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I came across this post on a byu fan board about how the entire Dallas mission will be attending a byu football game this weekend. I just find this odd as to how this is being paid for. Football tickets are incredibly expensive and I find it disturbing knowing church funds are going to this sort of thing At this stage the story has “some guy on the internet said so” levels of credibility. I’d wait to see who shows up to the TCU v BYU game for confirmation. If they showed up then we’d still be speculating on who actually paid for it. 200 or so missionaries, ticketmaster is all over the place, maybe nosebleeds in the $40-$50 range. $10,000 total to send the mission to a game. Maybe it wouldn’t be the church paying for it, that could be a low enough price tag for a wealthy MP to send the kids on his own dime because he thinks it will be a great missionary opportunity… somehow. Or he wants to do something nice for his missionaries.
For the sake of argument, let’s say it’s real and the church paid for it. IMO the church has done far worse with $10K. I’d be in favor of the church building one or two less temples and doing something very nice for every single missionary that’s currently serving at least once a year, preferably twice a year. Lord knows I could have used one solitary vacation day and break from it all on my mission.
:thumbup: This story is a “wait and see” for me.
nibbler wrote:
At this stage the story has “some guy on the internet said so” levels of credibility. I’d wait to see who shows up to the TCU v BYU game for confirmation.If they showed up then we’d still be speculating on who actually paid for it. 200 or so missionaries, ticketmaster is all over the place, maybe nosebleeds in the $40-$50 range. $10,000 total to send the mission to a game. Maybe it wouldn’t be the church paying for it, that could be a low enough price tag for a wealthy MP to send the kids on his own dime because he thinks it will be a great missionary opportunity… somehow. Or he wants to do something nice for his missionaries.
For the sake of argument, let’s say it’s real and the church paid for it. IMO the church has done far worse with $10K. I’d be in favor of the church building one or two less temples and doing something very nice for every single missionary that’s currently serving at least once a year, preferably twice a year. Lord knows I could have used one solitary vacation day and break from it all on my mission.
:thumbup: This story is a “wait and see” for me.
That’s fair. But I find it weird in general to send a bunch of missionaries to a football game which is already a hostile enviorment. Just feels like this is once again a situation where it’s byu sports, so it’s okay to bend the rules, check religion at the door situations. Just another reason why I’ve never been a fan of the CES fielding competitive sports teams.
Disclaimer: this response may get me banned If the story is true, I would roll my eyes and declare “there goes American culture doing its thing again.” As a non-American, I (and the rest of the world) have as much interest in American Football as you folks have in cricket, rugby, and standard international measurements.
I increasingly view the Church as an American corporation performing American business functions and peddling cultural exports. It was exciting and engaging before the internet came along and ruined everything by documenting all the bad stuff and making it accessible to everyone. [Deleted by admin.]
Carburettor wrote:
Disclaimer: this response may get me bannedI increasingly view the Church as an American corporation performing American business functions and peddling cultural exports. It was exciting and engaging before the internet came along and ruined everything by documenting all the bad stuff and making it accessible to everyone.
I would say, “It’s complicated”
😆 The business functions are probably US centric. The “cultural exports” are Utah-centric, and church history passage-centric. Where the church sits officially/doctrinally in any community really depends more on the religious landscape it is being displayed against. I think a huge religious shift happened during/after World War 1 in Europe (towards non-religion/secularism) that hasn’t arrived to the same degree in America (if at all) – and that the general trend over the last 10-20 years or so of Americans shifting away from religion is now occurring to religious organizations everywhere. The proper “appreciation” of those cultural exports has been waning for the past 20-40 years, which is why there are so many shifts to “be Christians” and try to retain some of the religious market share. It’s not working terribly well – 2 breadwinners per family unit, target population challenges in elder care and child care, the virtualization of community (in part due to video games and social media) are among large factors changing the religious-cultural landscape.
I grew up in California and have lived outside the Mormon Corridor my entire life. I have known many people from the Mormon Corridor and saw the cultural trends they tended to be at home in.
Carburettor wrote:
When we were all far younger and considerably more naïve, the U.S. sparkled as a land of opportunity. These days, I get the impression it has become a huge, geologically and environmentally diverse collection of natural beauty spots peppered with [deleted by admin].
The grass is always greener on the other side:)
The specific flavor of “faults” that Americans can inflict on each other may be uniquely American, but humans are going to human at every opportunity available.
Color me incredulous. I guess we shall see.
Carburettor wrote:
If the story is true, I would roll my eyes and declare “there goes American culture doing its thing again.” As a non-American, I (and the rest of the world) have as much interest in American Football as you folks have in cricket, rugby, and standard international measurements.Again, I think it’s premature to get worked up over this when in all likelihood it’s just someone inventing things to get people riled up.
Regardless, it’s a mission in America, not too surprising that if the missionaries are going to be treated to a sports event it’s probably going to be a sport that’s popular and widely available in America. Maybe if such a thing were to happen in Europe the missionaries would be treated to a football (soccer) match.
Also, I don’t think a country’s preferred sport makes one country better than another.
[Quoted comment deleted by admin.]
Yes, comments like these could get you modded. I really don’t understand why calling people garbage was necessary. America has its pros and cons. Americans can certainly be arrogant. America and Americans aren’t unique in that regard.
Yeah, I’m not buying it either. It sounds like something Snopes would look into and find to be false. I admit I am a BYU football fan (as well as some other colleges) and there are usually tons of fan shots. If there are a bunch of missionaries there we’ll know it. An afternoon game in Fort Worth on ESPN will have a viewership. Just a side note, it’s not this weekend, it’s Oct. 13. Sit and be quiet, the cougars are NOT out, they’re off this weekend. (That’s a reference to the BYU fight song BTW.)
[Admin Note: The comment won’t cause a banning (unless continually repeated after warnings), but sweeping, stereotypical insults will be deleted – as was done in this case.]Thought I’d post this… the rumors were true. https://kslsports.com/506092/latter-day-saints-missionaries-showed-up-to-support-byu-at-tcu-game/ Ok, now that it has been confirmed. I’ll put on my apologist hat. Note that I am not trying to defend the church per se but more trying to find my own peace (in broad strokes) with church financial decisions. 1) We don’t know that church funds were used for it.
2) Even if church funds were used I’m pretty sure that “tithing dollars” were not used.
3) Turns out that the church has a lot of money. I would actually support the church getting a little more free with the purse strings and supporting a more robust youth program for example. (I also know another church that has a financial advisor on retainer free to use for all the members. I can dream can’t I?)
4) Lastly, I haven’t paid tithing in over a decade. This enables me personally to be more detached about this type of stories. Not my monkeys, not my circus.
I fall back to my position where I kinda wish they’d do more things like this for missionaries. Reflecting back on my mission, there were probably 100 other things I’d rather have done than go to a TCU v. BYU football game… but there were probably
101things I’d rather have done than go proselyting another day, go to a TCU v. BYU football game being one of them. Missions don’t have to be all about work, work, work. I know leaders feel like they need to get every ounce of productivity out of the missionaries but in my opinion that approach is counterproductive.
It’s like your job asking you to work weekends for an extended period of time. After a while the benefit of squeezing those two extra days per week out of people begins to be a detriment to productivity. Your morale declines, the amount of work that you can get done per day decreases, and your work becomes sloppy. The progress you make from working people seven days a week ends up being less than the progress you would have made working people only five days a week.
A mission is two years of no weekends. At least mine was.
I bet morale, mental health, and overall happiness would increase by easing up on missionaries. Cut those 90+ hour weeks down to 50 hours. Give missionaries a nice week off to do whatever they want once per quarter (real days, not half-days). Have a semi-annual all day mission activity.
Something. But right now there appear to be more mission presidents that are taking away missionaries’ sofas because those few minutes relaxing on the sofa are a few minutes that could be used working for the lord/church. I bet leaders would find that if missionaries were more relaxed, well rested, and happier that they would be more productive than they’d be under a system trying to figure out more ways to squeeze a few more minutes of work out of them.
If I had my way, I’d like more MPs that took kids to football games than MPs that took kid’s sofas.
1) Is the sofa reference real? Like “don’t sit down! that is a waste of the Lord’s time.”??? 2) I always found that the relationship between hard work (productivity) and success (productivity) on the mission was pretty stained.
I’m a bit surprised but admit the obvious – I was wrong. That’s where doubting gets me (again)! I only watched some of the game, it was clear early it was going to be a slaughter and there was another game I was more interested in. So, I didn’t see if they showed that particular crowd shot. I think part of the rumor was that a benefactor, perhaps the mission president, paid for the tickets. From the picture they appear to be nosebleed seats but if you’ve seen the price of college football tickets lately even those are pricey. Like Nibbler, I’m not really opposed to missionaries being allowed to do things like this and I agree with Nibbler that they are overworked and generally treated poorly. I am not however in favor of using church funds (tithing or otherwise) for things like this. As someone who doesn’t think they really get their bang for the buck from tithing, if they’re going to send missionaries why not send all of us? And if it were some other church fund (for example the missionary fund) I think people didn’t give that money with the intent for it to be spent that way. But that’s only my opinion and I only pay tithes, no other funds so it doesn’t really affect me (except for the idea that’s the funds really aren’t separate but are one big pot).
Roy wrote:
1) Is the sofa reference real? Like “don’t sit down! that is a waste of the Lord’s time.”???2) I always found that the relationship between hard work (productivity) and success (productivity) on the mission was pretty stained.
In the mission where I live, yes, the sofa reference is real. It may have changed with the current administration, but the previous two mission presidents allowed minimal furniture in the apartments. Missionaries here are allowed a small table and either kitchen type chairs or folding types and only 2. No comfy chairs, sofas, etc. They are allowed two beds and dressers. But that’s it. The reasoning from the first MP that did this (pre-COVID) was that missionaries were spending too much time in the comfort of their apartments instead of working. I don’t interact much with the current missionaries (we were recently changed to sisters) and the newer MP seems a bit less fascist than his predecessors so I don’t know for sure that all of those rules are still in place. The current missionaries do seem to be allowed to visit with members more and have even said things like they want to get to know us (they don’t want to get to know me anymore after they do).
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