The Great Stain
Jun 8th, 2007 by Stephen Erastus Knudsen III
There is a great stain upon our church. Truly this is evidence that we are living in the last days when the time of the gentiles is close to being fulfilled.
I don’t know what is more disturbing about this — the fact that our missionaries are behaving in such an obscene manner or that even some of our sweet sisters are involved!
Why in the world would missionaries — the literal representatives of Jesus Christ — behave in such a manner? I certainly hope that none of you ever behaved like this. I certainly would not want to hear about it if you did.
It is my humble prayer that you will be as appalled and repulsed by these stories as I have been.
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When I was a new member in Chile I often helped the elders to put jokes together for the new missionaries. There was this Chilean elder very succesful who was getting a new elder from the States. He took the new elder to my house where he was supposed to challenge a guy to be baptized, we sat in my living room and started to talk of how bad the mission has been for him, not even one baptism…(big lie), he kept saying that he could not take it anymore, and bla bla bla… Here comes the investigator (another member) and plain told him: sorry elder but I don’t want to get baptized, I can’t leave the catholic church ever… The senior elder asked me permission to go to the studio in my house leaving the greeny in the front room with me and the “investigator”. We all hear a big “BUM” (we had a big balloon ready for the show..) we all ran to the studio to find the elder on the floor, with a toy gun in his hand and ketchup all over his head… The greeny felt on his knees with both hands over his mouth… We held it in for about 1 minute, and cracked up laughing. He walked out and later we all had to apologize to him…
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Here is a prank we played on our Zone leader and District leader in Haleyville in the Alabama Birmingham mission back in ‘87. Our Zone leader and District leader (who were companions) would often pay unannounced visits to our apartment (basically break in) during the day and help themselves to our food while they waited for us to return home. After a few times of this, we went to the store and picked up some chocolate Exlax and a brownie mix. We made up the brownies, poured it into a pan, placed Exlax chunks all over the mix, and baked it. We then placed the cut brownies on a plate, covered it with plastic wrap and put out a sign, “Do not eat.” Sure enough, they came in the next day and ignored our sign and devoured the ENTIRE plate. We said nothing as they laughed in our faces while “thanking” us for the brownies. The ride for them back to their area was quite a ways and by that evening I just had to call them to ask them how their ride was. They told me that they had never “pooped” so much in their lives. They never ate our food again.
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The classic initiation prank in Japan is surely the legendary “bempi-dialect” prank. The new missionary is told that, in *this* part of Japan, the word “genki” (used in the phrase for “How are you?”) is extremely rude, and must not be used. The preferred phrase, he is told to say “bempi” (”Are you constipated?”).
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We had a missionary temporarily staying in our mission office where I and 5 other office-elders lived. We waited until he was asleep and then I woke him up and said that he was supposed to have gone to a new area that evening while we were out tracting. Then, with perfect choreography, our AP, Elder Walsh, came into the room and asked (rather alarmed), “Why aren’t you in San Jacinto?!?” I told him that he had about 10 minutes to be packed and in the car. Anyway, the missionary freaked out and started jamming his stuff into his bags. While clothes were flying, another missionary commented something to the effect that the Mission President was going to be ticked. After he was in the car, I told him to come back into the office so we could get a group picture (since he had stayed with us for a while). He seemed touched and after they had lined up for the picture I counted “1 , 2 ,3 ” and everyone yelled “April fools” and on 4/1/92 I took a classic picture of one of the more embarrassed people I have ever seen.
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I was told a story of how a green bean missionary was taken to his first area. When he went into his apartment the two other sets of elders were “worshiping” an alter to Joseph Smith. It was a converted Japanese butsudan (miniature Buddhist alter for inside the home). They did this for several minutes before they started laughing.
Bonus story — this one happened to me. Before going to Japan I had heard a lot about curry rice (it is one of the mainstays of Japanese missionaries but at the time I didn’t know what it really was). Well, once on my mission my trainer told me that we were going to make curry rice for dinner. He told me to go over to the sink and get the “curry trap” so that we could add its contents to the curry mix. The sinks in Japan don’t have garbage disposals, instead the drains have small colanders or nets to catch all the solid waste. Well I looked in the “curry trap” and there was some old food remains in it. I thought that my trainer was insane wanting to put that in his food. Luckily he started laughing before we actually put it in the mix.
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On groundhog day, we were driving down the street, and there’s dead animals everywhere, road-kill, ya know? And there was a dead groundhog. It was groundhog’s day! So we picked it up, put it in a box, wrote “Happy Groundhog’s Day” and put it on the Elder’s door. The next day, they came to our apartment, covered our car with cornmeal, and put the dead groundhog on the car. Then we saran wrapped their car and put shaving cream all over the windows, and put the groundhog back on their car. It was like a little war that we had going on for a while. It was fun. We had wars like that in every area. The worst war we had was in my last area. There were these two brand new Elders and I called them and left a message on the answering machine and I’m all, “Hello, this is Dr. Keaton, and I live above you. I’m calling ’cause I’m interested in finding out more about your church. I’d really like to know more, so please come up and see me when you get home. So they go up stairs and knock on the door. They’re like, “Hi, we’re here to share the gospel with Dr. Keaton, he said he was really interested.” And they’re all, “Who?” And they’re all, “Dr. Keaton.” Anyway, it was all just a joke, but they were ticked! They found out it was me and the next night we got home and there was a card on the door that said, “What goes around comes around.” We walk in and they had gone into our apartment, gotten goldfish, and put goldfish in our toilet, goldfish in our bathtub, and all over. It was the worst mess… shaving cream. We were ticked. That did not equal what we did to them. But we just forgave them and left it at that.
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In my mission in Japan we had a member family do an initiation thing. The missionaries weren’t really involved. This family had been doing it for years. When new missionaries would come in the ward, they would do it to kind of welcome them to the area. He was in the stake presidency and they were the coolest family. I remember when I first came into the ward, he came up to me and said, “You have to come to our house. We have to have you over for dinner. We have this family ceremony where we initiate you into our family, and we like everyone to be a part of our family. This ceremony goes back in our family for generations.” And I thought, “Cool,” ya know? I thought it sounded real interesting. So we went over there and we had a nice dinner and everything. When we were finished, they turned off all the lights and there was this candle. And he did this whole chanting thing while holding a plate over the candle. I thought it was really cool, but I am so gullible, I just bought the whole thing. He learned this in America when he went to BYU Hawaii, but what he did was hold this plate over the candle and has two missionaries on the opposite end. He pretends to rub the bottom of the plate and then while chanting, rubs his face, like he is taking in the essence of the candle or something. Then he had us do it, but we actually touched the bottom of the plate, which was covered with all this black soot stuff from the candle. So we ended up wiping this black stuff all over our face, following his chant and thinking that we were partaking in some ritual ceremony hundreds of years old. Then they just turned on the lights and laughed at us, and we still didn’t realize that we had black stuff all over our face, and down our nose and I was real embarrassed. It was cool.
Dear Mission Alumni Site Maintainers,
It has come to our attention that the website “Mormon Missionary Folklore” includes content which is out of harmony with the spirit of LDS Mission Network. This is not an LDSMN website, although some mission alumni site maintainers have chosen to link to it.
We ask LDS Mission Network sites not to link to the Mormon Missionary Folklore page. We also ask pages with existing links to this site to remove them. We hope that you will understand and support this decision of the LDSMN Administrators.
One visitor wrote the following in the Mormon Missionary Folklore guestbook writes:
“Was planning on going on a mission but after reading all the stories I think I’ll need a bit more time to reconsider!!”
Review of the site demonstrates that it contains stories of new missionary “hazing” experiences, material which disparages other cultures, stories of disobedience and missionary apostasy, and unsubstantiated speculation. The message board also demonstrates that some non-LDS visitors consider the portrayals of their culture to be offensive. Some anti-LDS sites link to the Mormon Missionary Folklore page in their efforts to attack the church, citing examples of missionary immaturity and disobedience.
While the inclusion of quality links relevant to the mission, the Church, the area, language, and culture is encouraged, with the understanding that linked sites are not specifically endorsed by LDS Mission Network, we do hope that those links that webmasters choose to include will be in harmony with the spirit of missionary work.
The direction and content of the above-mentioned site as a whole convey a message which is contrary to the missionary spirit of obedience, sacrifice, and dedication. Links to websites that make light of sacred matters, glorify disobedience, and promote unsubstantiated rumors, are not suitable for LDS Mission Alumni sites.
We hope that mission alumni sites and their content (including links) will encourage young people to serve the Lord through full-time missionary service, rather than feeding doubt and dissuading prospective missionaries in their desires. We hope that you will continue to include quality links on your mission alumni site chosen in harmony with these principles.
Thank you,
The LDSMN Administrators
BTW — the above comment is no joke. It really went out when I ran my Missionary Folklore website several years ago. And just for the record, the person they reference who wrote in my guestbook said:
Hyperbole, people. It may not be in the Bible dictionary, but seriously… look it up.
Brother Stephen,
I’m with you on this one. What disgraceful behavior! No wonder so many apostles and prophets have said that church members (and by extension missionaries) are the biggest stumblingblock to the spread of the gospel. During my mission, I never allowed time for this kind of nonsense. After our morning studies, we tracted or street contacted non-stop. That was true missionary work. I knew I was on the right path even though my companions asked to be transferred every other week. They just didn’t have the right testimony to be out there.
Glenn, the letter may be authentic and sincere, but I would argue that it is still a joke in the broad sense of the word. What I love about that letter is the way it consciously tries to imitate the style of letters that come from Church HQ. I don’t know quite how to prove that, but there is a certain pedantic, condescending, and vaguely threatening tone about it that I find amusing. And on the self-importance meter, it’s off the chart.
Glenn, did any antis really link to the site, or was this a chimera of the LDSMN administrators?
The funny thing is that few of the people the administrators claim to represent would have had a problem with your content: they had gone through it.
I don’t know about multiple”anti” links, but I did see a link on the Tanner’s website to my “Mission Apostasy” section. That section dealt mainly with the French Mission apostasy and the missionary who started his own religion. I’m confident that once Brother Knudsen discovers it he will blow his trump and announce it to the world. It won’t be long, I’m sure.
Glenn,
I’m baffled by this post… Is it supposed to be funny? Are these stories you actually have heard or just stuff you are making up? And what’s the deal with using that lame Stephen Erastus character/pseudonym to post it? I thought you were going to put that character away…
Geoff J,
Nice to see you. These are stories that were submitted to my “Missionary Folklore” website in the mid-90s. I did not make them up. The people credited with the stories are the actual people who sent them to me. I can’t tell you whether or not they made them up, but I trust that they really happened the way they said these people said they did.
As for Stephen — he is rather lame, isn’t he? At one time — as you are aware — he thought he was going to have sole control of this site. That was wrestled away from him, but despite his lameness, we are friends (kinf of), so I do allow him occasional authorship privelages and he has a little corner here where people can go and ask him questions if they like. He is not allowed off this site and he only posts from time to time.
So why did Stephen post these? I can only guess at why he ever does anything he does, but I suppose he was looking through my previous collection, read these stories, felt they were innapropriate, and wanted to say so.
Ah… I am less baffled now.
As for Stephen — he is rather lame, isn’t he?
Well… pretty much. (But you seem to be a pretty decent blogger if that helps…)
There were always a ton of pranks going on in my mission. I was in one apartment where two of the missionaries, both juniors, didn’t get along too well. One of them was very sanctimonious (you would have liked him very much Elder Knudson) and he was always getting on the rest of us if we ever forgot our keys in the apartment or something.
Well, one day on the way to our district meeting, this Elder left his keys in the door — they were actually still in the lock. So my greenie decided to take them and play a little joke on the guy. He didn’t know at first what he was going to do, but as we were riding around that day, he saw a dead crow on the side of the road. He picked it up with a newspaper and brought it back to the apartment with us. When the other companionship were having lunch, he snuck down and put the crow in the mailbox with this Elder’s keys in its beak. He knew this Elder would be the one to find it because he was so obsessed with mail — he got a letter pretty much everyday from his girlfriend back home.
It’s a big set-up for a rather lame pay-off. When this Elder went down to get the mail, he saw the bird, and found his keys. He didn’t really give us much of a reaction, but he was clearly not amused.
I was going to say that we had no initiations in Hungary, but on second thought I realized that we did, often in partnership with local members. The initiation was realy pretty mild: merely having members feed new missionaries food that Americans generally considered disgusting: aspic, tripe, blood sausage, etc. The other thing that members took great delight in inflicting on new missionaries was exaggerating the Hungarian “guest friendliness,” which requires food to be offered repeatedly. By continually offering food and acting offended when turned down, many members could get missionaries to eat well past their point of obvious discomfort.