- Dave K on Weekly Calls as a Safeguard Against Mission Abuses: “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.” Jan 9, 13:26
- on Weekly Calls as a Safeguard Against Mission Abuses: “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.” Jan 9, 13:12
- on Weekly Calls as a Safeguard Against Mission Abuses: “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.” Jan 9, 10:23
- on Weekly Calls as a Safeguard Against Mission Abuses: “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.” Jan 9, 09:05
- on Weekly Calls as a Safeguard Against Mission Abuses: “@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.” Jan 9, 08:19
- on Weekly Calls as a Safeguard Against Mission Abuses: “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.” Jan 9, 07:27
- on If Religiosity Was Height, How Tall Would Latter-day Saints Be?: “For the sake of posterity who may come upon these comments 21 years from now, I wish to correct an error in my example numbers in my comment above. I forgot the 2 factor in the normal distribution exp( -(X-mean)^2/(2*SD^2) ), so the rejection numbers given above are far too low, and the rejection ratios are too high. The corrected numbers should be: For a population with a 70-inch mean height, 98.64% qualify and 1.36% are rejected. For a population with a 72-inch mean height, 95.18% qualify and 4.82% are rejected. For a population with a 70-inch mean height, 97.59% qualify and 2.41% are rejected. The rejection ratios are 3.5:1 and 1.8:1. (Earlier this week I was looking at comments left at this web site following the calling of Elders Uchtdorf and Bednar to the Quorum of the Twelve, 21 years ago at the dawn of “blogging.”)” Jan 9, 07:02
- on Weekly Calls as a Safeguard Against Mission Abuses: “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.” Jan 8, 21:05
- on Weekly Calls as a Safeguard Against Mission Abuses: “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.” Jan 8, 16:25
- on Your Reactions to Church Yesterday, 1/4: “Our testimony meeting started with a young woman observing that the iron rod was meant to help people who couldn’t see clearly, so maybe we can choose to hold onto it tightly even if we don’t feel like we have a strong testimony. That was a profound insight.” Jan 8, 16:09
