’s.
Mortimer – I’m with you the wardrobe, but not just the sisters. The elders in their white shirts and suits all look like they are children playacting at being lawyers. I drove past a different local church and a 18 y-old boy (happens to be a friend of my kids) was standing outside wearing jeans and a sweatshirt holding a sign. He felt welcoming in a way that our missionaries playacting in their missionary costumes just do not. Our missionaries look kind of foolish.
Or at least they do in my part of Calif. Perhaps it is less true other places.
This post has had me thinking about how missions have changed and if weekly phone calls home is even enough to avoid some of the problems. My son was in Brazil and there were some really dangerous things, that we as parents never found out about until long after he was home. After my son got home and the doctor took care of parasites he had picked up and he regained most of the weight he lost, the truth trickled out slowly. The first thing of importance to come out, was they were told not to tell their parents any of the bad stuff. Really, telling parents any of the problems was forbidden. Yeah, I think that is a problem weekly phone calls will not fix. There were drug dealers with machine guns guarding their territories. They didn’t care much about the missionaries and would allow them into the areas. But there was always the chance of getting caught in cross fire during the drug dealer conflicts. The missionaries were told not to carry money or cameras or anything of value because mugging were common. They were told to carry one or two dollars, not so much its loss would hurt, but enough to tell the mugger that was all the money they were carrying. He and his companion were robbed at knifepoint more than once, at gunpoint twice, and one mugging ended badly when his companion resisted and was stabbed. Sanitation was nonexistent and they were told they would get parasites, so just don’t worry about it and take care of it when you get home. Food poisoning was common, even a mass food poisoning at a zone conference where many of the missionaries ended up hospitalized. That hit international news, but he obediently never mentioned that his companion was one who ended up so sick he was hospitalized. His companion stole money from him, so leaving it in his apartment wasn’t safe either. So, no, I don’t think a weekly phone call will overcome the mission president forbidding them from telling their parents any better than weekly letters. It is like I used to tell children about abuse prevention, “if anyone asks you to keep a secret that is not a happy secret, tell your parents or a trusted adult, because some secrets are not good to keep secret.” The mission president in this case had instructed the missionaries in his care to keep dangerous secrets.
Anna
Thanks for sharing. My thought back in the day and now is that missionaries are not even given a # to call if there is an issue besides the parents. (that I am aware of) There should be a HQ # to call like we bishops had when the hard stuff came up that was not in any handbooks. I didn’t tell my parents about the crazy stuff either but my mission pres didn’t tell us to not tell.
To your point, why are we sending anyone to these types of areas? For numbers? Even my mission in the US we were living in areas you wouldn’t want to live. Even tho I paid for all my mission expenses I did not have the option to move to a nicer/safer location.
My mission pres told me to tract on the local military base even tho it was against the base law. I thought it was odd that he would even ask. I did it for one day with a close call with the base police. Never did it again.
Safety is clearly not the mission departments top priority.
ReTx,
I agree 100%. After the BOM musical, we really should drop the black pants and short-sleeve white shirt which is no longer business casual. I thought the elders had updated clothing specs too and could wear chinos (tan slacks) and casual colored shirts. Yet I still only see white shirts.
Whether we’re talking about dress or other “tradit” we really need more changes.
Why do we have missionaries who can’t tell their parents bad stuff and get help with that from their parents or others? This is shocking in so many ways. Parents need to be working towards being their kids ‘go to’ people especially in cases of danger, and the church should be promoting this. I know that kids get confused and a lot of us don’t measure up to this standard as families but it should be our earnest aspiration both as a church and as individuals.
“*(And it was quite silly; the missionaries simply started saying ‘y’all’ instead of ‘guys.’)”
You’re kidding! You mean, the apostasy actually deepened?!!
What? Oh. Sorry. Never mind, don’t mind me. Yes, I had to be the one to do it. (Not to trivialize a serious issue, but if my three choices are: (1) laugh, (2) cry, and (3) scream, whenever possible, I try to do the first over the other two …)
A few years ago a young man in my ward was a missionary called to a very poor nation. He father told me that his son could not share with the family at this time all the various privations that went with living in that nation, and the father understood this. We can’t have missionaries sending e-mails weekly detailing the ways Haiti doesn’t measure up to Norway, documenting that the missionaries look down on their hosts.
I served in the early 70’s, a period when number-chasing by mission leaders was rampant throughout the world. I was blessed beyond measure to have, for most of my mission, a president with a background in the humanities (BYU Spanish professor), who had served in Mexico in an era when they were required to teach people for 6 months before they could be baptized. When I worked in the mission office, this president (and his wife and children) became a second family to me and I had talks with him that were that were comparable to that of a warm, caring father with his son. He even helped guide me into my future career (translation and language services). Yes, we had rules and were expected to follow them. We had numerical goals and had to report on them every week. This was not an “anything goes” warm-and-fuzzy mission. But our baptism levels were not “up there” with other missions, and my mission president was dressed down afterwards by the authority who gave him his exit interview. His wife was bitter about it for years afterwards. Some of the countries that had spectacular baptism rates during that era later had to have Elder Oaks or Elder Holland come and administer the work there to try to clean up the chaotic situation created by tens or even hundreds of thousands of members of record who had essentially no connection with the Church. By the time my own sons served, also in Latin America, some 20 to 25 years ago, the situation had already greatly improved. Due to the sheer number of mission leaders now being called, there will still be an occasional abusive or fanatical leader, but overall I think we are doing much, much better.
IMO the church has an unhealthy obsession with baptism #s and hoarding money. Let me add temple building in there too. The three-fold obsession of the church. Bless their hearts.
Being “dressed down” for “low numbers” is all the proof you need.
Six months before baptism? I guess that is a byproduct of prior days of huge numbers of converts with little to no teaching….
I’m a little late to the party, but a question.
Weekly calls only help if there is some sort of redress. Missionaries don’t want to face the social consequences of being seen as an ark-steadier, or a critic of the mission president. So even if a missionary vents to a parent, and the parent agrees the mission president’s policy is mistaken, what recourse is there? It feels odd for me as a parent to contact the mission president to tell him his policies are wrong.
Case in point: Our son’s mission president requires them to make temple trips monthly–and to do it on p-day. By the time they’ve driven two hours each way, they have little p-day time left for groceries, zone sports, buying new shoes, and generally taking a break. These days, the missionary rulebook says that missionaries should not sacrifice p-days, meal breaks, or scheduled sleep hours in hopes of receiving additional blessings–a provision I wish had been present when I was a missionary. The mission president’s rule about using p-day time to go to the temple seems to violate the spirit if not the letter of that provision in the handbook.
Is it appropriate for me to contact the mission president and tell him about the deleterious effect of his policy on missionary preparedness and mental health?
I think whether it’s appropriate to contact, or even in very extreme situations go above the president’s head, depends on where it falls on the continuum of badness. On one hand we want to avoid a sort of “every member a mission president” situation where parents are calling about every little thing and distracting the mission president (I could definitely see something like that being a problem, and I’m sure MPs have their own stories), but on the other hand there should be enough outside contact to avoid some of the situations that have been raised here. I wasn’t even implying that my parents should have called the mission president to try to change the mission culture, just that having an outside anchor for the missionaries would have really helped prevent some of the excesses.
One of the recently called mission presidents, a member of my stake, made a career as an officer of the US Public Health Service, and is currently the Director of the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. I would suppose his life dealing with such things would be a reassuring comfort to those serving in his future mission and their families.