Is missionary work service?

[Anonymous]

I heard on my mission that missionary work was “serving others”. The first time I heard it, it kind of struck me as an odd definition of service. It is service, but it serves the church every bit as much as the individual. The convert pays tithing, staffs church functions, gives free labor, cleans the chapel, serves a mission, contributes to the temple and welfare farms….and the list goes on.

For me, true service provides no pre-conceived, tangible/temporal benefit to the person performing the service. Missionaries, as members of the church, don’t receive any temporal rewards, but the church as a whole benefits in droves. Therefore, I don’t see the missionary effort as an act of service by the organization as a whole.

When the church donates money, provides goods, or marshals its members to do service for outside organizations and non-members (such as cleaning, painting, disaster recovery), THAT is service, but not missionary work. I don’t see it.

However, I would like to know what others think.

[Anonymous]

Yes, it can be – if the missionary approaches it with the right attitude.

It isn’t pure service in the sense of not having any hope of reward or return of some kind, but it absolutely can be real and valuable service.

[Anonymous]

There is no true service.

Code:

Here is how – when you serve others you are rewarded with a sense of happiness, gratitude, or something good. You are then rewarded, so therefore it really wasn’t service because you were rewarded. No matter what you do as a service, unless you painfully hate it and get no reward, meaning it really SUCKED and you probably wouldn’t do it anyway, then you gain from the service.

OK – so you read that and realized that is impossible to not get gain from service. Helping at a food bank gives you the high of helping others. This is why people get hooked on service as helping others makes you feel good. There is probably some better philosophy way of explaining that concept, but there it is in my layman’s terms.

[Anonymous]

I agree with Ray, as usual. I might add that converting someone to the gospel, as opposed to converting one to the church, is indeed a service to the individual. There are many who convert to the church that did not have the gospel in their lives at all, and while the two are connected in the conversion process, I’m not sure they really are as connected in an eternal sense.

[Anonymous]

Old-Timer wrote:

It isn’t pure service in the sense of not having any hope of reward or return of some kind, but it absolutely can be real and valuable service.

Some people want to make changes in their lives, but don’t have the courage or hope that they can. I read in letters home instances of missionaries creating a space for people to contemplate change and I consider that a real service. Not unique to our church, but still needed and valuable.

[Author]

Posts