How common is regretting having served a mission?

I served as a sister missionary stateside in the early 00’s.

I have mixed feelings about the situation. I made some friends and became a better person with some solid emotional/soft skills that I could transfer into gainful employment. I contributed to reactivating my mother as part of the process of getting ready to go on a mission (which is interesting because she has been consistently more “active” since then while I am not).

I don’t know that I would have had the momentum to do what I needed to do to “leave the nest” without the distance the mission put between myself and my family. I regret going because I functioned like “a 3rd parent” for my siblings – and they have paid for missing that emotional support that I wasn’t there to provide.

I also deal with cognitive dissonance of “being called by God to go/do specific things” and now being unsure that God exists “to call me to” anything.

I have known and spoken with hundreds of people who served missions.

They range all over the spectrum in their feelings about it – from amazing to okay to bad to worst Church experience ever. I know some whose missions drove them away from the Church and others who still look back at it as the spiritual pinnacle of their lives.

I really like the new focus on trying to normalize non-teaching missions as an equal option for those who will or do struggle on teaching missions – with no hint of them being “lesser” in any way. The culture is fighting that change, but I love that the top leadership fully supports that change.

I hope it keeps going and ends in the same understanding for those who don’t want to serve a mission at all. I think we will get there, but it probably will take a while.

As a church, we have a tendency to highlight our church experiences & callings in a positive way, to encourage others to follow our path.

The psychology that the church uses is interesting.

That might be a trait of broader human psychology. Most people are going to try to present themselves in a favorable light.

In the church context, there’s some incentive to speak of missions fondly. Speaking of missions negatively could reduce social capital. That may be why I haven’t heard many active/orthodox Mormons give negative opinions of their mission.

There’s also the validation angle. Missions require a large sacrifice. If a person that served a mission sees others going out on missions then it can validate that they made the correct decision to serve. If that same person sees more and more people choosing not to serve a missions they may begin to question and consider the “what ifs” if they hadn’t served.

My mission was pretty tough. There were lots of physical hardships (no electricity, no running water, etc.). I too was glad when it was over.

I wouldn’t serve a mission again but that’s mostly because I learned the lessons a mission can teach me and I don’t care to repeat them. Looking back, serving a mission was the right thing for me at the right time in my life. No regrets, just lessons learned and character developed, good or bad.

I don’t regret serving because having served a mission has led me to who I am today. If I hadn’t served, I’d be different, not better or worse, just different.

There are many Senior opportunities after retirement that would be valuable to the church if more emphasis were paid to this

group of our membership.

I’m starting to hear about more and more meetings targeted at people that are over 40 years old where the goal of the meeting is to sell the idea of serving a mission as a senior couple.

There’s a lot of cultural pressure to serve a mission as a youth. For young men, the language surrounding missionary service is duty, obligation, responsibility, etc. Kids that don’t serve can end up feeling inferior, like second-class members. I’d hate for that same phenomenon to extend to senior couples if the culture starts to shift to place more and more emphasis on seniors to serve.

I can’t remember the last senior member of our ward that served in this capacity.

I’m sure the cost alone makes senior missions a non-starter for many. That’s certainly the case for me. I may be interested in serving a mission with my wife, but many missions are pushing $3,000 per month plus travel expenses. About $75K to serve a two year mission. I hate to say it, but at that cost a senior mission is practically a status symbol.

I don’t know about church-wide but I’m noticing a relatively new phenomenon in my area. I see more and more local couples walking around church on Sunday with missionary nametags. I’m noticing that these couples are often fulfilling assignments that were considered normal callings just a few years ago.

That could be a good way to get around the prohibitive price of missions. Serve local. I don’t think we’re quite there yet, but we need to make strides to make all service throughout the church recognized and appreciated equally.

I’m starting to hear about more and more meetings targeted at people that are over 40 years old where the goal of the meeting is to sell the idea of serving a mission as a senior couple.

There’s a lot of cultural pressure to serve a mission as a youth. For young men, the language surrounding missionary service is duty, obligation, responsibility, etc. Kids that don’t serve can end up feeling inferior, like second-class members. I’d hate for that same phenomenon to extend to senior couples if the culture starts to shift to place more and more emphasis on seniors to serve.

We were surprisingly approached by a member of the stake presidency a few months back about planning to serve a future mission. Even though I am retired, my wife is several years away from retirement but it was framed as future planning. The SPC inferred they were doing this with all couples in the soon to retire category and also indicated this was something that was not limited to our stake (IOW, it came from above them). We were very non-committal.

I can’t remember the last senior member of our ward that served in this capacity.

Agreed, it has been a while. Looking at our ward it would appear that there are few who would be physically able though. Our bishop could and I would not be at all surprised if he and his wife do at some point. I can’t say I see any others doing so though.

I’m sure the cost alone makes senior missions a non-starter for many. That’s certainly the case for me. I may be interested in serving a mission with my wife, but many missions are pushing $3,000 per month plus travel expenses. About $75K to serve a two year mission. I hate to say it, but at that cost a senior mission is practically a status symbol.

This is a good point and something I hadn’t really considered since I’m not interested anyway. We will have a decent retirement income between our state pensions (we both work/worked for the state), Social Security, and some retirement savings. That would certainly eat into our income.

I don’t know about church-wide but I’m noticing a relatively new phenomenon in my area. I see more and more local couples walking around church on Sunday with missionary nametags. I’m noticing that these couples are often fulfilling assignments that were considered normal callings just a few years ago.

That could be a good way to get around the prohibitive price of missions. Serve local. I don’t think we’re quite there yet, but we need to make strides to make all service throughout the church recognized and appreciated equally.

Funny you should mention this, I noticed something very similar here. I don’t even know what some of them do. Our recently released SP and his wife are wearing tags now (he’s an executive in a large corporation). I have no idea what their callings are, and on Tools it just says “service missionary.” He is also Gospel Doctrine teacher and she is in YW.