I see the desire to have a magic bullet in other areas of the church as well. “If only we followed the _________ program, all would be well.”

I think we want good things (new converts, good kids, fulfilling marriages) so badly the we overlook the significance of other peoples’ agency. We pin our hopes to a program because dealing with the agency of others is messy and unpredictable.

I’m sure the book was meant well, and it was full of stuff about how if you just truly dedicated yourself, the Lord would guarantee your success.

A lot of missionaries really liked the book, me included, until one day I realized the impossibility of what it promoted. It said that truly good missionaries would have proselyting activities in excess of 120 hours a week (over 17 hours a day) and would skip meals or eat them while running between appointments because they were so eager not to waste a moment of the time given them to share the Gospel. It also promoted hyper-vigilance to the rules. I realized that if I tried to follow the guidance of this book and still stuck to the rules about being in at 9:30, doing personal and companion study, etc., I would get at most four hours of sleep a night, never eat a real meal, and never wash my clothes because we’d have no P-day…

Fortunately the fad for this book was very short, as I think others realized it was impossible to adhere to unless we wanted to end up in a bag begin shipped back home.

I think this shows that not only APs, but also GAs are sometimes prone to schemes to obtain blessings. (In all fairness, there was perhaps some nuance in the book that told us that there were no guarantees, but that’s not what a bunch of 20-year-olds got out of the book.)

The irony of it all is that the area where I saw the most success was one where I had a companion who loathed my very existence and where we went about pretending to be missionaries because we couldn’t work together. When I had a companion who wanted to “sacrifice” every P-day (I refused to do so) and was big on working extra hard (but often in really strange ways), we had little success… That sort of convinced me that I had very little control over my success and failure when it came to the actions of others.

The MP did promise us once that if we prayed to teach a family and then did our best, we would have a family to teach by the end of the week. We took the promise to heart and worked our little hearts out (but still kept the mission rules). As we were walking home on the last day of the promise, a lady ran up to us and said that her family wanted to join the church. Her brother was a member and they liked what they heard.

I’ve seen the problem you mention with bishops and SP’s. *If you only repented and lived right, everything would be OK.* I’ll tell that to Job when I see him next. We had one SP who emphasized home teaching to the extreme. Everything else in the gospel took a back seat. His uneven approach was a failure. But the current SP learned from his mistake.

Following my mission I lived for a few months in Salt Lake and remember being challenged by the SLC missionaries to participate in an “inspired” program targeted specifically for that mission by either a GA or mission president (I forget which). It was the same idea that shifted the burden of finding to members with a promise that they would have someone teach in their home within 30 days of the commitment. I smiled and accepted the invitation when it was given, including the commitment to do such and such, which as I recall I did, but wondered how many other people had received the same invitation and how many additional teaching opportunities would actually avail themselves. Were any members’ faith damaged if there wasn’t an interested prospect within 30 days? Probably not. I’m sure 99% of those who accepted the invitation were just like me and grinned and said “sure I’ll try it.” If only this “inspired” program had been implemented 100 years ago

I was in France and I remember this coming up around early 1997. It would be interesting to know if this is a cyclical thing or it happend about the same time around the world.

I want to earnestly thank you for the above tidbit. That never occurred to me before, but it explains some things that I’ve never been able to resolve. Thank-you. That really, really helps.

forced her to kneel and repent before him for failing to make numbers in her weekly interview with him

If there is one common thread in these sorts of scheme and the occurrences when they inevitably fail, this is it: some schmuck makes a goal for others to keep and then gets made when he fails to make his goal do to the actions of others. Of course such things virtually guarantee that the unwilling instruments in these plans will find someway to deep six the plan: it’s not hard to see these as recipes for passive-aggressive behavior.

I can think of a few things that it would have been very appropriate for the sister in question to say to the Elder, but unfortunately none of them are appropriate for this blog…

(Gotta feel sorry for whatever poor girl he talked into marrying him….)

Eve (#9), I think you gotta feel sorry for him. I only hope she learned her lesson and does a better job now living up to her covenants. And I hope he is still conducting his weekly interviews.

But something else I see here — and perhaps this is a stretch — is the deep need that people have to be justified and validated. Again, this is building on the assumption that the “new plans” are adopted by most of the missionaries and that their attempt to see success through that plan is sincere. Why are they working so hard and putting forth so much effort to do things that in retrospect seem so ridiculous? I think a lot of it has to do with the need to justify their role as missionary — the need to see real fruits of their choice to dedicate themselves to the Lord for two-years/eighteen-months. It’s a hard thing to give up your family and friends and dating and movies and music, etc etc, for two years — so it had better be worth it.

As a side note, my mission president (who was Japanese) would tell us that if we did not obey every single mission rule, then we would not have the spirit to guide us and direct us in our work. A few of the really nutso mission rules that I remember:

1. We had to shine our shoes every day. Yep, that was a rule. The spirit will not dwell in unshined shoes.
2. We had to eat mugi (a cream-o-wheat type cerial minus the cream) every morning for breakfast. It kept us healthy and — eh hem — regular (as a counter to all the starchy rice). Mugi kept the spirit — and the rest of you — flowing.

According to our MP, if we did not do those things, we had no reward. And I believed my president — I believed that because of his stewardship and authority, that God would support what he said to us — so, even though I did not believe that there was any direct correlation between mugi and the spirit, I felt that if my president told us we could not have the spirit under certain conditions, that the Lord would support and uphold that decree regardless of what those conditions were. So I made sure to always annoy my companion (because when he was annoyed with me, he would shine my shoes as a way to rise above the annoyance) and I came up with many creative ways to eat mugi. And of course, had I ever become AP, I would have immediately shared those recipes with the mission.

Is that a reference to the movie anachrophobia? Because I don’t watch rated-R movies.

Fen, I don’t know that the “deep six” part is really a common theme.

I don’t think it is consciously, and I don’t think the passive-aggressive behavior of putting the kibosh on a particular AP’s scheme necessarily contradicts the overall improvement and effort you point to. I just know that when I am presented with a goal that I find inherently meaningless in its concrete expectations, I usually look for the “real” target, but I often find that I do things to mess up the concrete goal, even as I am trying to get to the important part. At least for numbers goals when I was a missionary, I pretty much ignored them and didn’t go for them if I felt that the needs of the people dictated otherwise, even if I could have met them, sort of like John’s story (in the original post you link to) about how he didn’t pass some people on for baptism who weren’t ready. I also admit that in some cases I probably was deliberate in not meeting the numbers goals. But that’s just me (and Bro. Stephen will know I was wrong in this behavior).

Also, at least in Hungary, I think there was a big difference in how we treated things told us by the MP, whom we all respected and admired, and things told us by the APs, whom we thought were basically like us, only a little more ambitious. (We had one AP who, before he became AP, was recognized as a wannabe. So the other Elders in his apartment got a picture of him lifting weights on a P-Day and got it made into a postcard with the text “Vote for ****** for AP” and then sent them to everyone in the mission.) If it came from the MP, we worked very hard. If it was from the APs, we took it with a grain of salt.

I remember on one occassion (I’d been in Hungary for about a month) we had to set a baptismal goal for the mission (i.e., the APs told us our goal). The previous year’s goal had been 1000, but the mission got to only about 400. So the APs made a goal of 1000 again, despite my MP’s obvious disapproval: he wanted us to set a realistic goal and said so, but they APs were so set on the higher number that he finally agreed. I think we got to 385 that year with a lot of work, but the fact that all the missionaries knew that the MP thought the 1000 was a crock really helped mission morale because we knew we weren’t failing.

Kudos for standing up to Stevie-Boy. His view of the church and the gospel is completely warped. By the way, I have it on good authority that he owns an “unrated” version of Saturday’s Warrior on DVD. (The version with adult content not approved for Sunday School!)

Yes, on occasion during the Nauvoo period, Brother Joseph would blog. It is not too difficult to understand why as it was a common pastime in 18th century England and many of the early members of the church came over from Lancashire where it originated in the cotton mills where wooden-soled blogs were preferred to leather soles because the floors were kept wet to help keep the humidity high, which was very important in cotton spinning. Blogging was a common sight at music halls throughout the 19th century and into the early 20th century. It was not always known as blogging, but was also called flat-footing, foot-stomping, buck dancing, jigging, or other local terms. What all these had in common was emphasizing the downbeat of the music by enthusiastic footwork.

So yes, Brother Joseph did occasionally participate during those rare occasions when he would take a break from gazing into his urim and thummim and projecting his pure thoughts outwards to his peers through the ethosphere – which, in case you were wondering, is the same way I am communicating here with you. Take a breath now Eve, and please remove the worm (or cheese, or whatever you use).

I understand your distress. It is often so with people who lack a certain degree of depth. They are oft tossed to and fro by the wicked ones’s winds. And in this case I can see how it would be especially troubling to one so shallow given the recognition that Brother Joseph, in his youth, so valiantly followed the word of wisdom years before the church was established, let alone the word of wisdom revealed to the world (you remember, when the doctor offered him whiskey to dull the pain of a bone operation in his leg, and he valiently refused). So why would he not also avoid the sin of dancing?

We do know that Joseph often prayed for repentance — which tells us that even he was not strong-willed enough to avoid all evil (it takes a lot of strength, let me tell you). But the important thing in faith-building is to gain a testimony of your own righteousness and maintain that level of exactitude through consistently righteous living. Then it doesn’t matter how many people around you stumble — you will be confident in your own footing on that narrow path of righteousness and your grip on the iron rod will be firm and true.

Thus, even if President Hinckley goes on Larry King Live!and speaks against such pure doctrines as the couplet “as man is, God once was, and as God is, man may become” you will still know in your heart (of hearts) that the couplet is true. As long as you are still living in this mortal probation, it is never too late to strengthen that testimony. Not even for you.

Kudos to you Eve. It’s good to see another sensible and honest person willing to stand up to the rantings of a man who, quite honestly, I picture being under various court ordered restraining orders after getting 100% home teaching three times a week!

Sister j_t,
Why are you so offended by my righteousness? Don’t you thank the Lord for your righteousness? Why is that so strange?

And, as I said before, I avoid all technology. I have never touched a computer in my life — except when I entered in ward financial data when I was ward clerk, and that was under the direction and consent of my Bishop. And I have heard of the internet, and what I have heard has not been good. I will continue to avoid it till the end of my days.

Of Course the only difference between being AP and any other Zone Leader is that in my mission, the APs were in charge of transfers, with MP oversite only. Let me tell you, that was one of the hardest and most rewarding experiences I’ve ever had.