As 36 new proselytizing missions were announced this week by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — missions that will be blended in around the world, bringing the total number of missions to a church record 450, using more than 72,000 full-time missionaries — there’s a movement stirring regarding how those missions and missionaries can be made not just to grow the faith’s membership but also to bless the world.
Commission those volunteers to do all kinds of service, not simply contact prospective investigators and teach and baptize them, rather offer able-bodied and able-minded help wherever and in whatever form it is needed. Reach out to individuals who need a helping hand or who are lonely or poor or disabled or elderly. Feed the hungry, read to the blind or illiterate, clean a public park, strengthen communities, paint a house, plant a garden, make God’s green earth a little greener.
Transform Latter-day Saint missionaries into good Samaritans.
Transform them from sweet-faced, white-shirt-and-modest-blouse-wearing emissaries sent from God to convert the unwashed into servants called of God, shirt sleeves rolled up, to make life better for all those around them, in whatever way possible, regardless of what they believe or how or what or if they worship.
[Read about the church’s newly announced mission expansion.]
It’s already happening, to varying degrees, locally and globally. The faith’s missionary guidelines contain sections on rendering effective, meaningful and safe service, urging proselytizers to, among other things, “participate in community service projects” and to do so “with a sincere desire to help others without any expected outcomes.”
To that, I say. Yes, yes and more, more.
I talked with a former mission president who said he encouraged his missionaries to serve however, whenever, wherever they could. He once asked a squad of them to mow the vast lawn at an assisted living center in his mission boundaries, a facility that lacked the personnel to get its gardening finished. “I told all of them to stay there, working as long as was necessary to get that job done,” he said. “It took over eight hours. There was no pretense that we were doing it to get anything, to baptize anyone, in return. Those folks just needed our help.”
A newspaper, nevertheless, found out from the facility workers that the service had been freely given and wrote an article about it.
Practice what you preach
(The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) Missionaries in the California San Jose Mission of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints help box food at Second Harvest of Silicon Valley in February 2021.
People sometimes laugh at and slam the door on short-haired, scrubbed-clean Bible or Book of Mormon thumpers who seem to want something from them. They don’t generally laugh at and slam the door on people of goodness on hand to offer a hand.
If the church continues to emphasize the giving under those premises, and it should, love and goodwill could germinate and generate and spread from Provo to Paris, from Saratoga Springs to Sacramento, from Tooele to Timbuktu. The beneficiary could go on believing whatever he or she wants, and such service would bring light onto a lurching planet desperate for good deeds done for good people to good people by good people.
No harm in that.
For those who think, no, that’s not what missionaries are called to do, they are called to seek out the righteous, to preach the gospel of Christ … well, instead of primarily preaching that gospel, they would be practicing it. They would be living it. And what’s a better way to grow any Christian endeavor than by doing and being what’s written in the Good Book — and any good book — by demonstrating what’s in the book, what it teaches, rather than by simply urging others to read what’s in it?
Doing that would — does — serve three purposes: It makes serving a full-time mission more rewarding and fulfilling. It makes the world a better place. It opens doors and minds that otherwise remain shut.
I served a full-time Latter-day Saint mission nearly 50 years ago in Germany. I don’t know much about the way God thinks, the exactness of what God wants, but I do know this: Offering heartfelt help to and genuine interest in individuals and families, whether it’s physical (repairing a broken faucet) or social (lending a listening ear) or spiritual (praying for and with them) is the best way to make human connection. And it’s best when the offering is not transactional, not we’ll render kindness and friendship to you if you listen to our gospel message.
The most effective — however you define that — missionaries I ever saw were the ones who made caring, loving, authentic human connections with nothing attached to them. Funny how those connections brought God along with them.
‘If feels good and is good’
(The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) With the Oakland Temple in the background, Latter-day Saint missionaries and other members move USDA Farmers to Families Food Box Program boxes from pallets to the back of a vehicle in 2020.
Genuine service outdrives forceful preaching by a hundred yards on any fairway. To make a real impression on the world, to help change it for the positive, the church should tell its missionaries to expect to get their white shirts and modest blouses, on many occasions, dirty and sweaty — or it will encourage them to wear T-shirts.
Some missions, some missionaries are already doing this. All of them could do it more.
“It feels good and is good,” the mission president said, “to be a good Samaritan.”
A lot of folks are more open to benevolence, and even to the word and will of God, when the fence is mended, the dog is washed, the driveway is shoveled, the leaves are raked, the cares of the human mind are listened to, heard and understood — when nothing is expected in return, when helping hands are offered and opened — 36 new missions’ worth of them, 450 in total.
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