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TL;DR. Needed a rant after MP claims apostolic infalability and quotes some dodgy figures. Went to a stake Priesthood Leadership meeting in my role as YMs president, and the first half was taken by the mission president. He was talking about changes coming to the missionary programs over the next year as some missions in Europe see an increase in missionaries by “up to 100%”. Here in our UK mission we are apparently going to move from 150 to 240 missionaries.
During the presentation he said that the ideal length of time between first meeting the missionaries and getting baptised is 3-5 weeks. The only requirement in addition to the baptismal questions is that they have to have attended a sacrament meeting twice. They should be scheduled for baptism on the first meeting with missionaries. Now, as a RM I completely disagree with this and I think it reeks of pressure tactics that missionaries have been using for years that has seen thousands go in one door and out the other.
A member of a bishopric raised a concern about this and said they were reluctant in their ward to baptise someone who came to sacrament meeting once, then again 5 weeks later. A legitimate concern. The MP completely shot him down and said that this was the Lord’s program, and that if the Lord wanted it to be any different, he would tell the Brethren. He then backed his view up by stating that retention after 2 years is 70% in the church as a whole at the moment (and 69% in our mission). Stake President backed him up, as did others with things like “we can’t keep them all” and “if we do 100% home teaching then we’ve done our bit”.
Not exactly what I wanted to hear in the midst of my faith crisis. I have a hard time accepting things are correct and from the Lord just because it happens to be church policy at this current time. So many counter examples for this. Reading Quinn at the moment is actually helping that as I’m now aware of 100’s of times church leaders have got it very wrong. I don’t want to think of them as infallible (mainly because they aren’t), but it’s hard when they virtually claim to be sometimes.
The 70% retention figure is dubious too. Last year the church created 124 new wards/branches (net). So we have to baptise 2300 converts for every new unit created. I hardly think people are dying or having names removed at such a rate to make that 70% figure even close to being true.
Clearly a longer time being taught before baptism would help retention, but it made me think that the only reason fathomable that the church doesn’t do this is the negative way it would affect baptism figures and the negative PR that this would create. The church does such a good job of presenting membership stats in a PR way. I cringe every time in General Conference when they read the figures out and people sit there thinking how the church is growing so fast. There’s not been a new stake in the UK for 15 years (except Chorley, but that’s only because 1000’s of people moved there to be close to the temple, nothing to do with growth). I’m sure some members don’t even realise the 14m membership figure includes less actives and people whose address is unknown, only being removed at age 120. I think informing people about this will be one of my little missions!
Sorry for the rant. Hope that wasn’t too boring!
🙂 Even when I was at my most believing (on my own mission) I never understood the ongoing pressure to baptize. On my mission the joke was “by stats are ye saved”. I don’t know why the emphasis needs to be on baptisms anyway. Wouldn’t a desire for baptism come as a natural outcome on the investigator’s part to better his/her life? On my mission we had a GA come and I brought up the problem of retention and how in our mission so many were being baptised so quickly and then going inactive. His response was that even if they fall away right away they still were given the opportunity to have the “light and knowledge” for a short time. At the time that answer seemed to make sense because I thought the zeal we were all about was to spread the gospel “with urgency”.
Maybe the the church just still takes a statistical approach. I’ve read the David O McKay book by Gregory Prince. The goals, quotas, comparative charts, incentives, material rewards, and deadlines were among the “well-known salesmanship techniques” that Henry D. Moyle made part of the LDS church’s world-wide missionary work. The baseball baptisms were a huge mess that the church had to clean up in Europe but I think that same approach in many missions is still taken today.
I don’t know. I can’t imagine The Lord, were he here, donning a suit and walking up to doors saying: hi, I’d like to share a message with you about the Church of me. It just seems that in the ministry stories about Jesus, he didn’t go about soliciting followers, taking their information, hounding them, challenging them, committing them. He didn’t even baptize them. They followed merely because of his charisma and teachings, word of mouth, the fruits of his labours, the clarifications he gave to the law and questions.
The church is preoccupied with expanding, like there is some imperative that growth means success. Quality takes a back seat to quantity. Even baptismal services get out of hand, becoming overlong recruiting events rather than focusing on the person in white.
Strictly speaking, from a standpoint of business, all the extra missionaries in the world will not mean that there will be twice as many people willing to buy in. The market is not there.
They don’t need more missionaries, they need more people who will believe of their own accord that this church is worthwhile. That is done by being marketable, not relying on acceptable losses.
Of course they are in a hurry. Jesus can’t return until we’ve knocked on every door, right? (pardon the sarcasm) Numbers or goal-based church programs rub me the wrong way and especially missionary work. I never served but I heard from just about every missionary that ever served that there was pressure to speed people along, even if they don’t even really understand what they signed up for.
I don’t like fast baptisms, as a rule or a standard approach – but I know of quite a few individual cases where a baptism within 3-5 weeks was completely appropriate. I don’t want a minimum time established, but I don’t like trying to set a baptism date in the first or second lesson. I want investigators to know up-front and immediately that the missionaries are there to teach and baptize them, ideally, so I don’t mind baptism being mentioned from the moment they sit down for the first time, but I want it to be “whenever you feel a confirmation from God that joining our church is what He wants you to do” and not “let’s pick a date and pray you feel good about it by then.” I understand not wanting to make someone wait longer than necessary when they want to join, and I understand youthful zeal and enthusiasm, and I understand leaders (especially MP’s) wanting to “do their best” and be recognized as successful leaders – but I don’t like rushing things that shouldn’t be rushed. I’d rather take a couple of weeks longer than necessary, for example, than a couple of weeks less than necessary when it comes to baptism.
Fwiw, I know the two-year retention rates right now for new converts are higher than they’ve been, overall, for a long time – but I don’t attribute that to fast baptisms. I attribute it to better, more personalized teaching than used to occur with the memorized lessons and, again just overall, less measurement of success as a function of total baptisms. Preach My Gospel says that in crystal clear terms, and I’ve heard it said from the pulpit in multiple locations over the last five years or so. It’s sad that some (quite a few, I’m sure) MP’s still are preaching the old line.
ElCid – its interesting you mentioned the baseball baptisms as that’s all i could think about last night. That appalling stain on the history of the church still has not been completely put to bed. I imagine many mission presidents now served in 1960s in the emerging culture of fast baptisms and minimal teaching. I was on my mission in 2004 when preach my gospel came out and the main thing we took from it was that lessons had to be completely personalised. The first ‘lesson’ in the manual usually took 3-4 visits as we discussed and progressed an investigator through the massive amounts of new things in there. I get the impression that this isn’t happening anymore.
I’ve always been against baptism being mentioned on the first visit, and if they did that when teaching someone i had referred I’d be furious!
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Quote:I get the impression that this isn’t happening anymore.
It might not be in some areas, but it certainly is in others. It’s supposed to be exactly as you described – personalized and variable.
I was bap’d too fast. It’s taken me years of inactivity to appreciate the church. Suddenly being jumped on days after my own baptasm by HT being told to teach and go on a mission, receiving phone calls from girls I didn’t give my number to, and being asked who I wanted to marry (after less than a month), obey obey obey……argh! Not what I signed up for. Quote:It might not be in some areas, but it certainly is in others. It’s supposed to be exactly as you described – personalized and variable.
I agree. Living in the Mormon belt where missionary work takes on a different flavor, I don’t see quick baptisms. Frankly, we don’t see convert baptisms much at all. When I was a missionary, while feeling some pressure to baptize (the challenge was part of the second discussion at that time) I was never reprimanded when I didn’t baptize. I do recall a meeting with a General Authority (I think I mentioned this in my introductory post) who spent an entire day teaching us “sales tactics” to use when working with families. The focus was all on “pressuring” people to come to Church and “pressuring” them to be baptized. It was one of the most perplexing days of my mission as these “tactics” seemed at odds with what I understood to be the gospel. As I recall, my mission president was there but after that day, I never heard him make reference to any of those tactics. I suspect he found it appalling, too.
kristmace wrote:…Needed a rant after MP claims apostolic infalability and quotes some dodgy figures…Went to a stake Priesthood Leadership meeting in my role as YMs president, and the first half was taken by the mission president…he said that the ideal length of time between first meeting the missionaries and getting baptised is 3-5 weeks. The only requirement in addition to the baptismal questions is that they have to have attended a sacrament meeting twice. They should be scheduled for baptism on the first meeting with missionaries. Now, as a RM I completely disagree with this and I think
it reeks of pressure tactics that missionaries have been using for years that has seen thousands go in one door and out the other…A member of a bishopric raised a concern about this and said they were reluctant in their ward to baptise someone who came to sacrament meeting once, then again 5 weeks later. A legitimate concern.
The MP completely shot him down and said that this was the Lord’s program, and that if the Lord wanted it to be any different, he would tell the Brethren. He then backed his view up by stating that retention after 2 years is 70% in the church as a wholeat the moment (and 69% in our mission). Stake President backed him up, as did others with things like “we can’t keep them all” and “if we do 100% home teaching then we’ve done our bit”…Not exactly what I wanted to hear in the midst of my faith crisis…. …it made me think that the only reason fathomable that the church doesn’t do this is the negative way it would affect baptism figures and the negative PR that this would create. The church does such a good job of presenting membership stats in a PR way.
I cringe every time in General Conference when they read the figures out and people sit there thinking how the church is growing so fast.There’s not been a new stake in the UK for 15 years …I’m sure some members don’t even realise the 14m membership figure includes less actives and people whose address is unknown, only being removed at age 120… I really doubt this 70% retention figure; it is probably closer to 70% of new converts that are not retained very long. It is definitely frustrating to see the inefficiency and apparent pointlessness of trying so hard to recruit all these new members just so that we can turn around and alienate large numbers of existing members over things like coffee, tobacco, and beer. The statistics are certainly very misleading when you ignore how many of these recent converts are not even active a year later and how many new children counted each year will end up being permanently inactive as adults.
In some Latin American countries with large numbers of converts year after year the Church still counts over 700,000 members in cases where less than 200,000 still self identify as LDS. But I guess the main thing Church leaders care about in this case is simply raw numbers and trying to maintain some lofty image of what the Church is supposed to be. Personally I think one of the main reasons for all the new temples they have started building in the last 15-20 years is simply an attempt to give the impression that we are really making progress worldwide.
I think the church is too missionary orientated and not convert orientated enough. A mission is not for the missionary or just another rite of passage to get a wife. It’s so non-members get to know us in a positive fashion and so people are helped through service. Africa will be the success story of the next century.
ElCid wrote:On my mission we had a GA come and I brought up the problem of retention and how in our mission so many were being baptized so quickly and then going inactive. His response was that even if they fall away right away they still were given the opportunity to have the “light and knowledge” for a short time. At the time that answer seemed to make sense because I thought the zeal we were all about was to spread the gospel “with urgency”.
Brown wrote:Of course they are in a hurry. Jesus can’t return until we’ve knocked on every door, right? (pardon the sarcasm)
I think it is worth noting that these ideological thoughts do play a part of this. We as humans love to explain and justify what is – even when to do so is only our best guess. It could be said that these people who are baptized quickly and then fall away will be at an advantage in the afterlife as they already have water baptism. It could be said that we are fulfilling Jesus’ mandate to preach the gospel to the end of the earth. It could be said that we are gathering “the elect” or “the lost children of Israel” and that they don’t need much time to learn the gospel as it will resonate with them. It could be said that if they have a witness that the church is true (i.e. pray over the BOM) then that should be enough to sustain them through any future challenges. I remember interpreting a few scriptures in such a way to emphasize the worth and potential of one “god in embryo” to the point that if only one person from this whole planet were to fulfill that potential, then the whole exercise would have been worth it (talk about acceptable losses!!!).
And then once we use these explanations/justification for why things are the way they are – then they sometimes become self-perpetuating so that to question the why becomes “ark steadying” of the Lord’s program. I do not believe that the church leadership is making cynical missionary program decisions based upon how they can spin it for PR purposes. I think that they generally believe that they are doing the will of God and helping their fellow man.
Quote:I do not believe that the church leadership is making cynical missionary program decisions based upon how they can spin it for PR purposes. I think that they generally believe that they are doing the will of God and helping their fellow man.
This.
I can agree or disagree with specific practices, but I do believe the top leadership is motivated by genuine concern for people – and, again, Preach My Gospel is explicit in its definition of “success” in non-numerical terms.
As to the issue of membership number reporting, I think we’ve covered that in another thread I will try to find, but the way that the LDS Church reports membership numbers is the easiest and most common way to do so. If it didn’t calculate activity rates, as well, that would be an issue for me, but it does – “religiously”. The leaders also have stressed retention for quite a few years now – ever since the debacle of the baseball baptisms, at least.
Yes, there is a serious tension between zealotry, millennial mindsets and retention, but I don’t doubt the underlying motives of the leadership as a whole – at any level.
Re membership, we have quite a circle of less actives here. I know a lot of them through socials etc but they don’t turn up every week or disappear for months at a time. I think particularly of Bro & Sis S, who rarely turn up but whose knowledge of the church is phenomenal and who have a sincere testimony, whose two daughters go to everything and whose son as bap’d last year (but never turns up) They love being HT too. Members? Definitely. TR no. Regular attenders no, These folk are the interesting ones. It seems that all missionary work is local (to borrow from the political quote). By that I mean that a lot depends on your MP, SP and bishop as well as the elders/sisters themselves. In my ward outside of the US we baptize about 20 folks per year. About half of those remain active year-to-year. Probably 80% of those baptisms are of non-member spouses and children of less-active adult members. The conversion and baptism of the family members is a part of the effort to reach out and re-activate the less-active member. If it’s the father who is less active, we will usually wait for him to get things sorted out to the extent where he can baptize his own kids and/or wife. Sometimes that means waiting on a baptism for weeks or months for the AP/MP holder to get sorted with the bishop. In our ward council, we make sure our elders understand that we prioritize our less active members and ask them to concentrate efforts there. If we ever heard one of those go-get-’em messages from the MP, we’d probably just shrug it off and keep doing what we’re doing. But to be frank, we’ve never felt any pressure for “numbers.” Maybe that’s because we baptize more than double the number for any other ward in our stake.
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