Cincinnati Ohio North Stake - Missionary Work Assistance

Developing and Initiating a Ward Mission Plan

2008-11-11T20:59:00.000-08:00

The Mission of the Wilmington Ward describes how a bishop and ward mission leader engaged their ward council to develop and implement a plan to inspire the members of their ward to find more people for the missionaries to teach. The story in the case is a synthesis of the experience of three different wards in Massachusetts whose leaders did a particularly effective job in leading the missionary effort. Our handbooks of instruction offer valuable guidance to each of us as wed attempt to serve in the church. They tell us what we are supposed to do. We glean most of our know how in church service, however, from watching other people serve in their callings. Role modeling is a powerful training device. The purpose of the Wilmington Ward case is to provide ward leaders a role model for how to be effective missionary leaders – because most bishops and ward mission leaders have not observed an effective member missionary leadership team at work before.

In the case study method of learning, instructors generally do not lecture. Rather, they ask thought-provoking questions to students in the class, to help the students discover the key insights themselves. This method can only work if the case is distributed several days prior to the training meeting, and if the students have studied it thoroughly beforehand. A thorough discussion of the important issues in the Wilmington Ward case typically consumes an hour.

In keeping with the urgings of the presiding brethren, this case does not suggest a particular missionary program that all wards and branches ought to follow. Rather, it describes a process that a bishop, ward mission leader and ward council can follow to develop a plan that is appropriate to their situation. As D&C 9:6-7 states, developing such a plan that can be put before the Lord is an indispensable step in the process of receiving guidance from the Holy Spirit.

Teaching Plan

I recommend dividing the hour’s discussion into three blocks – 15 minutes at the outset to characterize the process that the ward leaders followed; 35 minutes to probe specific elements of the process more deeply and to examine how they interact; and a final 10 minutes discussing how leaders can initiate this process in their own wards.

What is the process that the Wilmington Ward Council used?

I recommend launching this portion of the discussion by asking the students, “If you were using this case as a template to train someone in how to develop a ward mission plan, which of the things they did would you say are absolutely critical for any ward to do?” To involve as many students as possible in the discussion, it is best to get one suggestion from the initial respondent, and then to ask the question again to another student: “Is there another of the things they did that you think would be absolutely critical?” -- and so on, making a list of the points on a chalkboard as they emerge from class members. The points will include:

The bishop and ward mission leader led by example.
They involved the entire ward council, rather than formulating a plan in isolation, as a band of ward missionaries.

3. Too often in our church service we seek improvement by formulating programs that address the symptoms of problems, rather than their root cause. The Wilmington Ward leaders, in contrast, defined initiatives and activities that addressed the root reasons why members weren’t actively sharing the gospel. This discipline helped them define some creative and effective actions.

Specific people were given responsibility to execute each element of the plan
The ward council chose a specific measure of their success – the number of people that members brought into their homes for the missionaries to teach. They set a goal for the year. Every week the ward mission leader updated his chart. Once a month he taped that chart to the wall in ward council meeting, as a mechanism for the council to hold itself accountable for achieving their goal.
The mechanisms for motivation that the ward leaders used were 1) to teach correct principles (through the member missionary class), and 2) inspiring the members to action through example and testimony. They deliberately eschewed coercion, guilt trips and one-shot programs.
They sought ways to involve the whole ward in the missionary effort – including less active members and people of other faiths. Every auxiliary had responsibility for an element of the program. This was one benefit of having the ward council plan and direct this effort.

As class members proffer these elements of the process, the instructor should ask them why they feel that particular piece was so crucial to the Wilmington Ward’s success. He should summarize each point in a list on the blackboard, so that he can return to many of the points later in the class.

Class segment 2: There is no silver bullet

Once these characteristics of the process have been chronicled on the board, I the instructor should shift gears into the second segment of the discussion, where the class can probe the reasoning behind each piece of the system, and explore how they work together. He can initiate this exploration by pointing to one of the items (for example, the bishop and WML’s decision to lead by example) and ask, “What else in the process would not have worked if the leaders had attempted to lead the effort without setting an example?” Clearly #6 – relying on teaching and testimony for motivation – could not have worked. Number 3 – addressing the root cause – would not have been possible, because one root cause of the ward’s member missionary malaise had been that the bishop could not emphasize it without feeling hypocritical.

The instructor can then pick another dimension of the system – the decision to involve the whole ward council rather than having the plan belong only to the ward missionaries, for example – and go through the same process of assessing what else wouldn’t have worked, if the ward council did not develop and own the plan; and so on. The key insight from this discussion about interdependencies is that there isn’t a simple silver bullet. No single initiative solves this problem. It’s a systemic challenge that demands a systemic solution.

Leadership vs. Administration

When the interdependencies have been explored for this point, the instructor can invite class members to explore more deeply a few of the program’s dimensions. A good place to start is to ask a class member to comment on the distinction that Bishop Miner made to Mike Spencer: “You weren’t called to be a ward mission administrator. This is a leadership problem, not an administrative problem.” What’s the difference between a ward mission administrator and a ward mission leader?

An important, related question might be, “Bishop Miner is a very busy man. Why do you suppose he set that end-of-year deadline for himself, of finding someone for the missionaries to teach?” The instructor can use this to show that what he did was “set a date” as a goal for himself, just as Elder Ballard suggested we do. Ask, “What relationship did setting the date have with Bishop Miner’s talking with and inviting Jose Gutierrez to meet with the missionaries?” always helps class members see that the deadline forced Bishop Miner to do what God wants us all to do – to see everyone as a possible member of Christ’s church. This is also a good point in the discussion to testify that there are two courses of action available to busy church leaders who are faced with the mandate to lead by example. One course is to opt out, with the reasoning that they are already doing all they can to serve in the Kingdom. The other course is to have the faith that God will bless them with a miracle, as happened to bishop Miner and as Elder Ballard and Nephi promised (I Ne. 3:7).

Measures of Success

A second dimension of the process that bears deeper exploration is the council’s decision to measure their success by referrals, rather than baptisms; and then the chart that Mike Spencer developed to update the ward council on their progress towards their goal. The instructor can guide this discussion with two questions. The first is, “I some leaders don’t want to use such an “intimidating” measure as the number of referrals who are taught an initial gospel discussion – believing that if they give members a less onerous challenge it will be easier to inspire them to be missionaries. Which approach is better?” Most class members will favor giving more modest “baby-step” challenges, believing that members respond more readily to easy challenges than hard ones. The instructor can challenge whether there is evidence supporting that belief, however. Furthermore, members deprive themselves of extraordinary blessings when they stop short of inviting people into their homes for the missionaries to teach. A second question is, “Have any of you participated in a January meeting in the past, in setting a goal for how many baptisms you were going to get as a ward that year? What was different about the way that Mike Spencer treated the achievement of their referrals goal, than the typical ward council has treated its baptismal goals?” I recommend spending some time focusing on the chart on p. 9 of the case, which was the tool that Mike used to keep the ward council focused on improving and revising the plan in order to achieve the goal. It is a great tool that a ward council could use to hold itself accountable not just for its missionary plan, but for improvements in sacrament meeting attendance, reactivation, and so on.

It may be helpful to read the following statement of President Thomas S. Monson:

When we deal in generalities we shall never succeed.

When we deal in specifics, we shall rarely have failure.

When performance is measured, performance improves.

When performance is measured and reported, the rate of performance accelerates.

President Thomas S. Monson, Favorite Quotations from the Collection of TS Monson, pg 61

Deseret Book, 1985

Means of Motivation

A third dimension of the Wilmington Ward council’s process that bears close examination is the means of motivation that they employed. The first mechanism was to teach correct principles of member missionary work in a systematic, small-group three-week setting, where class members could learn, act, and return and report the next week. Often in the church we see members not magnify their calling, and we conclude that they simply are not committed. I believe that in many cases, members’ apparent apathy actually is a symptom of their not knowing how to do the work – so they don’t. The second means of motivation was the testimonies of the ward council members in fast & testimony meeting. Ask the class members about the impact that Bishop Miner’s testimony had on the ward; about Christine Quinn’s testimony; and so on. A good way to visualize what was happening is this: It is as if the ward members were all walking together across a glacier, and came to a frighteningly deep crevasse. They were all huddled along its edge, afraid to jump across. If the ward leaders approached from behind and tried to push the members across, they’d resist or run for cover. But if the ward leaders jump across first, and then turn back and describe how rewarding and easy it was, then other members will follow – not all at once, of course. But as more and more members make the leap and turn around to testify about the experience, more and more will develop the courage to follow.

Implementing this Process in Your Ward

I recommend finishing the discussion with a ten-minute discussion about how to implement this process in their wards and branches. I recommend starting this segment by asking, “Could I just see by raise of hands how many of you want to develop and implement a plan to inspire the members of your ward to be more effective missionaries?” Most, if not all, will indicate this desire. Having asked them to make this commitment, the next question should be, “We’ve all been to these training meetings, where we get some good ideas and sing the closing hymn with a resolve to go and do – only to find that when we get home, other events intervene and not much happens. What advice would you give to the bishop or ward mission leader next door, to help them avoid getting sidetracked?”

If these questions don’t result in a sufficiently productive discussion, it can be helpful simply to walk through the steps that Bishop Miner and Mike Spencer followed:

1. A personal meeting, in which they committed to lead by example.

2. Dedicate one ward council meeting each month to the missionary effort. In the first of these, do a root cause exercise. In subsequent ones, develop plans to solve those root problems.

3. Start to collect information, and construct the chart, to allow the ward council to hold itself accountable; and use it every month.

Ask the members why it took a relatively long time to realize success in baptisms, leading to the conclusion that very often, we need to do things “right” for a while, before the results begin to roll in. Often we give up when results don’t instantly appear; and failure becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. It simply takes time for the fire to propagate.

A good way to wrap it up is to note that the ward leaders who did this were average people who previously had not been exemplary missionaries – they had not been born with the instinct for how to do it. And yet ordinary members, following a process like this, and following correct principles, received extraordinary blessings, and became great, successful leaders.

Case Study #1

2008-11-11T20:26:00.000-08:00

Bishop Kevin Hawkes of the Camden Ward, Topsham, Maine Stake, smiled at the members of his ward council as they began one of their twice-monthly meetings in May, 2004. The focus of this meeting, held on the second Sunday of each month, was missionary work. “I have good news and bad news,” he began. “The good news is that we know how to do this. We know how to light the fire under our members and inspire them to find people for the missionaries. We know how to fellowship people as they go through the investigation process. We know how to keep most of them active in the church. We’ve done what we know to do over the past two years, and we’ve succeeded. It’s just been wonderful. That’s the good news. The bad news is that we don’t know how to sustain it.”

Bishop Hawkes pointed to a chart he had taped to his office wall – a format the council had used for two years to hold themselves accountable as leaders of the ward’s missionary effort (See Figure 1). “We set a goal to refer 80 people to the missionaries this year, compared to the 65 people we found last year. So far, referrals are way off compared to last year, let alone the pace we need to be on to meet this year’s goal. Last year we baptized 22 people. That’s the good news. The bad news is that so far this year only four have been baptized.”

“We’ve been doing a lot of things right,” Bishop Hawkes continued. But there must be something that we’re not doing. I want to spend this meeting figuring out how we can keep the pace of member missionary work up. In other words, how do we keep wind in the sails of the Camden Ward – to keep us growing?”

How the Growth Got Started

Bishop Hawkes’ concern about keeping wind in the ward’s missionary sails was an apt metaphor for a ward on Maine’s rocky coast – where most people would choose a day’s sailing in beautiful Penobscot Bay over almost any other alternative. The Camden Ward’s members were mostly home-grown converts – 50 of its 65 active adults had been born and raised in the area. Sacrament meeting attendance had languished around 100 for years, but since 2001, thanks to its stream of new converts and several reactivations, attendance had grown to 140, and it was now considered to be one of the stronger units in the stake.

Seeds of the Camden Ward’s growth were sown in November, 2001 when the presidency of the Topsham Maine Stake convened a priesthood leadership meeting whose theme was, “Just do it.” In his remarks, stake president Reed Black had said, “Brethren, there was a time when missionary work was languishing in this stake, and we could excuse ourselves by saying that we were doing our best – we just didn’t know what more we could do to quicken the pace. Today that isn’t the case. We know what to do. Our leaders have taught us not just what to do, but how to do it. Some of our units aren’t doing any of the things they’ve taught us. Others have chosen one or two of their teachings, like à la carte items on a menu. Not one of our wards or branches has done even close to everything we’ve been told to do. Some people say that change is a difficult, time-consuming process. That’s not true. Change is instantaneous. It is not changing that takes so much time. Brethren, we’ve spent far too much time not changing!”

President Black then handed out a sheet of paper listing eight things that he personally had taught, or that general & area authorities had taught while visiting the stake or in satellite broadcasts over the prior several years, about how to lead the missionary effort. These were:

1. There are no administrative solutions to the slow pace of member missionary work. It is a leadership problem. If stake and ward leaders cannot speak in first-person pronouns and present-tense verbs about member missionary work, they cannot lead this work effectively. God will bless busy leaders with missionary miracles if they will in faith commit to Him to lead by example. Members will be inspired to follow their leaders’ examples if they will testify about these experiences.

2. Because missionary work is the ward’s responsibility, the ward council must bear primary responsibility for leading the work. Each ward council needs to develop and implement a ward mission plan – a plan to inspire their ward members to find people for the missionaries to teach, to fellowship those who are being taught, and to strengthen those who are baptized.

3. Most members are fearful and frustrated about missionary work because they have come to be guided by false beliefs about how to do the work. Members can share the gospel much more successfully when they are taught and follow correct principles.

4. The most important key indicator of member missionary success is referrals. What President Monson has said applies to this case: “When we deal in generalities we shall never succeed. When we deal in specifics, we shall rarely have failure. When performance is measured, performance improves. When performance is measured and reported, the rate of performance accelerates.” (Favorite Quotations from the Collection of TS Monson, pg 61. Deseret Book, 1985.)

5. Every day, in every prayer, we must ask God to put into our path people who will accept our invitation to learn about the gospel.

6. When converts are baptized into a situation where there is another active member in the home – a sibling, parent, child or roommate – the probability of their staying active is much higher than for those who are the only members in their home.

7. The ideal calling for a new member is one that provides friends, meaningful responsibility, and nourishment in the good word of God. In the weeks before baptism, ward mission leaders should custom-design and recommend to the bishop a calling that provides these things for each convert. Bishops should then prayerfully seek the Lord’s guidance. If they are inspired to do so, they should extend this calling at the time of baptism, so that each convert immediately begins experiencing these three things.

8. New members should visit the temple within 2-3 months of baptism to be baptized for deceased relatives.

Why Aren’t We Doing It?

President Black then led a discussion to explore why the ward leaders weren’t doing these things. His counselor, Lew Fletcher, later reflected that their explanations for inaction seemed to fall into three categories. The first was typified by one branch president’s comment. “The reason I haven’t done these things, quite frankly, is that they were taught to me one at a time. I’ve never seen the whole set. Because they were taught one by one, I guess I thought we could do them one by one, or pick and choose.”

The second set of reasons – by far the most prevalent – was that there is just too much to do. The wards’ agendas are so broad – entailing not just preaching the gospel, but perfecting the saints and redeeming the dead – that bishops had no alternative but to pick and choose which important things they would focus upon, and which important things they would put on the back burner. One bishop summarized the way his ward had dealt with this challenge: “If you talk about everything in every meeting nobody will learn anything. You just have to focus – and you have to stay with that focus for some time in order to get results. So we focus on missionary work for one year, then perfecting the saints – things like home teaching – in the next year, and then family history and temple work in the third. Then we’re back to missionary work again.”

The third group of reasons related to sticking with it. Several leaders described how they had tried certain things like a member missionary class, but said the energy behind them seemed to fizzle quickly. “Sometimes,” a ward mission leader said, “It’s hard to sustain these programs because we do it, we don’t get immediate results, and then say, ‘It doesn’t work.’ Other times we have good momentum, but the people who are responsible move or get a different calling – and the new people just aren’t as committed.”

After orchestrating this discussion, President Black concluded the meeting: “Brethren, it sounds like you have a deep understanding of why it can’t be done. Can I just stand here, apparently alone, and tell you why it can be done? The first reason is that I, personally, can become a great member missionary. You can too. We’re busy men, but do you believe what I Nephi 3:7 says? God will provide a way. From now on,” President Black continued, “Because we’re the men that God has called to be His missionary leaders and because I know we can succeed as missionaries, I’m going to start my interviews with you by saying, ‘Tell me your story.’ By that I mean, ‘Tell me an inspiring missionary experience you had this past month.’ When you’ve told me your story, I want you to say, ‘OK, President. Now tell me your story,” and I’ll do the same. If one of us doesn’t have a story, then I’m going to say, ‘Then we don’t have anything to talk about, do we?’ and we’ll end the interview. This will give us time to go out and get a story. God has called us to be leaders. We can lead.

“Now, here’s the second reason why it can be done. President Hinckley said that ‘If we inspire the members of the church to bring people into their homes for the missionaries to teach, the spirit will come into their homes. Many of the other problems in their lives, and in our wards and branches, will resolve themselves if we will do this.’ In other words, it’s not an either-or. If we do better in proclaiming the gospel, it will help us in perfecting the saints and redeeming the dead.”

President Black concluded his remarks. “Brethren, I have watched us try this balancing act for a long time – trying to focus a little of our energy on each thing that is important. What’s the result? Sacrament meeting attendance in this stake has been growing about 2% per year. We were complaining about inadequate priesthood strength ten years ago, and we’re complaining about it today.” Looking at Bishop Hawkes, he illustrated his point by saying, “The Camden Ward is a great example, Great Bishop, a good core of leaders and members working hard, and yet you’ve barely grown over the last decade. The Book of Mormon changes hearts not because it says lots of different things, but because it has a single, focused message: It brings people to Christ. We can be much more successful if we have the same focus – bringing more and more people to Christ. As your stake president I ask you to do these eight things on the sheet that I’ve given you. This is not a menu from which to select an item or two. It is a complete set of instructions.” President Black then bore his testimony and closed the meeting.

The Camden Ward’s Response

The next day in Ward Council, Bishop Hawkes passed out copies of the eight points, reviewing what President Black had said. “I want to do what President Black has asked. I trust him. I deal with youth problems, marital problems, welfare problems, and that’s only the beginning. I’ve got to continue spending my counseling time with members as I always have. I just don’t see a way of cutting back. But I’ve thought about how to focus in the face of all these demands. The focus can come from having ward council meetings that are focused and effective. So rather than dealing with a hodge-podge of different issues in this meeting, I want to focus one of our two ward council meetings each month on our missionary effort. It is through this meeting that we are going to do each of these eight things.

“The second point on President Black’s list is that the ward council must take responsibility for leading the missionary effort,” Bishop Hawkes continued. “I’ll run this meeting, but I need you need to bear primary responsibility for defining our plan, implementing it, and holding ourselves accountable. Rich Adams (ward mission leader) will serve this council as our “executive secretary for missionary affairs.” He’ll collect data on member referrals, set the agendas for these meetings, and follow through with each of us between meetings to be sure we each carry out our part of the ward plan.”

Bishop Hawkes then passed out a document titled, The Mission of the Wilmington Ward.[1] “The mission president gave us this in a meeting a year ago. It’s a case study about a ward that did what we need to do – develop and implement a ward missionary plan. I just had put it aside because there was so much else to do. But I finally read it last night. It provides a good template, or a process to follow, that will help us come up with a plan that is right for us. I’d like each of you to read it. In two weeks at our next ward council meeting, I want to ask Brother Ernie Skinner, our high councilman, to lead us through the process of creating our plan. Then every month in this meeting we’ll return and report on our progress on each element of the plan, and discuss what we need to do next to keep doing better.

“President Black said this will be possible because it is possible for each of us, as individuals, to be missionaries. I ask each of you to join me in this commitment – and when I or my counselors have our monthly interviews with you, we’re going to start like President Black: ‘Tell me your story.’ That means each of us needs a story each month. During fast meeting, we need take responsibility to bear our testimony about the spirit that has come into our homes as we’ve begun sharing the gospel. Point #1 on this sheet is true. We really need to lead.”

Bishop Hawkes then invited, “I’d like each of you to think back to a time when you had a great experience and felt the spirit as you shared the gospel with someone. If you feel inclined, tell us about it, and bear your testimony to us.” He then recounted such an experience in his life. Six other council members then bore testimony. As they did so a spirit pervaded the room, and one by one the ward council members seemed to resolve within themselves that they could succeed as leaders of the ward’s missionary efforts.

The Camden Ward’s Missionary Plan

The ward council reconvened two weeks later and under Ernie Skinner’s guidance formulated a preliminary plan. They followed the Wilmington Ward’s method of first discussing the reasons why most members weren’t sharing the gospel actively. They then proposed activities, initiatives and goals that would address those reasons. The group set a goal that through this plan, they would inspire themselves and members of the ward to find 36 people for the missionaries to teach in 2002. The elements of the plan are summarized in the following table.

1) Ward Council: In each fast & testimony meeting, at least two ward council members or ward missionaries will bear testimony about an inspiring member missionary experience. This is how we will lead by example and let our light shine.

2) Ward Council: Each Sunday we’ll huddle after meetings to review the people (investigators, new members and partially active members) who should have been at church that day, but weren’t. We and their home/visiting teachers will contact them that day with a message of how much we missed and needed them.

3) Ward Council: We’ll ask each person who prays in our meetings to ask God to put people in our paths whom we can invite to learn about the gospel. Every prayer in every meeting.

4) Ward Mission: We will teach the principles of member missionary work to all adults and teen-agers in the ward through a three-week member missionary class, ten people at a time.

5) Ward Mission: We’ll visit new members at least once each week for two months to teach the new member lessons.

6) Relief Society: We’ll visit new members at least once each week for two months to teach the new member lessons.

7) Relief Society: Every month we’ll invite at least one non-member friend to teach an Enrichment Meeting class. We’ll invite non-member neighbors to assist us when we provide compassionate service.

8) Primary: We’ll ask the families of children being baptized to invite non-member friends and their parents to the baptismal service.

9) YM & YW: Once each month the YM & YW leaders will ask one of their non-member adult friends to help lead an activity. We’ll keep activities planned a month in advance, and will consistently remind youth to invite their friends.

10) High Priests: Our family history specialist will meet with each new member within a week of baptism to begin preparing family names for temple work. We’ll get each to the temple to be baptized for these ancestors within two months of baptism.

11) Elders' Quorum: We’ll hold a monthly fireside of high and consistent quality on balancing work and family responsibilities. We’ll ask our members to invite different neighbors and work associates to attend this fireside at least four times every year.

Following Through

Once the mission plan was in place, the ward council dedicated its second-Sunday meeting to leading the ward’s missionary progress. Rich Adams prepared the agenda. During the month Rich kept in touch with each auxiliary and priesthood leader to verify that they were following through on their responsibilities in the plan “so that we didn’t have to waste time in the meeting just getting reports.” Rich began each meeting by highlighting two or three success stories that members or leaders had, as they implemented their portions of the plan. “Nothing succeeds like success,” he later reflected. “When someone has a great missionary experience and then testifies about it, it inspires and gives courage to others.” Rich updated the chart shown in Figure 1 and taped it on the wall for each meeting. It showed not just the number of referrals given to the missionaries, but the families that had given the referrals. “That format really helped us hold ourselves accountable. We could compare our goal versus what we had done, discuss why we were falling short, and come up with plans to close the gap. Having a ward mission plan was important, of course. But returning and reporting to ourselves every month on the key indicator of referrals was just invaluable.

The result of these monthly discussions was that the plan kept evolving as council members decided that some parts of the plan needed greater emphasis, stopped pieces that weren’t helping, and developed new ideas for how to inspire ward members to share the gospel. Always, Rich Adams kept an up-to-date written version of the ward mission plan, which he periodically re-distributed to council members.

Strengthening New Members

During the March, 2002 meeting, Bishop Hawkes pulled out his copy of President Black’s eight-point sheet, and asked high councilor Skinner about point #7. “I must have been asleep in the meeting where they told us the ward mission leader should custom-design callings for new members. I always thought that callings in the ward were the bishopric’s responsibility. Can you explain this to us?”

“It’s true that the bishop is responsible for callings, but there’s more to it,” Brother Skinner said. “Members of the ward council actually initiate most callings in a ward. They have a need or a vacancy, consider who could do the best job, pray about it, and then recommend to the bishop that a particular person be called. After considering other ward needs and the individual’s situation, you and the bishop work it out through a process of negotiation, desperation and inspiration. In contrast, when someone joins the church in most wards, the missionaries and ward mission leader just dump him on the bishop’s doorstep and say, in essence, ‘Give this convert a calling,’ and walk away. The problem is that bishops are busy, and it often takes them several weeks to decide upon and issue the calling. In our mission, on average, only 40% of new converts are in church on the fourth Sunday after baptism. The 60% aren’t all inactive yet, but by the time the bishop is ready to extend the call, they have begun attending only sporadically. When this happens they often don’t get a calling at all because we can’t rely on them. Historically in our stake more than half of new converts never have been given a calling – and it’s usually for this reason.

Brother Skinner continued, “Most bishoprics keep a list of callings in the ward, and which of those positions are not filled. They often give one of these unfilled callings to a new convert – and often these callings aren’t filled for a reason: they aren’t very important. Most of these are not good assignments for new members. An ideal calling for a new member has five characteristics:

1. It helps the new member feel needed and important in the ward.

2. It is straightforward and well structured – not amorphous.

3. It requires the new member to attend church on Sunday

4. It entails working alongside other members

5. Service in the calling requires the new member to read the scriptures and learn the gospel.

“For example, a calling as a member of the activities committee conforms only to characteristic #4. But a calling as assistant gospel essentials class teacher meets all five criteria – it is a perfect assignment for a new member. Very few callings on the traditional list have all of these characteristics. Rather than trying to fit new members into traditional callings, busy bishops should delegate to ward mission leaders the responsibility to tailor a responsibility that is suited to each investigator as he or she approaches baptism, and to recommend it to the bishop. This requires that the ward mission leader add or subtract elements of the job, sometimes in creative ways, to make it match as closely as possible these five characteristics.”

“I think we’ve got the basic idea. You’re saying that we shouldn’t let the responsibility be independent of friends and of nourishment in the good word of God. We can build all three into the responsibility, right?” Bishop Hawkes queried. When Brother Skinner nodded, Bishop Hawkes said, “Let’s start doing it right now, Rich. This needs to be part of our ward mission plan.”

From that point onward, the process worked well, most of the time. Rich Adams formulated a calling for each potential member aged 12 and older, and after prayerfully consulting the Lord Bishop Hawkes extended the calling at the time he interviewed them for baptism. Those few new members listed in the Appendix who are shown not having a calling all had declined the assignment when Bishop Hawkes extended it. Though he couldn’t make every assignment conform perfectly to these criteria, Rich Adams was creative as he shaped these assignments. Debbie Glass, for example, was called as Relief Society chorister. This had characteristics 1, 2 and 3 built into it. To add characteristic 4 (work alongside other members) they modified the calling, asking Debbie to phone a different sister every week to ask what her favorite hymn was. The Relief Society would then sing that hymn the next Sunday, and Debbie got to know another person every week. To add characteristic 5 to her job, Debbie was asked to study the scriptural reference given at the bottom of the page for the selected hymn, and to explain its meaning to the sisters before they sang it.

Other Members in the Convert’s Living Situation

In its April, 2002 meeting, the Camden Ward Council tackled the last of the items on President Black’s list. Bishop Hawkes explained it. “President Hinckley spoke about this in a missionary training broadcast, saying that when converts are the only person in their living environment who are members, it is hard to stay active. Nobody is there encouraging them to keep the word of wisdom, go to church, pray or study the scriptures. In fact, they often urge them not to do these things. Many converts just don’t have the strength to stay with our lifestyle if there is no support from those living with them. He asked us to do all we can to have another faithful member in the convert’s home who is also committed to living the gospel. He promised that most converts who were so blessed would remain active. This means that whenever we see that the missionaries have begun teaching someone who, if baptized, would be the only member in his living environment, we need to do everything we can to baptize or activate someone else in that investigator’s family or apartment. Any ideas for how we can do this?”

After a few brief comments, Jennifer Donaldson, Relief Society President, looked at the full-time missionaries (who usually attended the missionary ward council), and said, “You Elders could really help us with this. In meetings like this when we ask missionaries to tell us about their investigators, they often don’t even know the investigator’s last name – let alone any other information about them. There’s no way we can help if you can only tell us their first name. You need to ask them about their family, their friends, their roommates, their job. If you can give us detail about the other people in their living environment, then the ward council can brainstorm about what we can do to interest some of them in the church as well.”

Elder Cox, the senior companion, responded, “You’re right, and we’ll do it. And what I hear you saying is that you’ll then help us figure out a way to teach their family, friends and roommates. Right?”

“Rich, let’s write these commitments into our ward mission plan,” Bishop Hawkes instructed.

The Appendix shows that of the 34 people baptized in the Camden Ward subsequent to this discussion, 22 of them were baptized into living situations where there was another active member. Twenty-one of these 22 (95%) had remained active (defined as attending three out of four sacrament meetings per month) or became strongly active (defined as attending all meetings consistently, being temple-worthy, and magnifying his or her calling). Of the 12 converts who were the only members in their living environment, in contrast, only 4 (33%) had remained active.

The Results

In 2002, members of the Camden Ward brought 39 people into their homes for the missionaries to teach – three more than the ward council’s goal. In 2003, members found 65 people to be taught in their homes. The number of converts baptized into the ward grew from six in 2001 to 12 in 2002 and 22 in 2003. Of the 34 people who were baptized in 2002 and 2003, 27 (79%), had been referred by members to the missionaries.

Twenty-five of the 34 people baptized in 2002 and 2003 were still attending church three out of every four weeks. Eleven were temple-worthy. How did they do it? Rich Adams offered his assessment. “We did two things consistently. First, we had callings ready and waiting for these people at the time they were baptized. Some of looked pretty tenuous when we baptized them – the sorts of people who normally would quickly come to feel that they didn’t belong or fit in the church. We’d have lost most of these if we hadn’t given them callings that were tailor-made to them. Another specific thing: of the 29 converts who were 12 or older, 25 went to the temple within two months. Of those 25, 22 of them are now active or strongly active. Of the four we didn’t get to the temple, three are completely inactive.

“Aside from those specifics, however, I can’t really point to a magic bullet. It just involved creating a plan that got us doing all the things on President Black’s list. Looking back on it, there’s no way that the bishop could have orchestrated this effort. Nor could I. When the ward council signed up, then it was all the little things, in all of the organizations in the ward that summed up to a big difference.

Bishop Hawkes added, “I was scared when we took on this commitment to lead the missionary effort, that I’d get stretched past the breaking point. What I learned is that the key was to have focused, productive ward council meetings – and to use those meetings to harness the talents and energies of the whole ward leadership team. They stopped coming to those meetings with the mindset that they represented the Elders Quorum or the Relief Society. They came as leaders of the ward.”

Where Did the Wind Go?

Flash forward to the May, 2004 missionary meeting of the Camden Ward Council mentioned at the beginning of this case. “We had a couple of great years,” Bishop Hawkes said. “But it’s a good thing that we didn’t spike the football and declare victory – because we’ve just not been able to keep the momentum. At the present rate, we’ll have introduced 30 people to the missionaries by the end of the year, and will have baptized 12 people. Both of these are about half of what we did last year. Whatever it was, we’ve just lost the magic recipe. What were we doing that we’ve stopped doing?”

“Bishop, I’ve got to agree with you,” said Elders quorum president Mark Maxfield. We’ve lost the excitement. When we came into ward council meeting a year ago, it seemed like we were all buzzing about missionary experiences. Now we’re not buzzing. Do you remember the first of President Black’s eight points, that there wasn’t an administrative solution, only a leadership solution? I think we have an administrative mindset now in this meeting, mechanically monitoring the plan. It’s different.”

Rich Adams commented, “Bishop, I’ve worried that we’ve felt more successful than we really were. There’s been an 80-20 rule at work in referrals: 80% of the referrals came from 20% of the members. We have never lit a missionary fire in most of the active members – a small minority has carried the ward. I’m afraid that the minority has been tapped out – they’ve referred everyone they know. Even me – I found three people for the missionaries to teach last year, but nobody so far this year. I guess I’ve just been feeling that I did my job, and I’m not feeling much pressure to find three more this year.”

“It might be worse than 80-20, Rich,” offered Relief Society President Christine Dickey. I’d bet that if you taped last year’s chart on the wall, we’d see that 30 of the 65 referrals came from Tina Allard, Jen Brouillette and Patti Moir. They are each converts of the last 2 years, and have had such enthusiasm for the gospel. Maybe now that they’re more mature in the church, they’ve lost their missionary fire. Maybe these ladies have finally become comfortable like the rest of us!”

“These are all good thoughts,” Bishop Hawkes said. “I’d like to give you an assignment. Think this through. Talk to your counselors and your spouses. Rather than wait until June, let’s use ward council meeting in two weeks to figure out how to change course so that the wind is in our sails again.”

Returning and Reporting to President Black

In their June 2004 personal interview, President Black and Bishop Hawkes began by recounting their personal missionary stories. President Black then said, “Bishop, I need your advice. Remember that training meeting in November 2001 when I handed out that list of eight things that we’d been taught to do? Clearly, something clicked for you, and within five months you had incorporated all eight into your ward mission plan. There were ten bishops and branch presidents in the room that day – and only three of you did anything. The Lewiston Ward and the Fox Islands Branch are the others. All three of you have seen a dramatic improvement in member referrals, baptisms and retention. But the other seven units basically have been inert – nothing has changed. Can you advise me on how to light a fire under the rest of the stake?”

“I’ll just think out loud,” Bishop Hawkes replied. “First, as a general rule, I think that people learn when they’re ready to learn, not when we’re ready to teach them. I bet that you motivated the three of us to take action because for some reason, we were ready to learn when you were ready to teach us. I’d bet that the other bishops had just come to that meeting worried about other things. That’s why it blew past them.”

“So what should I have done?” President Black asked. “Have the same meeting six months later for the seven that hadn’t done anything?”

“Maybe,” Bishop Hawkes continued. “You still have the problem that they might not be ready to learn, though. But try this: returning and reporting, like we have done. Some people come to ward council all charged up, while others come with no fire. As those who have found success with their part of the ward mission plan talk about what they did, you sometimes see a light turn on in one of the other faces. For example, in one meeting our Primary president described how she’d had the missionaries deliver invitations to the families of ten of their son’s friends to attend his baptismal service. Most of them came. They heard her son give a great talk about the meaning of baptism, and then saw her husband baptize and confirm him, and give him a beautiful father’s blessing. She then had the missionaries visit each of these families a few days later to thank them for coming, and ask if they had any questions about what they had seen. Several had questions, and two of the families started taking the discussions. She then said that she wanted to incorporate this idea into the ward mission plan, and she volunteered to be responsible for inviting the family of every child being baptized to do this. When she told this story, I saw something click in the head of our Young Men’s president. The next month he said that he wanted to add to the plan that the young men were going to do the same thing when one of them got ordained to an office in the priesthood – do it in a special Sunday evening service at church, invite friends’ families, have the young man talk about what the priesthood is, and then let them watch the father confer this responsibility and give a blessing.”

“Our practice of returning and reporting to ourselves as a group,” Bishop Hawkes reflected, “created a great dynamic in these council meetings. Not every council member came to every meeting ready to learn and act. But always a few did, and over the course of several months most of them got lit with the missionary fire. Maybe, President Black, you need to drink the same Kool-Aid. We as bishops return and report individually to you every month, but we don’t ever return and report to each other, and hold ourselves collectively responsible. Can you imaging how much more difficult it would have been for me to light everyone on fire if we hadn’t returned and reported as a group, but instead just brought up missionary work individually with each council member in our monthly PPI? Maybe once each quarter we could devote one of our bishops’ training meetings to returning and reporting on our missionary progress. If you taped a chart on the wall of the high council room that showed how well each ward was doing compared to their goals and what they did last year, I’d bet the dynamic in bishops’ meeting would change. Not every bishop would come ready to learn and act, but I’d bet that over the course of several months, the fire would light under most of them. There’s something reinforcing about the group dynamic, that you just don’t get in a one-on-one interview. Besides, in PPIs there always are a lot of other things to talk about.”

“Now, you need to help me with a problem,” Bishop Hawkes said. He then summarized the discussion from the Camden Ward’s most recent missionary ward council about why the wind had died in their missionary sails. “President,” he asked, “Why do you think we’ve lost momentum?”

“Let me think out loud, too,” President Black responded. “How many members of your present ward council were part of the group when you formulated your original plan?”

“Actually, just four of us. The others have all been called in the last 18 months.”

“The nice thing about having a plan is that it provides continuity when you change leaders. But the new leaders need to buy into the plan. What have you done to get their buy-in?” President Black asked.

“Frankly, not much,” Bishop Hawkes reflected. “I guess we’ve just given the new leaders their handbook, told them when ward council meets, and expected them to step right in where their predecessors had left off.”

“I wonder if that’s one reason why as a group, your ward council has begun treating your ward mission plan with an administrative mindset rather than a leadership mindset,” President Black suggested. “Maybe you should do the same thing you do when your computer starts getting slower and slower. Just reboot the system. Ask your new ward council to develop a new ward mission plan that addresses the problem that you’re currently facing. If, for example, Rich Adams’ 80-20 observation is valid, it means that your last plan only succeeded in motivating 20% of your members. Maybe you could ask your council to develop a plan to reach the other 80%. It might generate a whole new set of ideas, in addition to keeping parts of the old plan that contribute to the new goal. And it might create a whole new sense of commitment.”

Bishop Hawkes responded, “Thanks, President. I’ll bet that a year from now, we’ll both have some inspiring stories to tell.”

[1] Members of the Massachusetts Boston Mission presidency wrote this case about how a ward council can create a ward mission plan. Copies are available by request to cmc@hbs.edu.

Case Study #2

2008-11-11T15:56:00.001-08:00

It was a beautiful September Sunday, and Bishop Kent Miner of the Wilmington Ward in the Middlesex Massachusetts Stake had just asked Mike Spencer, his best friend, to serve as ward mission leader. “Bishop, I’ve never declined a calling. If this is what you want, I’ll do it,” Mike responded. “But I am not a good missionary. I love the gospel, but I just have never been comfortable asking people if they want to learn about the church.”

Bishop Miner answered,

“I know you’re a mixed bag, but that’s why you’re the man we need. President Southwick is concerned that we’re not baptizing enough people. Many converts fall away; and he senses that fewer members are engaged in finding people for the missionaries to teach. As you know, bishops and ward mission leaders now have direct responsibility for the vitality of the ward mission. The stake presidency and bishops have fasted about this, and we’ve committed to doubling the number of people who join the church each year, and to keeping all of them active. Because bishops are already so busy, President Southwick told us to call the best man in the ward as ward mission leader. That’s the first reason I want you to do this, Mike.

Second, I want you because you’re not a natural missionary. Most of us are afraid or too busy, and like you, feel like it is something they just aren’t good at. I want every member to feel confident that they can do missionary work successfully. Mike, if you have the courage to become a leader – someone who inspires the rest of us by your spirit and example – you can have a tremendous impact. People will say, ‘If a guy like Mike Spencer can do it, I can do it.’”

“I’m not sure if that’s an insult or a compliment,” Mike responded. “But you know me. So what do you want me to do? Where do I start?”

Mike, who previously had served as the Wilmington Ward bishop himself, had a lot on his mind on the drive home that day. “Missionary work is the dimension of my spiritual life that I just haven’t done much about,” he thought. “Either Bishop Miner is desperate, or this is a signal from the Lord that it’s time for me to grow. I suspect that both are true.”

Setting the Groundwork with the Bishop

When they met the next Sunday, it was clear that Bishop Miner had thought deeply about the ward’s missionary situation. After kneeling with Mike in prayer, he summarized his reflections:

“I’ve got to take a lot of responsibility for so few members being engaged in missionary work – because quite frankly, I haven’t been engaged. I’ll give you an analogy. My father was our bishop when I grew up. He was a wonderful bishop. But he had a problem with profanity. He was raised in a rough environment, worked for the railroad, and spent his days with some crude people. When things didn’t go right at home, I’d sometimes hear him swear. He knew it was a bad habit, but with all of the other good things going on in his life, he never seemed to get around to changing in that one area. I never remember him giving us a lesson on avoiding profanity. He just couldn’t convincingly ask others to do something he wasn’t doing himself. He lived most principles of the gospel perfectly, and he spoke of those often. But I never heard him give a talk about profanity.

“I’m in an analogous situation. I have never, as bishop, given more than lip service to member missionary work because I’ve just been too busy to do it myself. Without consciously choosing, whenever I have talked with or to ward members, I have chosen some other topic that I could address without feeling like a hypocrite.

“I decided that if I can’t change myself, I can’t change the ward. I might be the busiest person in the ward. But if I exempt myself from being a member missionary because I’m so busy, it opens the door to everyone else exempting themselves because they’re so busy. So I’m committing to you right now, Mike, that by the end of the year I will have found someone for the missionaries to teach. I read 1 Ne. 3:7 last night, and I’m going to do likewise."

Bishop Miner then paused, lifting his gaze from some notes on his lap to see how Mike was reacting. “So why are you looking at me like that, Bishop?” The bishop did not respond, so Mike broke the silence. “I guess what you’re asking me to do is to make the same commitment.”

“Mike, it’s obvious, once you think about it. A leader simply cannot ask people to do something he is not willing to do himself. If we are serious about inspiring our members – and I really am – then this commitment is the only place we can start. You weren’t called to be a ward mission administrator. This is a leadership problem, not an administrative problem.”

“We’re in this together, Bishop,” Mike said with a smile. He then described what he had learned from studying the ward mission pages in the General Handbook of Instructions.

“The manual summarizes the administrative responsibilities – correlation meetings, getting people to teach with the missionaries, and so on. It tells us what we need to do. But how to lead this work – like how to inspire the ward members to find people for the missionaries to teach … it strikes me that they’re leaving much of the how part of the job to us. I come out where you are. There isn’t an administrative solution to the Wilmington Ward’s missionary problems. We need to be leaders. But how?

Following False Principles in Sharing the Gospel?

The following weekend at Stake conference, President Southwick invited Matt Jenson, a counselor in the full-time mission presidency, to speak. Brother Jenson recalled that despite his desire to be a good member missionary, he had repeatedly failed in sharing the gospel – because, he decided, he had come to follow what he termed “false principles” about missionary work. He suggested that most church members were being guided by the same falsehoods. As he had come to understand what he called “true principles” for sharing the gospel, Brother Jenson reported that inviting people into his home for the missionaries to teach had become a joy and not a burden. He then told a series of inspiring experiences of how he and his wife had invited people into his home for the missionaries to teach.

Mike took careful notes of Brother Jenson’s talk, and summarized them in his own words in his journal that evening. The talk struck powerful chords in Mike’s heart because it helped him see that he had found missionary work to be daunting for precisely the same reasons as Brother Jenson. A tight web of false reasoning had kept him from being a good missionary. He wasn’t sure how he would do it, but decided that somehow as ward mission leader, he needed to teach these principles to the Wilmington Ward members because he sensed that they, too, were adhering to the same false reasoning. Mike’s summary of Brother Jenson’s talk is reproduced in Appendix 1 at the end of this case.

The Root Causes of the Wilmington Ward’s Member Missionary Malaise

As luck would have it, the next two days Mike attended a seminar in quality management in which his employer had enrolled him. The premise of the course was that in solving a problem, it is crucial not to jump immediately to solutions. The instructor advised that it was better first to define the root cause of the problem. If the problem is defined insightfully, she argued, the solution often becomes obvious. By rushing to supposed solutions, many managers solve the wrong problems, or address only the symptoms of a deeper root cause. She taught that problem-solvers must not assume that the obvious deficiencies are the real root causes of the problem. Instead, they must keep asking “why” – likened to peeling layers off of an onion – to get at the core, root reason for the problem.

As he learned the technique in the context of his employer’s problems, Mike increasingly could see how an exercise like this might unite the entire Wilmington Ward Council around a plan to lengthen members’ missionary strides. He and Bishop Miner consequently dedicated an entire ward council meeting where, joined by the ward and full-time missionaries, they worked to define the root reasons why ward members weren’t finding enough people for the missionaries to teach.

The group decided that six factors contributed to this problem:

1. We are timid – afraid to invite others to meet with the missionaries.

2. We know we should do missionary work, but we don’t know how to do it.

3. We are too busy with other priorities.

4. All of our friends are LDS, and those of other faiths whom we know aren’t interested.

5. We have too few reliably attractive events where we can comfortably introduce others to the church.

6. Some missionaries are immature and don’t win the love and trust of members.

They then kept asking, “Why are we timid?” and “Why don’t we know how to do the work?” to get at the root causes. An illustration of how they traced their way to the root cause of these contributing factors can be seen in the third factor: Members’ other commitments pre-empted the time to do missionary work. The group had to ask, “Why is it that other forms of work and worship pre-empt the sharing of the gospel? Why doesn’t sharing the gospel pre-empt these other things?” The group hypothesized that other aspects of worship and service had regularity and deadlines. Sacrament meeting started at 9:00. Youth activities had to be prepared before Tuesday at 7:30. Many members had created similar “deadlines” for themselves by trying to attend the temple at least once a month. In contrast, most members felt that missionary work could always be postponed until tomorrow if today were too busy.

Mike then forced the council to ask “Why?” again. “Why don’t we have deadlines in sharing the gospel?” The group started to converge upon an explanation that missionary work was just unpredictable – you just couldn’t schedule a time when someone would be interested. But then Bonnie Ford, one of the ward missionaries, said. “I agree that whether someone accepts the gospel is out of our control. It’s their free agency, not ours. But inviting someone to learn about the gospel is within our control. The reason we don’t have deadlines for inviting is that we just haven’t created deadlines. The reason you guys all do your home teaching on the last day of the month is that somebody said it had to be done by then.” The discussions about the root causes of other main contributing factors to the problem proceeded in a similar manner. At the end of the meeting Tony Kimball, high priest group leader, pulled Mike aside and said, “That was a great Ward Council meeting. Most of these meetings are consumed with calendar issues and updating ward news. This was the first time the whole group got engaged in solving a problem. We had a lot of energy.” The root causes of the ward’s member missionary malaise are listed in Appendix 2.

As the causes of the problem became clear, it was apparent that many of the solutions would need to be implemented in other organizations in the ward. “This needs to be the ward’s mission plan, not the missionaries’ program,” Mike Spencer thought to himself. That’s why it’s wise to have done this with the Ward Council. The whole ward leadership needs to agree on the reasons why we have these problems. We can then come up solutions.

Solutions to the Problems: The Wilmington Ward Mission Plan

Having agreed upon the problems that they needed to tackle, Bishop Miner then decided that they would dedicate one of their twice-monthly Ward Council meetings to brainstorm how they could effectively address each of the root problems. Mike described these solutions, which they called the Wilmington Ward Mission Plan,” as “A set of goals, initiatives, and activities that we have committed to undertake to address the reasons why we don’t find enough people for the missionaries to teach.”

“We didn’t feel an urgency to nail the whole plan down in a couple of weeks and laminate it in plastic,” Mike reflected. “It should be a living plan – something that we revisit every time we meet in missionary correlation and as a Ward Council. The problem-definition exercise gave us a sense of “true north” – the objectives toward which we want to lead the ward. As we implemented these initiatives, some things in our plan led us in that direction, and some didn’t work. Month after month we just kept discussing how to do better, canceling things that weren’t working, and replacing them with better ideas.”

“There was a huge benefit to our ward council of revisiting the ward mission plan every month,” Bishop Miner noted. “Before this we’d just go around the room and ask each person if they ‘had anything.’ All we did in the meeting was make announcements to each other and schedule events on the ward calendar. Our meetings now have become problem-solving meetings. We work together as a group to solve problems and help the ward move ahead. We don’t come into the meeting thinking that we’re representing the interests of the Primary, the Young Men’s program, and so on. We’re united as leaders of the ward.

“I was reading Doctrine and Covenants 9:7 the other day, where it says ‘Behold, you have not understood; you have supposed that I would give it unto you, when you took no thought save it was to ask me,’” Bishop Miner continued. “It struck me that prior to this, we had been giving no thought to how we would solve this problem. We had just been praying that somehow we’d find missionary success. Now, as we go through this process, we come up with what we think is the right solution for us, and then we pray to ask God if our plan is right.”

As the specific elements of the plan became defined, Mike or Bishop Miner, as appropriate, gave a ward missionary or ward council member specific responsibility for its success. This was a breath of fresh air to Brent Mansfield, who recalled, “I was a ward missionary for two years before we had a ward mission plan. It was the worst experience I’ve had in the church because there wasn’t any structure. I had no way of knowing whether I was magnifying my calling. Now with a ward mission plan I know exactly what I’m in charge of, and what other people are in charge of. We are much more specific about what we need to do, and we can help each other because we know what everyone else is supposed to do.

The detailed Wilmington Ward mission plan is included in Appendix 2, but the following paragraphs highlight several elements of the plan – a member missionary Sunday School class, leading by example, asking friends of other faiths to serve in the church, high-quality missionary events, and the use of baptisms and ordinations as missionary events.

1. Member Missionary Class

To address members’ sense that they didn’t know how to share the gospel, the ward initiated a three-week member missionary class that met during the Sunday School hour. Bishop Miner invited members aged 12 and older, as individuals and families, to take the class, about ten people at a time. Ward missionary Bonnie Ford was assigned to teach the class and worked with Brother Jenson to develop three lessons that conveyed his principles. Bonnie also prepared for the bishop’s signature letters of invitation to attend. In cases where invitees had responsibilities to work in Primary or Sunday School, young men or young women were asked to serve in their place so they could attend Bonnie’s class.[1]

In addition to teaching the principles of member missionary work, Bonnie’s charter was to inspire those in her classes to accept Elder M. Russell Ballard’s challenge not to pick a person, but to set a date. Elder Ballard had promised that if members of the church would pick a date and then commit to the Lord that they would have conversations about the church with as many people as possible, that God would bless them by that date to intersect with a person who would accept their invitation to meet with the missionaries. The Ward Council charged Bonnie to inspire, not pressure, each person who took the class to set a date. Setting a date addressed the problem that there were no deadlines in missionary work.

2. Leading by Example

A second element of the plan was that in each fast and testimony meeting, at least two ward missionaries and/or ward council members would recount a faith-building experience in sharing the gospel they had had during the prior month. “I volunteered to be the backstop,” Mike recalled. “If the end of the meeting was approaching and at least two people had not testified about the spirit that had come into their lives as a result of sharing the gospel, I was committed to bear testimony myself. This was good, because it meant that I needed to have an inspiring experience every month, just in case!” As in Bonnie Ford’s class, the group explicitly decided that none of them would attempt to motivate members by pushing them from behind, or making them feel guilty. Leading by example was the way to solve the problem that members of the ward were timid about inviting people.

Christine Quinn, the Relief Society President, visualized the reason why the example of the ward council members was so critical. “Picture the members of our ward walking together on a big glacier, and we come upon a deep crevasse. They’re all huddled at its edge, fearing its depth and afraid to jump across. If we as leaders come up in the rear and push them, saying that it’s their duty to be courageous, they’ll stiffen up and resist. But if we jump across ourselves and then turn around and say, ‘This was actually easy, and it felt great,’ many more of them will make the leap in sharing the gospel.”

3. Asking Non-Members to Serve

The group developed an innovative solution to the problem that members were too busy with other church obligations to do missionary work. Each priesthood and auxiliary organization committed to involve at least one non-member in serving in that organization each month. For example, the Relief Society would ask a non-member to teach one of the mini-classes in its monthly enrichment meetings. The compassionate service leader committed to ask non-member neighbors to join Relief Society sisters in preparing meals for those in need. The Elders Quorum committed that when they helped a family move into or out of a home, they would ask one or more non-members to help. The teachers and priests quorum advisers committed that once each month they would ask a non-member acquaintance to invite the ward’s young men to their place of business, to explain what they did in their careers. The activities committee committed that they would always involve at least one non-member in planning and producing each ward activity. Rather than simply invite friends to attend the annual Halloween party, for example, they would ask friends to help decorate the cultural hall. And the director of the family history center took an interesting challenge. There were within the boundaries of the Wilmington Ward strong “ethnic pockets” – neighborhoods populated by first- and second- generation Armenian-Americans or French-Canadians, for example. The high priests group leader committed to involve members of these communities not just in using the family history centers, but also in doing the extraction work for records from their native lands. Giving friends of other faiths the chance to work shoulder to shoulder with members would give them a vivid feeling for how Latter-day Saints serve each other. It would help them to feel the spirit that comes from serving God, and could help some of them recognize that something has been missing from their lives.

The group committed, in particular, to finding an appropriate calling or opportunity to serve for every non-member spouse of an active member.

Involving friends of other faiths in church service addressed the problem that members were too busy, by enabling them to do missionary work while they served in their other assignments. Because most people in the Wilmington Ward’s boundaries lived in relatively comfortable circumstances, this initiative addressed Brother Jenson’s assertion that prosperous, happy people had a deeper need to give service than to receive help. It also squared with the ward leaders’ sense that whenever they had been able to convince a member whose faith was weak to begin serving in the Kingdom, the service had strengthened his or her faith. They reasoned that the blessings stemming from service were available to non-members as well. Bishop Miner gave responsibility for this element of the ward mission plan to Bill Lane, his executive secretary. Sharing results and brainstorming new plans for involving non-members in the work of the church became a standard item on the agenda of every ward council meeting.

4. Consistently High-Quality Events

The group also tackled the lack of consistent, missionary-quality events to which members could bring acquaintances. Elders Quorum President Dave Coppins recalled the superb talk that a sister in the ward had given in the previous week’s sacrament meeting. “I just sat there thinking, ‘Why didn’t I bring a friend to this meeting?’ And there have been other times when I’ve brought a friend to a meeting and sit there thinking, ‘Why was I so unlucky to have brought my friend to this meeting?’”

Bishop Miner described, “We decided that the only reason for asking a different person to speak every time we had a missionary fireside was to provide variety for the members. But the firesides weren’t for members. So we decided to design a great fireside that introduces people to the spirit, and to reproduce exactly the same fireside every month. We asked Charles Smith to do this. You might say that Brother Smith is the ‘Richard G. Scott’ of the Middlesex Stake. He has such a deep, sincere, comforting and convincing way of teaching and testifying. We asked Brother Smith to give the same talk in my home on the second Sunday of every month. We even serve the same refreshments. It is just working out great. Members go without a friend once just to get a feel for what Brother Smith says. Then they can with confidence bring acquaintances to this meeting to introduce them to the spirit that we feel in our church.” Ben Ball, another ward missionary, had responsibility for these firesides. Members who invited a friend to one of these firesides would call Ben, who in turn would invite a set of other members who had something in common with the friend to attend – ensuring that a critical mass of the right people would be at each event.

5. Baptisms and Ordinations as Missionary Events

During a meeting when the ward council was puzzling about how to inspire more members to share the gospel, Primary President Nancy Bittner spoke up. “Let me tell you what we’re going to do for our son Daniel’s baptism. He turns eight in two months. The missionaries are going to teach Daniel simple versions of the discussions. Then we’re going to print invitations to the baptismal service, and the missionaries will deliver them to the families of several of Daniel’s friends – just saying on the doorstep that we asked them to deliver these invitations. The missionaries will welcome everyone at the door at the service. Then a few days after the baptism the missionaries will just go back to each friend’s home, thank them for coming, and ask, ‘Do you have any questions about what you saw or heard that we could help you with?’ We suspect that most won’t, but I bet some might invite them in to answer to a question. If this works, maybe we could make this part of the ward mission plan – something that we invite every family to do when a child is baptized.”

The missionaries delivered ten invitations to the families of Daniel Bittner’s friends, and eight of them came to the baptismal service. “As you can imagine,” Bishop Miner recalled, “The Bittner family made sure that this was the most inspiring baptismal service in history!” When the missionaries subsequently visited those families’ homes to see if they had questions, two of the families invited them in, and one began taking the discussions. The ward council then made this practice a part of the ward mission program, giving Nancy Bittner responsibility to invite the families of each child being baptized to do this. Subsequently, the young Men’s organization instituted a similar practice when young men were ordained to new offices in the Aaronic Priesthood. This part of the ward mission program addressed the problems that members felt too busy to do missionary work, and that most of the people they knew were already members of the church.

Prayer

Inspired by a challenge that Elder Dallin H. Oaks gave in a general conference address, the ward council resolved that in every prayer offered in their ward – in sacrament meetings, classes and leadership meetings, as well as in family and personal prayers – they would ask God to put into their paths people who would accept an invitation to learn about the church. In the discussion leading to this decision, Tony Kimball, High Priests Group Leader, recalled, “Remember in the 1970s when President Spencer W. Kimball asked us all to pray that God would open the doors of nations so that our missionaries could enter? A lot of us made this a habit. And sure enough, the Iron Curtain opened and the missionaries went in. We need to do what Elder Oaks said. It will work – but this time we need to pray for ourselves, not some distant missionaries.” Accordingly, council members resolved that when people were called upon to pray in any of their meetings, they would be reminded to do this until all ward members habitually remembered.

The Results

In the January fast and testimony meeting, Bishop Miner and Mike Spencer each recounted his version of having challenged the other to find someone for the missionaries to teach. Bishop Miner told how he hadn’t been successful in engaging anyone in a serious conversation about the church during the months of September and October. By mid-November as he began to fear that President Southwick was going to have to release him, he pinned his hopes on a particular work associate, who he thought was sure to be willing to take the discussions. He seemed open-minded, and his values seemed to mirror those of our church. It took several weeks for Bishop Miner to build the courage and find the right situation to extend the invitation. But when he invited the friend to come to his home to meet with the missionaries, the friend appreciatively declined, citing satisfaction with his present church. Bishop Miner was devastated, and spent the remainder of the day unproductively in his office, wondering how in the world, with the busy Christmas holidays approaching, he was ever going to find someone else.

As Bishop Miner prepared to leave for home that evening, an employee of the firm that cleaned his company offices, Jose Gutierrez, knocked on his door and asked permission to empty the trash. “Just then I got this feeling that I should talk to Jose,” Bishop Miner said. I asked him to sit down for a second, and asked how his family was. He expressed a real sadness that he was here in America alone, while his parents were in El Salvador. I told him that I thought he might be interested in the church I attend, because for many of us it constitutes a family-away-from-family, and just point-blank I asked him if he’d be willing to come to our home and let our missionaries introduce it to him. He said he’d love to; and we set an appointment on the spot.” Bishop Miner continued, “Driving home that night, I just couldn’t stop crying. I realized that I’d been quite judgmental in deciding who would and wouldn’t be interested in the church – and quite frankly, Jose had never even crossed my mind. Another reason I couldn’t stop crying is that I was so stunned that God actually kept His promise. Somehow I had come to expect that as a plain old member of the church, I would not see miracles in my life. I bear you my testimony that God keeps his promises. I set this date as a commitment to the Lord, just like Elder Ballard asked, and I did my part, by trying to open the door to a conversation about the gospel every time I could. What I learned is that we can’t predict whom we will find, but we can predict that God will help us find someone. The wonderful, peaceful spirit that comes into our home as the missionaries teach Jose and testify of Christ stays there all week. I am so grateful to Jose and to the missionaries for bringing this into our lives.”

In February’s Fast and Testimony meeting two members of the ward council, and three other ward members recounted inspiring experiences they had had in inviting someone to learn about the gospel. One of them said, in fact, that when he had heard Bishop Miner’s testimony the prior month, he thought, “If a man that busy can make this commitment, surely I can too.” The trend continued in subsequent months. Inspired by the examples of their fellow ward members, the courage to invite people into their homes to meet with the missionaries spread. The spirit that these experiences brought into their homes was evident in many ways.

Measuring the Success of the Wilmington Ward Mission

In the March Ward Council meeting, Mike Spencer wondered aloud, “Last year only two people were baptized in the ward. I wonder how many baptisms we’ll have this year.” Already, one young woman, a friend of a Laurel in the ward, had been baptized. Jose Gutierrez had also been baptized, though he attended the Spanish language ward in Somerville.

Bishop Miner broke in. “I hate to ‘manage by numbers.’ But I do think that success breeds success, and it’s important to be able to measure whether we’re succeeding. I don’t think baptisms are a good measure of the success of a ward mission, though. Many factors that influence baptism are beyond the ability of our members to influence. Jose’s baptism, for example, got recorded in the Somerville Spanish Ward and not the Wilmington Ward. Which of these ward missions succeeded? And Mike, the guy you invited to meet with the missionaries last December quit after the third discussion, if I remember. Did you fail? I don’t think so. You succeeded in giving him the opportunity, and he failed to make the right choice. I think the right measure of our success is the number of people that members of our ward introduce to the missionaries to be taught the gospel. Furthermore, we succeed when we keep doing the things in the ward mission plan, week after week – because it is those things that inspire members and give them the opportunities that lead to referrals. The ward mission plan is the process that leads to the result we want. Lots of good things are happening in the ward. Baptisms will follow.”

Accordingly, Mike began keeping a chart, reproduced on page 9, on which he measured the ward’s progress. The ward council had set a goal to inspire ward members to find 70 people for the missionaries to teach during the year. The dotted line on Mike’s chart traced the number of people the members needed to have found at any point, in order to be on track to meet the year’s goal. For example, it meant that by the end of June, they needed to have found 35 people, in order to meet the year’s goal of 70. Then every week during his correlation meeting with the full-time and ward missionaries, Mike added the number of new member referrals the missionaries had been able to teach that week to the previous total (this became the solid line on the chart). Mike would tape the chart on the bishop’s office wall at the beginning of each monthly ward council meeting, and the discussion focused around what more could be done to close the gap between what the ward council’s goal was, and the number of people that members of the ward actually had been able to find to that point. “This was a very, very valuable tool,” Mike reflected. Without this, nobody would have known how we were doing. This forced us to return and report to ourselves every month.”

One significant modification was made to the ward mission plan in June, when Mike’s chart showed that in May and the first two weeks of June there were significantly fewer referrals to the missionaries than in the prior months (as shown by the flattening of the solid line in his chart). “I’m afraid the low-hanging fruit has been picked,” he noted. “The most courageous members have already found one or two people, and are feeling like their job has been done for the year. We still haven’t reached 70% of the members. We need somehow to make sharing the gospel a way of life, not some sort of ‘program’ that has a beginning and end.”

“I’ve worried about the same thing,” noted Christine Quinn, the Relief Society President. “We need to call a special ward fast – on a Sunday other than Fast Sunday – to call down the blessings of heaven on our efforts. Bishop, you should send a letter to each family a few days before the fast, reminding them that we are not fasting for the success of the missionaries. We are fasting for ourselves, that we can be better missionaries. Making this a way of life for all members of the ward is a hard problem. We as leaders have done all that we can. I honestly believe that. We need to fast.”

The Council agreed, and one of the ward missionaries sent the reminder letter over Bishop Miner’s signature. In sacrament meeting on that Sunday, Katie Spencer, Mike’s youngest daughter, spoke about how it had made her feel to listen to the missionaries teach discussions to her father’s friend in their home. Bishop Miner invited Jose Gutierrez to visit the Wilmington Ward, and he spoke next. Christine Quinn concluded. She recounted how graciously her non-member neighbor had accepted her request to prepare a dinner for a ward member who had just had twins. “I asked her very apologetically, saying that I was too busy and really needed her help. She made me apologize for being apologetic! After she delivered the dinner she came over and asked if our church always did this. When I said yes, she said, ‘I understand now why every Mormon I meet seems so happy – because you’re always helping someone.’ She then made me promise to involve her every time we did this.”

Within a few weeks of the fast, several members who had not previously done so, invited the missionaries into their homes to teach someone. It required another fast in November, but that year members of the Wilmington Ward found 69 people for missionaries to teach. Convert baptisms in the ward rose from two in 1994 to six in 1995. In addition to those six, another three people who were referred to the missionaries by Wilmington Ward members were baptized in other wards.[2]

The Ward Council continued to implement and improve the ward mission plan, true to Mike Spencer’s desire that it be a living mechanism for addressing the reasons why members weren’t finding enough people for the missionaries to teach. The next year, ward members brought 74 people into their homes for the missionaries to teach, and the number of people baptized in the ward increased to twelve. Mike Spencer was called to the stake High Council after serving for two years as mission leader.

Lessons Learned

More than two years into the effort, President Southwick asked Bishop Miner to describe in a stake training meeting what he had learned as he and Mike Spencer led the effort to create and implement the Wilmington Ward mission plan. The following comments are taken from President Southwick’s notes of Bishop Miner’s presentation:

“We haven’t lost momentum when the ward mission leader or other ward leaders have been replaced. Because we have a plan that we’re checking up on in every meeting, we keep doing better.

“The spirit has changed our homes. Those of us who have had the missionaries into our home to teach people a few times now just can’t live without it. There is nothing that a parent can do that sets a stronger, more positive example for children than this. This has been an immeasurable blessing to our ward.

“The greatest leverage came not from taking more time, but from using the time in our Ward Council meetings more effectively. We previously used these meetings to go around the room asking each person in turn if he or she ‘had anything.’ When it came his turn, the ward mission leader typically told us the names of a few of investigators in the missionaries’ pipeline, and asked us to look out for them if they came to church. At best we were reactive. Now the ward mission plan provides a structure for discussion and problem solving. The ward leaders used to get involved when an investigator came to church. Now when the missionaries have taught a couple of discussions to someone, the Relief Society, Elders, or YM/YW president will take an assignment to visit the investigator and invite him or her to church.

“I actually did need to find extra time in my crowded bishop’s schedule to be a more active leader of the missionary effort. But my advice is to use that extra time personally to be a good missionary – to lead by example. The reason we’ve not been baptizing more people is not that we’ve lacked ward mission administrators. We need ward mission leaders, who have the faith that despite the limits on their time and bandwidth, they can find people for the missionaries to teach. The message you give to the members is, “If the bishop or Relief Society president can do it, we ought to be able to do it. It does take a lot of faith for busy leaders to commit to find someone for the missionaries to teach. But aren’t we men and women of faith?

“Once I fully understood the principles that Brother Jenson taught, inviting people to learn about the gospel became much less intimidating, and far less time-consuming, than it had seemed before. I really do think that many of our fears stem from believing what Brother Jenson called “false principles.” Teaching his principles to our members was one of the most effective – I would almost say liberating – things we have done.”

Appendix 1:

Principles for Sharing the Gospel: A Summary of Brother Jenson’s Talk

When the Prophet Joseph Smith was once asked how he governed such a widespread, growing organization, he explained that he strove to “teach the people correct principles, and then let them govern themselves.” This has indeed been a key to the church’s strength and growth. In contrast to the situation in other areas of church practice, however, most members of the church do not understand the correct principles by which they should conduct their member missionary efforts. In fact, most members approach opportunities to share the gospel as if the following six things are true:

1. We can judge in advance who is likely to be interested in learning about the gospel, and who will not be interested;

2. If we become close friends with someone, it will increase the likelihood that he or she will accept an invitation to learn more about the church;

3. People have chosen to attend or belong to their church because its doctrine makes the most sense to them;

4. Most people feel like they need help in important dimensions of their life;

5. If we do not convince another person to join our church, we have failed as missionaries to that person; and

6. If we’re too busy to share the gospel today, we can do it tomorrow when we’ll be less busy.

After a moment’s reflection we can see that these statements cannot be true; and yet most members act as if they are. Most of us choose one or more people or families (people whose lifestyles and values seem similar to ours), and then “work with” them – trying to deepen a relationship – as a prerequisite to inviting them to learn about the church. In so doing, we choose not to “work with” others, whom we judge less likely to be interested. When asked, “Tell me about the Mormon church,” most members will describe our most important doctrines, and then describe how much the church will help the person who inquired. Because we approach sharing the gospel in a wrong-headed way, missionary work has become an uncomfortable, time-consuming, frustrating and unproductive experience for most members. We know we should do it, but it seems daunting and time-consuming, and we are not confident that we can succeed.

If members are taught correct principles and share the gospel accordingly, however, missionary work can be a delightful, non-threatening experience. Brother Jenson proposed these “true” principles” that should guide our missionary efforts.

1. No one can tell in advance who is and is not prepared to receive the gospel. Only the Lord knows this. This means that we need to discuss the gospel in an honest, open and non-judgmental way with many people, in order to find those who will accept our invitation. Often, people who currently don’t look or behave like “ideal” Mormons are likely to be interested. Their interest is driven by the circumstances in their lives. This means that people who decline at one point can become interested at another.

2. The notion that we should prayerfully select someone and then deepen our relationship with that person as a prerequisite to inviting him or her to learn about the gospel is false, deceptive and time-consuming. There are no pre-requisite social engagements that must precede invitations to learn about the gospel. You should be friends with people you naturally want to be friends with; and you should invite everybody to learn about the gospel of Jesus Christ. The friendships that help new converts to remain active are often cemented during the missionary discussions. They need not be in place beforehand.

3. Most people know and care little about the specific doctrines of the church they attend. They select a church for social reasons – its youth ministry or its choir, for example. Others choose a church because they want to feel a deeper purpose in their lives; and some are motivated to solve a personal or family problem. When we have the chance to tell people about our church, therefore, we should save our instinctive doctrinal response until the missionary discussions. Initially, we should instead describe the sorts of benefits our church offers that align with what most people are seeking.

4. Most people are quite comfortable with their lives because they don’t know what they’re missing. Therefore, when we try to interest them in the church by asserting that it will make them happier, it doesn’t connect with what they feel that they need. Many “comfortable” people have a deeper need to give help than to receive it. One of the most effective ways to introduce the church to them is to invite them to work or serve with us in the church or in one of its activities. For members and non-members alike, service builds a sense of being needed. Because we feel the Spirit when we serve in God’s kingdom, this can help non-members see that something has been missing from their lives.

5. Success in member missionary work isn’t baptism. We’ve succeeded when we’ve given someone the opportunity to feel God’s love and our love, and to feel the Spirit. Their job is to accept the truth. Everyone has free agency, but they can’t exercise it unless we give them the opportunity. It’s easy to use LDS-related words in most conversations. These serve as a signal that we’re LDS, and they that create opportunities for people we’re speaking with to choose to have a conversation about the church. Most people won’t pick up on the opportunity, but a few will. A few of these will accept an invitation to learn more, and a few of these will be baptized. When we create these opportunities for others to choose, we have succeeded.

Deadlines are a big help in causing us to do what needs to be done in church service. This is why Elder M. Russell Ballard asked us to set a date regularly as a commitment to the Lord. He challenged us not to pick a person (consistent with principle #1 above), but to set a date, and then to commit to God that we will speak about the church with as many people as we can. Elder Ballard said that when we do our part, God will bless us to intersect with someone before that date, who will accept our invitation to hear the missionary discussions. We should set a date in this way at least once each year. In the other two parts of the church’s three-fold mission, we set deadlines for ourselves. We do home and visiting teaching by the end of the month. Even without an official church mandate, many members have found that setting a personal goal of attending the temple one or more times per month, helps them fulfill that responsibility more faithfully. We need to do this with the missionary dimension of our church’s mission.

[1] A copy of Sister Ford’s lessons is available in electronic form from cmc@hbs.edu.

[2] Mike knew that some ward members would find people who lived beyond the ward’s boundaries, who accepted an invitation to meet with the missionaries. To collect this information, “We as ward missionaries just had to keep our ears to the ground, and kept asking members about their efforts to share the gospel.” Mike felt that keeping track of the work that ward members were doing with people outside the Wilmington Ward’s boundaries was critical to keeping his ward missionaries and the members feeling that they were succeeding in the work.

My Ways Are Not Your Ways

2008-11-10T20:37:00.000-08:00

Many of the Savior’s most profound teachings are counter-intuitive to the natural man. For instance, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you” (Matthew 5:44) is a counter-intuitive strategy that few experts on international relations, negotiation and arbitration would employ. The solutions that our natural minds are prone to develop are often very different from those that the Lord would have us pursue. “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.” (Isaiah 55:8 - 9)

The purpose of this essay is to suggest that when we as a church its leaders, seem “stuck” and cannot make progress against a critical challenge, the reason often is that our solutions are grounded in the wisdom of men – which is foolishness to God (I Cor. 3:19). In the following sections I will highlight five of the Savior’s teachings that seem counter-intuitive to the wisdom of men, but which might hold the key to our solving some of the problems that keep the church and its saints from growing stronger.

1. “For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel’s the same shall save it.” (Mark 8:35)

The Savior’s formula for how to convert our hearts to His cause is unambiguous – He instructs us to lose our lives in His service. When church leaders seek to give church callings to members whose commitment to the gospel is weak, they instinctively are following this advice. For example, when Hugh B. Brown was stake president in southern Alberta he called a less-active cigar-smoking man to be a bishop. The man waved his cigar and said, “Hell, with this?” President Brown countered, “Hell no, without it!” The man became an outstanding and committed bishop.[1] We all know stories like this. Less-active members don’t always accept the opportunities we offer them to lose their lives, but when they accept, the result almost invariably is that they find their spiritual direction.

We recently learned that about 12% of the male members of the church of missionary age in the Northeast actually serve missions – a smaller fraction than in any other area in North America. Mission presidents find that many of the young men who accept mission calls are not prepared for the rigors of the work or to teach the gospel with competence and conviction. We’re trying to “raise the bar” to ease the burden on mission presidents – but this doesn’t solve the underlying problem that we’re preparing only a small fraction of the young men on our membership rolls to become committed, capable, courageous missionaries. And the rigors of this work are likely to become harder, not easier, in the future.

Why are we doing so poorly in this crucial mission of preparing more of our young men to be better missionaries? One reason may be that the focus of many of our leaders is to help our youth “find” their lives. We define a strong youth program as one with a large “critical mass” of youth, with engaging, well-planned weekly activities and opportunities for LDS friendships. These are good things to have; I do not argue against them. But while we work so hard to provide enriching experiences for our youth, we often deny them of the most important opportunity of all – the chance to lose their lives for the sake of the gospel.

Some church leaders have observed a statistical correlation: the larger the size of a ward (and its youth program), the larger the proportion of youth who serve missions and marry in the temple. I suspect that this is correlation and not causality, however: it may appear this way because large units have more strong families than small ones. In families where the parents are sacrificing to live the gospel and serve in the Kingdom, generally their children also receive ample opportunities to lose their own lives for the sake of the Savior, from their earliest years. I think that if we look closely, however, we will generally see that our “strong” wards don’t do much better than “weak” ones at transforming youth whose home environments don’t prioritize the gospel. That’s because our leaders typically employ fun, interesting activities as the primary means of attracting and strengthening these at-risk young people. They rarely devise ways to help these young people lose their lives for the sake of the gospel.

I recently asked a stake young women’s president who lives in a small branch in New York whether she had a hard time keeping her girls active, given the lack of a “critical mass” in some branches in her stake. I’ll paraphrase her response: “Whether they become strong in the Church has nothing to do with how many girls there are in the ward or branch. What matters is whether they grow up learning to love serving God. I grew up in a little branch in West Virginia. When I was 12 our branch organist moved, and though I could barely play the piano, I was called to be the branch pianist. I practiced those hymns and went to sacrament meeting because the branch needed me. I was called to teach primary when I was 15. I grew to love those kids. Do you think I’d have missed church or done something that would have been a bad example for them? Never. They needed me, and as I served, my testimony became strong.”

Children whose family life provides them many opportunities to lose their lives for the sake of the Gospel generally aren’t those at risk.[2] The youth whose lives we need to influence are those who do not live in environments where they systematically have opportunities to lose their lives for the sake of the Savior. A strong youth program isn’t one that coddles these at-risk youth. Rather, it will give them chances to sacrifice in the service of God, so that they feel needed in the Church and so that they feel the spirit as they serve.

I suspect that if we gathered the statistics, they would show that a large percentage of our young men and women who go to BYU or another college with an institute program when they finish high school stay active in the Church; whereas a large portion of those whose intent is to stay at or near home as young working adults fall away from the Church after high school. There is a treacherous crevasse in the local transition from the YM-YW programs into Elders Quorum and Relief Society. Why? I think that our approach of seeking to strengthen our youth by helping them find their lives as teen-agers might be part of the problem. If the reason for coming to church between ages 12 and 18 is fellowship and fun for these at-risk young people, then Relief Society and Elders Quorum are quite a shock: they aren’t very fun. The burden of adult discipleship looms heavy if they have never shouldered the Savior’s yoke before, and they opt out of the Church. The Savior’s message, “For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:30), runs counter to the wisdom of man. I think we might be more effective at building the faith of at-risk young people, so that more of them will serve missions and become faithful adults, if our ward leaders are trained to spot the riskiness of their situation when they are aged 14 or so, and invite them to try the yoke on – not in once-a-year service projects, but weekly pulling side-by-side with other adults in callings where they will feel the spirit as they do the work of the Lord.

Our struggle to keep our young people strong is just one example of how adhering to the wisdom of man is blocking our progress in building the Kingdom of God. We need to apply God’s wisdom of inviting people to lose their lives for the sake of the Savior to other challenges as well – such as strengthening less-active members, bringing non-member spouses into the fold, and in doing member missionary work.

2. “How think ye? If a man have an hundred sheep, and one of them be gone astray, doth he not leave the ninety and nine, and goeth into the mountains, and seeketh that which is gone astray? ...” (Matthew 18:12 - 13)

The Savior says here that the instinct of good shepherds is to go after the individual sheep who are lost. Yet we frequently count and focus upon the ninety and nine, leaving those who are lost to continue wandering from the Church. I’ll just focus on two instances of this proclivity.

In every sacrament meeting our clerks count the number of people who are there. This is a useful way to measure whether our efforts in the past to encourage members to faithfully attend their meetings have yielded fruit. But it provides no guidance about what our shepherds should do in the future. Much more useful information for the clerk to collect would be a list of the individual members who could have been in the fold on that Sunday, but didn’t come.

My friend Reed Wilcox, who served as mission president in the south of France, instituted a practice like this in each of the branches in the mission district that he oversaw. At the end of the Sunday meetings, the branch council and missionaries huddled briefly, assembling a list of members and investigators who could have been there but didn’t come. They each took an assignment to contact one of those individuals that same day with this message: “We sure missed you today. Are you ok? It’s just not the same for the rest of us when you can’t come. Is there anything I can do to help? Can we get together this week?” Within two years, sacrament meeting attendance in the district increased from 540 to 725 – and this was in the south of France, where baptisms are as rare as a drink of ice water in the desert. Listing the individuals who are not there, in addition to counting the number of sheep who are, would be a simple practice for every ward and branch to institute. Its effect could be extraordinary.

There was a Sunday in the life of each inactive member when he or she did not return to the fold, and the shepherds there didn’t notice. Principle #5 below asserts that great things proceed from little things. The kingdom of God is built one person at a time.[3]

There is another manifestation of our proclivity to count the ninety and nine, which I’ll illustrate with a story. In 1978 in the Cambridge First Ward we had a group of about 20 Spanish-speaking members who had their own Sunday School class. As ward leaders, we all hoped that the group could grow to the point that they could become a free-standing Spanish branch, but progress was slow. In one PEC after we had discussed for 45 minutes what we could do to help the Spanish group, Steve Wheelwright interjected, “I never remember our having discussions about strengthening the English-speaking members of the ward. We always consider them as individuals. Why are we trying to help these people as a monolithic group?” His comment changed our approach. We listed on the board the six individuals or couples who we felt might become the leaders of an independent Spanish branch. We then released our six best home and visiting teachers from their other assignments, and charged them with helping these individuals to become worthy, committed and capable enough to lead this branch effectively. The branch was organized less than a year later.

When we find ourselves using terms such as single sisters, we are doing the same thing – focusing on the monolith of the ninety and nine, not the individual. Perhaps one reason why married couples and families feel like they fit in the church is that as leaders we never have discussions about how to meet the needs of the married members. We discuss how to help them as individuals. Yet we often refer to those who are single as a group. In my last three stake conference visits I asked the stake Relief Society presidency to join my meeting with the stake presidency, bringing a listing of each unmarried adult woman in the stake. The lists were long – between 40 and 50% of the female adult members were single. I asked them to indicate whether each individual was fully active, attended occasionally, or not at all. I also asked them to list the calling that each of the single women held. Across the three stakes, only 17% of the single women were fully active, whereas 63% of the married women were active. Married women held 95% of the positions in ward and stake auxiliary presidencies. This is a horrible indictment of church leaders whom the Savior has repeatedly charged with caring for the widows and orphans.

I suspect that the greatest need of these single women is not for more and better singles conferences, but instead to feel that as individuals, their service, instruction and leadership is important to everyone in the ward.[4] As I note below, another of the Savior’s seemingly contradictory statements supports this view: “Out of small things proceedeth that which is great” (D&C 64:33). We are prone to think that the best way to help a large group of members, such as singles or inactives, is to create a big program to help them all at once. The small, person-by-person treatment of every member of the Church as an individual is what truly will yield great things.

3. “The weak things of the world shall come forth and break down the mighty and strong ones, that man should not … trust in the arm of flesh.” (D&C 1:19)

One of our greatest laments is that many of our wards and branches suffer from inadequate priesthood leadership. The reason for weak leadership, however, is that in most units, we rely on the most committed, capable, qualified people to fill the key positions in which personal growth can occur. When a branch is just emerging and there are no alternatives, leaders are forced to conscript the maimed, halt and blind; beg them to assume important responsibility; and give them the opportunity to grow. During such periods, the branch and the individuals within it grow in exciting ways. Almost always, however, there comes a point when a group of committed, qualified members and leaders has coalesced; and when there are capable people like these to rely upon to ensure that the programs of the Church run efficiently, we often stop drafting people from the periphery of capability into the positions of responsibility in which they can grow. Because these simple and weak people are manifestly not as capable as those in the experienced core, we leave them on the periphery. We might say that wards and branches in this situation suffer from the “STP Syndrome” (Same Ten People). They lack leadership bench strength because the coach only plays the starters; and ultimately the starters get tired.

The Lord has rarely used an STP strategy when He personally has directed the staffing of the Kingdom. His statement in D&C 1:19,23 that He would build the Kingdom on the backs of the simple and weak, was not a temporary stop-gap staffing plan to tide the Church over during its early years until enough experienced, committed, qualified leaders had arrived on the scene. He deliberately weakened Gideon’s army so that Israel wouldn’t get confused about whose power had led them to victory (Judges 6,7). None of His original Twelve had evidenced adequate experience or commitment when He called them. Enoch (Moses 6:26,27,31,32), Moses (Exodus 3:11,13; 4:1,10); Samuel (I Samuel 3:1-11); David (I Samuel 16); Jeremiah (Jeremiah 1:4-6), Amos (Amos 7:14-15) and Joseph Smith were manifestly unqualified when the Lord put them to work. Later, as He did with Saul, God transformed them into capable, inspiring leaders (I Samuel 10:1, 6, 9). In teaching the Nephites, Christ did some of the teaching Himself, of course. But He chose to deliver the greatest and most marvelous truths by training the children; and then stepping back to let the children teach the parents (3 Ne. 26:13-14).

We will build much greater priesthood strength in our wards and branches when we stop relying on the strong – when the experienced and most talented of our leaders are called to stand aside, and assume roles of training and supporting those who need to become strong while they serve in positions into which they can grow.

4. “Ye must repent … and become as a little child, or ye can in nowise inherit the kingdom of God.” (3 Nephi 11:38)

Few of the Savior’s statements are as counter-intuitive vs. the wisdom of man as this one – which invites us to abandon much of what we have learned about the possible and impossible, and to trust in God as innocently and naively as little children trust their parents. An important factor that restrains the Church’s progress is the failure of many of our best and busiest priesthood leaders to do this. Because they are so very busy in their assignments in bishoprics and stake presidencies, they have, de facto, exempted themselves from commandments such as member missionary and family history work that loom quite rationally as impossibly time-consuming. I’m afraid that when Moroni foresaw that many in the last days would believe that God had ceased to be a God of miracles (Mormon 9:15-20; Moroni 7:27-37), he might have had not just Catholics and Protestants in his view, but some of us as well.

Elder M. Russell Ballard once speculated to me in a personal conversation why his 1984 invitation that we select a date as part of a commitment to the Lord to speak about the Gospel to many people, has had so little effect on the pace of member missionary work in the Church. He asked me to imagine whether a bishop who had stopped paying his tithing would choose to stand before his ward members and preach a sermon on tithing. He wouldn’t. He would choose instead to speak on a topic that he could address without hypocrisy. He said that although the members of the First Presidency and the Twelve speak with urgency about the need to lengthen our member-missionary strides, the chain of follow-through breaks because most members of stake presidencies and bishoprics are not good member missionaries themselves. They have quite rationally exempted themselves from keeping this commandment because they are doing so much to serve in the Church that they just don’t have the time and bandwidth to be missionaries as well. When they have opportunities to speak to and counsel with their members, they therefore choose to emphasize other dimensions of the gospel. Our leadership ranks are filled with men and women who can administrate the mechanics of missionary meetings just fine. But because they cannot speak in present tense verbs and first-person pronouns about finding people for the missionaries to teach, they cannot lead this work effectively.

The busy-ness of our leaders is a cold and incontrovertible fact. In the face of this, the wisdom of men dictates that “something has to go” – and often it is missionary work because it looms as difficult and time-consuming.[5] The only way that ward and stake officers can become leaders is to fast and pray in faith that God will bless them regularly with miracles – that He will put people in their path who will accept their invitation to come into their homes to study with the missionaries. I have learned through repeated experience that this is true. When I have been tempted to excuse myself from missionary work because of my schedule, I am grateful that instead I have fasted and prayed for miracles. I testify that we all intersect regularly with people who will accept our invitations. As soon as God trusts that we will invite them to learn and accept His gospel, He will prompt them to come to our offices, stand next to us in lines, and sit in the next seat. When God can trust us, we can trust that He will bless us in miraculous ways to be exemplary leaders.

5. “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” (Matthew 25:40) “Out of small things proceedeth that which is great.” (D&C 64:33)

This fifth contradiction is related to the second and third above. It tells us that the small things are the big things – and yet we often behave as if this were not true. For example, in our heads we know that there should be no hierarchy in church callings. Most members can quote J. Reuben Clark’s statement that it is not where we serve, but how. Nonetheless, there are many in the Church who feel inferior for never having served in presidencies or bishoprics; and others who repeatedly serve in leadership positions and feel confident in the value of their contributions because of it.

I have written and spoken elsewhere about a personal experience, when I was “passed over,” and an important leadership calling, which somehow I had felt in line to receive, was given to another man instead. In the crisis of self-confidence that ensued, I ultimately realized that the way God would measure my life was not by the numbers of people over whom I had presided, but by the individual people whose lives I had touched with my love and God’s love, and with the gospel of Jesus Christ. With this sense of my most important calling, I began to fast weekly and pray daily that God would give me opportunities to bless and help people who needed it. As I acted upon the promptings that I received, it was as if God spoke to me more and more often, because He knew I was listening. It proved to be the period in my life of the most extraordinary spiritual growth; and many people received the blessings of God as a result. There is a calling far higher than that of stake president, bishop or Relief Society president. It is to be a Christian.

I have subsequently come to know three wards whose cultures seem to inspire their members to seek to do many small things, especially for the least of their brethren and sisters – and where great things have resulted. While the wards surrounding them struggle to baptize a few people in a year, these three wards each baptize twenty to thirty – and most of these remain faithful. The only way I can explain it is that God seems to trust these wards. Whenever someone new walks into these three chapels, they feel instantly loved. When they accept baptism, they have friends, responsibilities, and nourishment in the good word of God. I don’t think that there are more “prepared” people living within the boundaries of these three wards than are living in neighboring wards. One ward is in Ireland; one in rural northern New England; and one in a comfortably affluent suburb of a major eastern city. I think the difference is that God trusts these three wards. He knows that when His children pray to Him for help and guidance, He can put them in the path of missionaries and members, or prompt them to go directly to the church, knowing that they will feel His love and His spirit when they arrive.

I think it quite possible that if we called more of the humble and weak to positions of responsibility, released many of our most experienced and committed leaders out of the STP group noted above, and “promoted” them to be full-time Christians whose job was to bring the love and blessings of God to those of His children who need them, great things would result.

[1] This is recounted in Firmage, Ed, An Abundant Life.

[2] A recent survey that Elder H. Bryan Richards discussed with me showed that 92% of the missionaries currently serving came from families where both parents are strong, committed members.

[3] … I will take you one of a city, and two of a family, and I will bring you to Zion (Jeremiah 3:14).

[4] Last year I also attended the conference of the Potsdam District – the collection of branches along the St. Lawrence Seaway in northern New York. Interestingly, in that environment where leaders were desperate for every individual member they could find to serve in their branches, there is no difference in the activity rates of single and married women – even though they don’t have singles conferences.

[5] As we have noted elsewhere, this isn’t the case. It looms this way when they follow false principles of member missionary work.

Perfecting Imperfect Home Teaching Percentages

2008-11-09T20:40:00.000-08:00

On an October Sunday in 2003, Tom Kelly, president of the Simsbury Connecticut Stake, grimaced as he and his presidency examined their latest quarterly report. “I don’t know what to do about home teaching,” he mused. “Once in a while we find an on-fire elders quorum president who holds good PPIs and won’t get off the phone until home teaching gets done. But then he moves, wears out, or joins the bishopric, and home teaching falls right back down. Look at the Wallingford Ward. Three months after we called Gary Gessell to be Elders Quorum president home teaching went from 30% to 80%. Then Bishop Kolts called Gary to be his counselor, and look here – last quarter they did 34%. We’ve made some progress in perfecting the saints of the Simsbury Stake, but we’ve sure not done it through home teaching.”

President Kelly continued, “My problem is that I don’t know how to solve this problem. We never got it above 50% when I was bishop. And the other stake presidents around here don’t have much to teach us. Look at this data from our last Coordinating Council meeting for all the wards and branches in New England. Some stakes do better than others, but only one visits even 40% of their families. On average, they’re all doing as poorly as we are.”

Home Teaching Percentages in the 13 New England Stakes, Quarters 3 & 4, 2004

This case is a synthesis of the experiences of leaders in the Murrieta CA Stake, the Cambridge II Ward of the Cambridge MA Stake, and the Saratoga Ward of the Albany NY Stake. It has been written to facilitate discussions about how we might better lead the home teaching effort.

“One of our area seventies told us about wards in Vermont, Massachusetts and Ireland that keep baptizing lots of good people,” President Kelly said. “As he studied what they were doing to bring so many people into the church, he sensed that these were wards that God trusted. People who joined the church in those wards came from different walks of life. Some were member referrals, missionaries found some, and others found the church on their own. But all reported that the minute they walked in the door of the chapel, they felt surrounded by love – and the feeling that they had “come home” never left them. It seemed somehow that God had decided that if He moved upon people in those wards’ areas to get to the door of the church, He could trust that the ward would nurture them the rest of the way.

“Can God trust the wards in the Simsbury Stake? We baptize about 70 people every year. Ten years ago sacrament meeting attendance in the stake was about 1,100. The latest report I saw put total attendance at about 1,250. Normal population growth at 1% would have taken us to 1,200. That means, roughly, that we’ve baptized 700 people, and only a small fraction of these are attending sacrament meeting today. Can the Lord lead new members to us and trust that the members of our wards will nourish them so that the spirit will transform them into committed, converted saints? With 30% home teaching and a miserable retention record, I don’t think so. Why would the Lord have His spirit move upon the people of this area to seek the covenants of baptism when there’s such a high probability that they will fall away?”

First counselor Bill Marble stood, and while pacing the room proposed, “We need to dig deeper than just telling our bishops that they need to do a better job home teaching. When we lived in Minneapolis, I was on a governor’s task force on productivity in government with the CEO of Dayton Hudson. At our first meeting he said, ‘Inventory turnover in retailing is very important. But when one of our store managers tries to “do” turnover, his store quickly becomes unprofitable. Turnover is something that happens when we concentrate on getting more basic fundamentals right.’ I wonder whether home teaching is the same thing,” President Marble wondered. “If we concentrate on “doing” home teaching, we don’t get traction. Maybe there are some structural fundamentals that none of us are getting right – and if we figure them out, home teaching will happen.

Second counselor Doug Porter added, “Some say that home teachers who don’t magnify their callings just aren’t converted – and the solution is that we need to get them to be more deeply converted. Whether this reasoning is fundamental or glib, it sure puts us in a chicken-and-egg bind. How can we help more of our home teachers become more deeply converted, if their own home teachers aren’t converted enough to help them become more converted?”

“I hate to end such a philosophical discussion, but we’ve got to get to the Avon Ward conference.” Rick Parks, the stake clerk, said. “I think we should focus our next high council meeting on figuring this out.” Parks, a data analyst by profession, continued, “As a general rule, when you see some units doing well and some doing poorly, you can solve the problem by “conversion,” broadly defined – by finding leaders who are more converted, or somehow by training and motivating those who aren’t succeeding, to do better. But when you see something like this – where almost every leader is struggling to succeed – you can’t pin your hopes on urging the leaders to work harder and do better, or to get themselves converted. There’s just got to be something fundamental about the way we’ve defined and structured home teaching as a system that isn’t right.”

On the second Thursday in November, President Kelly convened an unusual high council meeting – unusual because it focused on one issue, and because it focused on understanding a problem, rather than solving it. They began by giving each man 3” x 5” post-it notes, and asking each to write on the first sheet what he felt to be the most important reason why home teaching in the stake wasn’t getting done consistently or well. They were asked to write the next-most-important reason on their second sheet, and so on, up to five. President Kelly then asked the junior member of the council to stick the post-it with his most important cause on the center of a flip-chart, and to explain his reasoning to the rest of the group. He then asked if any other members had identified a similar cause; and when several hands were raised, he asked them to explain their reasoning and to put their post-its on the same chart. He then taped that chart to the wall, and asked the next councilman to place the most important of the causes remaining on his set of post-its on another flip-chart, and explain his reasoning. Others who had identified the same problem were invited to explain and post what they had written onto the flip-chart, and so on, until the causes on every post-it note had been considered. They comprised six flip charts. “What we did,” Rick Parks explained, “was getting what everyone had been thinking out of their heads and onto paper; and then grouping similar ideas together.”

President Kelly then assigned a chart to each of six sub-groups. The group members then re-read the descriptions of the particular problem that had been posted on their chart, and summarized those statements into a single sentence. Each group then read its summary statement to the others, to be sure that in summarizing they had not lost any of the important meaning that the individuals who had contributed an idea to that chart had intended.

Once these causes of the stake’s home teaching malaise had been defined, President Kelly asked each group to consider whether the summary statement they had drafted might be a manifestation of an even deeper root cause for why home teaching wasn’t being done well; and if so, to state what that root cause might be. Each group then reported to the rest of the group. The list below is their summary of the six reasons why home teaching wasn’t being done consistently and effectively in the Simsbury Stake.

Issue 1) Most home teachers really don’t think home teaching is important, when compared with other demands on their time.

Response 1) They perceive it right: home teaching actually isn’t important to many of the families they visit. Most inactive ones don’t want the visit at all. Most active families view home teachers as a backstop; their well-being doesn’t hinge on the monthly visit.

Issue 2) We get what we measure. Reporting percent visited perversely influences most home teachers’ approach to the job.

Response 2) We report percent because it is an easy, standardized measurement. Measures of the kinds of actions that we want home teachers to do are hard to quantify and standardize.

Issue 3) Whereas many callings require service on a regular schedule, home teaching can be scheduled at any time. It is easy to postpone.

Response 3) We have never asked or required any of our home teachers to schedule in advance when they will do this work.

Issue 4) Many home teachers don’t know how to be effective.

Response 4) Because home teaching is rarely done well, most of us have learned from poor role models.

Issue 5) We collect reports, but home teachers aren’t accountable – there are no consequences for failure.

Response 5) It takes time and energy to hold people accountable. We fail as stake officers to hold bishops and elders quorum presidents accountable for good home teaching.

Issue 6) The burden is too heavy in most units – visiting 6-8 families per month is impossible.

Response 6) Our missionary work and youth programs are feeding inactive members onto our home teaching rolls at a faster rate than they are giving us dependable home teachers.

Developing this consensus about the cause of the stake’s home teaching malaise took the entire meeting. At its conclusion, President Kelly announced that the next meeting, two weeks hence, would have a similarly focused agenda – how to address the root causes of this problem. He asked the six groups to prepare by meeting in the interim with the other members of their group, and devising possible solutions to the problem on their chart. They were to present their ideas at the next meeting. The only constraint, President Kelly said, was that home teaching was to be the primary means through which priesthood leaders worked to perfect the saints. “There are no other sacred cows. Everything else, as it is now practiced, is up for debate.”

In addition to holding this discussion with the high council, President Kelly solicited the bishops’ inputs at their training meeting the following week. The bishops fundamentally agreed with the high council’s diagnosis of the causes of poor home teaching.

Proposed Solutions to the Causes of Poor Home Teaching

At the next high council meeting, President Kelly asked a spokesman from each of the sub-groups to present their recommendations about what might be done to solve the problems.

Addressing the Importance of Home Teaching

High councilman Darcy Mott led off with his group’s proposal for the problem they had been assigned, that home teaching as it was currently structured and practiced actually wasn’t important to most people (#1 on the chart above). “When something is at stake, people are motivated to do things. Things slip when nothing is at stake. We can’t lick this problem by convincing our brethren that home teaching really is important. We have to change the structure of the system so that it is important.”

Brother Mott continued, “Realistically, home teaching is important to a subset of members and their home teachers. A lot is at stake for new members, newly reactivated members, members whose non-member spouses are friendly to the church, and some single adult members. It isn’t important to inactive families that are antagonistic towards the church. It’s less important to many of our strongest families – they ought to need it, but if home teachers don’t visit, they seem to do just fine.” We have an eternal perspective and can easily say that it is important to all these people. But if they don’t feel its importance, most people won’t act.

“President, you told us to think outside of the box, so here goes,” Mott continued. “We propose that we organize home teaching by stake-wide districts. People in districts 1 & 2 will be people for whom home teaching is in fact important. Those in District 1 could be members who were baptized or reactivated within the last four months, as well as progressing investigators. Missionary work is really home teaching to investigators; and because of this, we should staff district 1 with ward missionaries – which means most wards will need to call a few more. Our goal should be to visit 100% of members in District 1 not every month, but every week. The reason is that new members just can’t go from almost daily visits by missionaries to monthly visits from home teachers. This is a big transition.

Weekly visits for four months might seem like overkill – but it really isn’t. The first three visits after baptism they should be helping to get them to the temple to be baptized for their own family members; and then they need five weeks for the new member lessons. They should teach new members how to succeed in their first calling; and men need to be taught about the priesthood. They ought to teach them how to study the scriptures and pray, and they should follow through to be sure this becomes a habit. Each new member ought to invite a family member or friend to begin taking the missionary discussions – not just for the good of the new investigator, but for the new member. There’s plenty to do.

“Four groups of members could be assigned to District 2,” Mott proposed: “The first are those we will call “maturing members.” They have “graduated” from District 1, were baptized or reactivated between 5 and 24 months ago, but haven’t yet been endowed. The second are part-member and less-active families where we sense potential; and third, single adult members who are fully active or attend occasionally. Fourth are other families with special needs or concerns. District 2 should be staffed with the most reliable home teachers in our wards, and we should visit 100% of these people every month.”

Another high council member, Lee Curtis, interjected, “How can you expect home teachers to visit 100% of these people every month, let alone every week, when we only visit 30% in the stake?”

Mott responded, “If people have a responsibility that they regard as important, where they are indispensable to the people they serve, they will do it. We think that the job of home teachers to this group of people can be structured or redefined so that the home teachers feel indispensable. And look at it the other way. We average 30% home teaching every month. Most of it is done by home teachers who are in fact faithful and reliable. We’re just saying that we ought to focus our best on the people who we absolutely can’t miss.”

Jeff Burr, another member of Mott’s group, pitched in. “President Monson once described a sanity test. Take someone to a tub full of water, into which water is flowing rapidly, and tell them to empty it. An insane person will start bailing water out of the tub. A sane person will first shut off the water flowing into the tub, and then bail the water out. Brethren, by this test we are insane. Remember the statistics President Kelly told us about how slowly sacrament meeting attendance is growing relative to the number of baptisms in our stake? Our converts are pouring into the tub of inactive members that President Monson talked about. The sane approach to a situation where we don’t have enough energy to home teach everybody is at least to shut off what is flowing into the tub. If we can do this, it will go a long way to our becoming a stake that God can trust.”

“So what about everyone else?” President Kelly asked. “How do we get them visited?”

“That’s where District 3 comes in,” Mott replied, “The members in District 3 would be the most faithful, reliable families. We’d put the least reliable home teachers in District 3, but the assignments would work in reverse. It would be the District 3 families’ responsibility to call their home teacher every month and say, ‘Brother Brown, we need a home teacher’s visit. When can you come?’ You know how some priesthood leaders will call their less-reliable home teachers towards the end of the month to be sure they do it? We won’t have the quorum leaders call the home teachers. They’ll call the home teachees, asking if they have invited their home teacher to come. We, as members in District 3, need to figure out how to make these visits important to us – a dimension of the gospel that we need to improve upon. We then get our home teachers to hold us accountable. If a home teacher in District 2 misses for more than two months, he should be reassigned to District 3 for remedial work.

“And District 4 would be everybody else – active and inactive members.” Burr concluded. “Some of the inactive families that get assigned to District 4 aren’t really in the ward any more – but because we have done so poorly in home teaching we just don’t know when people move. So a key task for District 4 will be keep an accurate record of members. We recommend asking the missionaries to help us with this. They will find opportunities to bring some of these back to the church; to meet other members of their families; and so on.

“Finally, District 5. It will be a holding tank for do-not-contact and lost members.”

Solutions to Problem #2: We Measure the Wrong Thing

High councilman Bruce Call then summarized his group’s assessment of cause #2 – measurement of percentage visited. “This is a pernicious problem,” he began. “Whether it’s business, school or church, we get what we measure. We ask for a visit, at best we get a visit. This fuels the problem that it doesn’t seem to be important. What’s worse, we choose this measure because it’s “accurate.” But it’s full of fudge. Take me, for example. There are times when I go months without a call from my high priests leader asking for a home teaching report – and yet I know he’s turning in a number every month. I’m a good home teacher, but I miss some – and I bet he’s just assuming that I do 100%.

“The fact that we tolerate fudged data year after year should set us free from the visit-no-visit measure. It’s not accurate anyway. We should start measuring the behavior that we want,” Call continued. “Instead of asking if I “did” my home teaching, my group leader should ask, “What did you do this month to strengthen the faith of this family, or bless their lives?” After I report, then he could ask, ‘What do you plan to do in the coming month to strengthen their faith and bless their lives?’ Then when he calls next month, he’d ask how I followed through on my plan. If we get what we measure, doing something like this would help us make home teaching more important in every one of the districts.”

Scheduling When Home Teaching Will Be Done

The third group’s leader, Doug Romney, reported: “Most members have committed to fulfill their church callings at a regular time each week. Sunday School and Primary teachers commit to prepare and teach a lesson at the same time each Sunday. YM and YW advisers commit to serve every Tuesday night. Financial clerks count donations after church. The fact that these are scheduled helps them get it done. So if home teaching is easy to postpone, let’s ask each home teacher to set a fixed time every month with each of their families, and to block these times out on their calendars a year in advance. Almost every busy person we know who gets to the temple regularly does this. Why not do it for home teaching? When quorum presidencies get December’s home teaching reports in early January, they can ask each home teacher what time they’ve set each month to visit each of their families. For those that haven’t done it by then, they can just keep asking.

Let me adapt this proposal to Jeff and Darcy’s District 1 idea. We should ask ward missionaries to declare and reserve one or more regular blocks of time every week, as the time when they will serve as ward missionaries. This could be Wednesday evening, Sunday afternoon, or whenever – but the same time every week. Most ward missionaries are adrift in their callings, just like stake missionaries were – there’s no structure to their work, no specific responsibility. If this time is reserved, then they’ll need to find something productive to do during this time – and they’ll get the home teaching done for the people in District 1. If these things are the responsibility of ward missionaries and they commit to a schedule, they’ll do it. If we keep trying to get them done catch-as-catch can, we’ll continue catching a few, and fumbling most.

“Some bishops might say that they don’t have enough men to call as ward missionaries to staff District 1. There are a lot of members who spend 6-8 hours per week in their church calling. If ward missionaries blocked out this much time every week, two or three could do it,” Romney concluded.

Solutions to Problems #4 & 5: Training and Accountability

“We decided after our last meeting that problems 4 & 5 were so related that’d do our problem-solving together,” high councilman Guido Guercio said as he walked to the front of the room. “President, we would be dumb just to say that we need to do a better job training home teachers. We’ve tried. But when somebody stands up in leadership meetings and says he’s going to talk about how to be an effective home teacher, people just check out. A few obediently take notes, but not much behavior changes. The reason, we think, is that people will learn when they’re ready to learn, not when we’re ready to teach them. Because most home teachers in their gut don’t think it’s that important, most of them haven’t been ready to learn when we’ve taught them. Furthermore, because we just ask if they “did” their home teaching – and if they “didn’t” we don’t hold them accountable – we don’t create a readiness to learn. So we propose that we create a readiness to learn by changing the way we hold home teachers accountable.

“Nephi couldn’t go and do unless he was commanded to do something,” Guercio continued. Most of us have never received an assignment to do something other than “be” a home teacher. When home teaching is divided up by geography or alphabetically, as most wards do it, you can’t have any standard measures of performance and accountability. Ideally each home teacher would have a plan to help each of his families with their different needs, and in monthly PPIs each leader would follow through in a unique way on each of those families. But that takes a lot more maturity than most of our home teachers have. The nice thing about districting the way Jeff and Darcy have proposed, is that within Districts 1 and 2, there are some standard things that they can be held accountable for.

“For the home teachers in the other districts, I think if we ask the questions every month that Brother Call proposed – ‘What did you do this month to strengthen the faith of this family, or bless their lives? and ‘What do you plan to do in the coming month to strengthen their faith and bless their lives?’ – it will do more to train our home teachers to be effective than anything we’ve done to date in this stake.

Another member of Guercio’s group, Joe Ortega, added, “High councilors need to accept some blame, because we don’t hold elders presidencies and high priests group leaders accountable for what they should be doing. For example, home teachers should be set apart. How many of us know if the leaders in the wards we advise have set apart their home teachers? When was the last time that we each sat down with them and reviewed when they held the last personal interview with each home teacher?

“I listened to a talk of Elder Holland’s, where he was teaching missionaries how to help their investigators make and keep commitments. He said, in essence, “If your investigators tell you they haven’t read the section in the Book of Mormon that you assigned, and if they haven’t prayed sincerely about it, be devastated, elders! Don’t just meekly suggest that they try harder next time. Be devastated! You’ve got to help them see that getting a testimony of the truths of eternity is serious business.”

“I miss visiting some of my home teaching families on occasion,” Ortega confessed. “Not once, however, has my priesthood leader been devastated when I’ve confessed to dropping the ball. Often they don’t even meekly suggest that I try harder next time. They just say thanks and hang up. And frankly, when I’ve met with the priesthood leaders in the wards I advise, I’ve never been devastated by their reports of 30% home teaching. All the way up to our level, we’re reinforcing the sense that home teaching isn’t important.”

The group that had been assigned problem # 6 – that the home teaching workload was just to vast – deferred, saying that the other groups’ ideas for shutting off the flow of new members into the tub of inactivity, and for scheduling home teaching to those in Districts 1 & 2 at a regular time each week and month, took in everything they had discussed.

President Kelly stood to close the meeting. “Brethren, you’ve gotten us out of the box. Thank you, thank you, for working so hard and so prayerfully on these proposals. I’d like you to join me in fasting this Sunday. Fast for the stake presidency, that we will be wise and inspired. We want to share your ideas with the bishops at our next training meeting with them; and then we’ll get back to you in our next high council meeting with recommendations on what we will do.”

The Simsbury Stake’s Home Teaching Plan

Second Counselor Douglas Porter introduced the presidency’s recommendations at the next high council meeting, by saying, “We feel to accept most of the things you’ve recommended, brethren. They are inspired. The bishops endorsed your ideas quite enthusiastically at our last meeting with them. Let me summarize the key points of our plan, and then we’ll ask for your sustaining vote.” Rick Parks handed out a sheet that summarized these points. (A copy is included below.)

“First, we’ll ask each ward to organize home teaching into the four districts that we discussed. We reviewed a December 2001 First Presidency letter, “Watching Over and Strengthening Members.” They said that if home teaching to every home isn’t possible, we should give priority to new converts, less-active families that are receptive, and other families with the greatest needs – and then visit others as resources permit. Our district strategy is very consistent with these instructions. (A copy of that letter is attached as Appendix 2.) It shouldn’t be that complicated administratively, because most wards already are in geographic or alphabetical districts. We need to urge our leaders prayerfully to seek inspiration about which families and which home teachers to assign to each district.

“We’ll ask the ward missionaries who will serve as District 1 home teachers to visit weekly. By home teaching progressing investigators as well as new members every week, we’ll eliminate the hand-off at baptism from missionaries to members where we’ve fumbled the ball so many times. We can set a standard template of expectations for these home teachers, to which we can hold them accountable. They should serve at the same time every week; take every new member to the temple with their own family names within a month of baptism. They should ensure that each new member who they home teach as a progressing investigator gets a calling at the time of baptism that is custom-tailored to their abilities. New converts always should serve with another member. Men must be ordained within a week of baptism. During their weekly visits, home teachers will teach them about the priesthood, teach them how to serve successfully in their callings, and teach the new member lessons. We should ask our ward mission leaders, serving as home teaching district leaders for District 1, to supervise this effort. The new MLS system will enable us to customize a report that cuts across wards. We can know at the stake level who the members of these districts are, so that we can hold leaders accountable.

“Second, your suggestion that we put in District 2 single adults and maturing members is wise. We have been baptizing about 35 adult men in the stake every year. But you can count on just a few fingers how many men stand in a typical stake conference to be ordained to the Melchizedek Priesthood who aren’t young men who were raised in the church. Most of our male converts get ordained as priests, but we do a horrible job getting them ordained elders and endowed in the temple. And as you know, we are working to pull more single members into the mainstream of activity and leadership.

“We will ask every home teacher to work out in advance a fixed time every month to home teach. In addition to asking home teachers to do this at the beginning of the year, we should ask as a standard accountability question when we collect end-of-month reports when the next month’s visit is scheduled.

“We will immediately fire any priesthood leader who collects home teaching reports with a yes-no “did you do it” question. We won’t accept a “they’re fine” answer from our home teachers, either. Our priesthood leaders must ask for detail and get detail in response. This is how we’ll train good home teachers. Ward mission leaders will hold District 1 home teachers accountable for each of the points we’ve noted on the sheet Rick gave you. District 2 home teachers will be held accountable to have a plan to get the maturing members they home teach to be endowed in the temple, and to help the single adult members they visit to feel that they fit in the church as much as married members do.

“In the first satellite training broadcast, Elder Eyring told us that there is always something that every family can do better. We want to modify the accountability questions that you defined – ‘What did you do this month to strengthen the faith of this family, bless their lives, and help them get to the temple?’ and ‘What do you plan to do in the coming month to strengthen their faith, bless their lives, and help them get to the temple?’ These will be great ways to hold the rest of our home teachers accountable, to find those things that each family needs to do better. Let’s see how far we get by using these accountability questions to entice the right kind of home teaching.

“We’ll ask our quorum and group leaders to hold a personal interview with each home teacher once each quarter, and to collect their reports by phone for the other two months. In the next personal interview, we’ll ask them to set apart all home teachers who haven’t previously received that blessing, and to set apart all new home teachers. In some wards, quorum and group presidencies have called home teaching district leaders whose job it is to collect reports. We should discontinue this practice. None of our wards is so big that this is warranted. It reflects the attitude of low importance that we are trying to overcome. We should call any brothers who now are doing this to be ward missionaries in District 1.”

President Porter closed by saying, “Brethren, on behalf of the presidency I express our utter devastation about the way we have led the home teaching effort in this stake. Our plan doesn’t involve complicated new things – they’re things we should have been doing all along. We pray that the Lord will forgive us for this part of our past, and pledge to Him that we will do our best to perfect the saints of the Simsbury Stake through home teaching in the future. We pray that as we do these things, the wards and branches in our stake might truly become ones that God can trust.”

President Kelly then stood and asked those who were willing to support this plan to raise their hand – and all who were present did so. He then asked each of them to schedule a time with the priesthood leaders in the wards and branches they advised, to start them on the process of implementing this plan.

SUGGESTIONS FOR WATCHING OVER AND STRENGTHENING MEMBERS

December 10, 2001

· Review the needs of ward members. Select new converts, less-active families who may be the most receptive, and other families who may have the greatest need to receive home teachers. Then visit others as resources permit.

· Make better use of Aaronic Priesthood teachers and priests as home teaching companions to Me1chizedek Priesthood holders.

· Consider using full-time missionaries on a limited basis to work with Melchizedek Priesthood holders to home teach part-member families and less-active members. Sister missionaries may be assigned to visit teach with Relief Society sisters as needed.

· Encourage quorum and auxiliary leaders to watch over and strengthen those members and families for whom they are responsible. Their visits and contacts with members can help to fulfill the responsibility to watch over and strengthen each member. When these leaders and teachers learn of family or individual concerns, they should inform the bishop.

How to Help our New Members Become Strong, Committed Latter-day Saints

2008-11-08T20:51:00.000-08:00

Some overall thoughts about new members…and how they struggle or are strengthened—followed by some comments in read throughout the article:

Before I read your article, I made a list of what I thought was important and what went wrong—I thought about it in the context of friends, nourishment with the word, and responsibilities.

Friends: They need to have someone who is near them—both in proximity and in relationship. So many of the strongest converts I’ve seen are those who have joined b/c of a roommate, neighbor, or proximate example. They need to feel very comfortable being with them so the member can identify things that they should learn by having observed the new member. The new member needs to feel like they can ask any question of the member…they need to feel like they have an awareness of the member having weaknesses too (so they’re not intimidated). This friend should be someone who nearly doubles the positive experience Church gives the new member… there are people, for me, who delight and lift me just being in the same meetings I’m in-b/c they take a special interest in me. That doesn’t happen very often for new members who come into the Church alone.

Nourishment w/the word: This is just not happening. There is no accountability for their progress in the Scriptures, in their prayers, in their fasting, their Sabbath observance, their attendance at all Church meetings, their participation in Church activities, their living the commandments and laws of the Church, etc. New members were accountable to the missionaries for the commitments they received during investigation—there is no clear setting of accountability to anyone afterward… a warm welcome from a bishop should include some feeling of “you are accountable to me” …or moreover, “you are accountable to the Lord, and He would have me serve as His representative to help, tutor, love, and lift.” I think about all the ways I am nourished with the word…through my personal scripture study (which took many years to provide a strong nourishment, and if I’m not careful, which I still struggle to do well both regarding intensity and frequency/length of study.) I am nourished by General Conference (I don’t think most new members grasp the beauty of rolling-6-month revelations through living oracles!), Institute/Family Home Evening, Sunday School, Home Teachers, etc. Are they around families or individuals who talk about the Gospel when they’re not expected to…applying it to all of life’s perilous challenges.

Responsibility: They need someone who can mentor them in a significant, and specific responsibility. We don’t provide this. We don’t give them the frequency of contact with leaders or mentors to really engage them in the ward in a way that makes them feel needed, and helps them see the divine working of the Lord in His Church. We need to assign responsibility lightning fast, and then check in to be sure responsibilities are understood—rarely are they overwhelmed, they’re much more underwhelmed—so let’s overshoot, if needed, then dial it back if there is too much. New members have enough excitement to move it forward in ways we can’t always estimate. I think about areas where the Church has had to grow on the backs of new members—I think it must grow in large measure b/c new members are enthused about bearing the kingdom. (I’d like to see more data on this)

A few other thoughts that you didn’t address, but that I think work in the lives of new members:

*Negative experiences with the Church, its doctrine, its people: I think there is a time when new members face negative experiences…they learn about anti- literature, they face poor treatment by a Church member, they experience abuse of power or insensitive treatment from a Church leader, etc. This negative experience may extend to personal trials—unanswered prayers, recurring temptations and bad habits, and transgression—some minor, some more serious. I don’t think we handle these negative experiences very well… The new member will feel very hesitant to talk to anyone about it—so we need to do better at providing the right environment to begin with…but then, we need to be willing to address their negative experiences with less judgment, and much more love. JaNeece’s friend, who left the Church—who I interviewed for the less-active-new-member aspect, ran into a lot of anti-Mormon stuff, and no one knew how to handle it. They brushed it under the rug, they didn’t validate the concern, they acted very unaware and unfeeling toward her. As she started to not attend Church anymore, no one reached out, because they feared her…what she might say, what she might know, what she might ask, what she might be doing. She found out people were surmising she was having immoral relationships with a boyfriend, etc. etc. A recent convert in LP1 who I home taught—he made bad choices, stopped paying tithing, stopped attending Church, and felt very distanced. I tried to handle it as best I could—but found I was very frustrated at his lack of response…we need to be better..we need to know the Lord is still working in their lives, and we need to be committed to them for the long haul. Almost every single person I listed as a reactivated member or new member I worked with in the last 7 years—went through a significant trying period where they pulled back…only by having people who loved them for the long haul, accepted them, etc. were they brought back…some didn’t come back. I don’t think we deal with this issue in the Church.

*Escalating and Adapting: I don’t think we do very well when things start to fall apart (as mentioned above), or when timelines are missed. In my new job, we call our customers members. And we watch their “activity level” very closely—we have a service score that is reviewed every week…showing how active the members are…how much are they using our research, how often are they coming to our meetings, asking for our content to be sent/presented, downloading from our website. We’ve come up with metrics that show where they should be at any point of the annual cycle to predict renewal. When the metrics are not met, WE INTERVENE, and we have contingency plans. We should be doing this absolutely for new members. I say a lot more about this below—the lack of accountability,..but I think it’s a huge problem. We have a “member retention expert” in my organization—who reaches out to members that slip… Why don’t we have someone just focused on retention..and maybe they sit in the ward, or maybe in the stake? What about at the temple? Can the temple president play more of a role to pull the new members in, rather than hope the pathetic 10-30% get pushed to him? I imagine a stake president reaching out and saying, “I’m your bishop’s leader, and he has expressed concern and love for you—I thought I’d take some of my time for you, showing you how important you are for the Church, and just find out what’s up.” Or a high-council member focused on retention? And pulling the data and actions up the line… When there’s a problem with new member lessons being taught, let’s find out what’s going on and adapt. Instead, we wait around for 6 months to pass when it’s obvious we’ve a problem and it’s too late to reach them. (As said below, I think our leaders accept answers to queries about new members that they should not accept)

MB: Comments about specific ideas in the paper are below in red.

Whenever one group works on a piece of a project and hands it off to another to continue the work, defining how the two groups must work together is crucial. If the first group does not do its work well, then the second needs to fix what the first should have done before they can begin their job. Even when both groups feel jointly responsible for producing a successful result, frustration reigns if no one has clearly defined how the work of the two groups must fit together,. The first group often works hard on things that that don’t matter. The second blames the first for the problems and gets tired from re-working what they think the first should have done.

We see interface problems like this in education, where first grade teachers hand kids off to the second grade who can’t yet read. Toyota sees (and has solved) this problem in the myriad steps involved in designing and manufacturing cars. There are hand-off problems in athletics, where one runner gives the baton to the next; and in medicine, when surgeons deliver patients to critical care nurses. And we encounter this challenge when missionaries hand off newly baptized members to the leaders of our wards.

A key reason why many of our new members fall away from the church after baptism is that we have inadequately and inaccurately defined the interface between investigation and membership. As a result, we are working very hard to fix problems that would not arise if we were to design the work of members and missionaries to interface properly at the point of baptism. The work that missionaries and members must do so that we consistently retain all of the people who are baptized has been described only in general terms. We do not accurately measure whether we are succeeding, and we do not hold missionaries or members accountable for doing this work well. It is no wonder that only a fraction of new members are still fully active five years after baptism. “Working around” the fundamental problem caused by this poorly defined interface is not only frustrating and ineffective. It allows the problem to persist.

The good news is that if we define more clearly and accurately what must be done before and after baptism, we can be much more successful without requiring more work by members and missionaries, and without reducing the numbers of people who are baptized.

I think this can be difficult given the recent shift in full-time missionary training/resources we have seen with Preach My Gospel. It seems to be a very clean break from scripted, “you must teach this, with these words, etc.” to “teach by the Spirit, using your own developed outlines, etc.” That being the case, I think any specific instruction about “teach this doctrine this way, and ask these questions, and ensure this learning” is going to be difficult. I completely agree with the examples you give about teaching them to pray—by example, practice, and member-missionary-investigator iterations. I also like giving them homework with specific questioning and answering about reading.

The Interface Between Investigation and Membership

Although President Hinckley has defined the elements of the interface between investigation and membership – “A friend, a responsibility, and nourishing with the good word of God” – we have not translated this specification into the required changes in the way we work with investigators and new members.[i] There are two sides to each of these elements. It is not enough to say that the members need to nourish new converts. Converts must understand how to be nourished. It’s not enough to say that members must give responsibility to converts. If this is to work, converts must be ready to accept responsibility. If investigators are prepared to receive these things and members are prepared to give them, many more of our new members will grow to become strong, committed, worthy latter-day saints.

The metaphor of hand-offs describes how we often have worked at the baptismal interface. However, members and missionaries are jointly responsible for improving what we do on the investigation and membership sides of the baptismal interface in order to keep new members active. We’re all responsible for getting it right: “The work of proclaiming the gospel will move forward more powerfully when full-time missionaries and members coordinate their efforts and work in unity together.”[ii] “It isn’t enough for people simply to come into the church. They must come to stay.”[iii]

Nourishment in the Good Word of God

If new members are to be nourished in the good word of God, it means that before baptism we need to teach them how to be nourished. And upon baptism, we must be prepared to continue providing the needed nourishment without interruption. Conversion is an ongoing process in which missionaries and members are partners.

Teaching Investigators How to Be Nourished

I will illustrate how we must do a better job teaching investigators how to be nourished by describing how John, our friend, accepted the gospel. John had been raised in a Christian home. At the end of the first lesson the missionaries gave him a Book of Mormon and invited him to read and pray about it. At the beginning of the second and third lessons they asked if he had read any of it, and if he had been praying. When John said “Yes,” the missionaries seemed pleased and quickly got down to the business of teaching him the lesson. At the end of each lesson they again asked if he would continue reading and praying. John said he would.

At the beginning of the fourth lesson, the light of the gospel that we normally see in the face of those who are discovering the truth just wasn’t radiating from John’s. In fact, he looked troubled. So when he told the missionaries again that he had been studying and praying, I interrupted and asked, “John how are you praying, and what are you saying in your prayers?”

John looked relieved that I’d asked, and answered, “I guess I really don’t know how to pray.” We had assumed that because he was raised in a Christian home and had heard us offer prayers at the start and end of the lessons, that he knew how to pray in private. But he did not.

I then offered, “Let’s kneel down, and I’ll demonstrate how I would pray if I were in your shoes. Then I’ll ask Christine to pray, and then Elder Hoffman. Listen to what we say and how we say it. Each of our prayers will be different, but listen for patterns in what we say. Then you can ask us why we said what we said, and we’ll do our best to explain. We did this.

We then discussed the concerns and challenges in John’s life that had prompted him to accept our invitations to come to these discussions. We suggested how John could ask for God’s help for these concerns in prayer. Then I asked John to pray aloud, and we gave suggestions on how he could make his prayers even more effective. We also explained that during and after his prayers he could receive responses from God. We described what these felt like, and said that when he prayed privately it was very important not just to speak, but to listen for words in his mind and feelings in his heart.

I then asked John how much of the Book of Mormon he had read. He confessed that he had only read the introduction. “I’ve been busy and it’s been hard to get into it,” he explained.

“You don’t read this like you read novels when you were in school,” I offered. “To show you how to do it, I’m going to give you a simple homework assignment. Read Moroni, chapter 8. Then write a one or two-paragraph answer to each of these two questions.” I wrote them down: 1) Why does it make God angry when people baptize infants? And 2), What is the process by which your sins are forgiven?

I then said, “Before you sit down to read this chapter, kneel and pray aloud, asking God to help you answer these questions. Then read the chapter and write a draft of your answers.

“Then pray again,” I continued. “Explain to God what you’ve written, and ask, ‘I’m going to read this chapter one more time. Please help me understand this even more clearly.” Then revise what you’ve written into the final draft that you’ll turn in to me when we meet next.

Finally, we read Moroni 10:3-5. I explained two things about this scripture that are crucial elements of how to pray. “First, notice that we need to express gratitude to God for all that he has done for us. This will remind you how much God loves you. The reason why He wants you thoughtfully to list the things He has done for you and to thank Him for them is that doing this will help you feel his love. Second, praying with real intent means that you need to tell God what you intend to do with the knowledge you are asking him to give you. It’s not enough just to ask for knowledge.[iv] So finish this exercise by praying one more time. As you thank God for what He has done, thank Him for helping you to understand the things in this chapter. Then ask him whether the things that you have summarized in your own words, are true; and tell God what you intend to do if He tells you it is true. Then listen to how you feel in your heart.”

I finished by saying, “You’ll be tempted to short-cut this process by busily reading the chapter from beginning to end as fast as you can – the same way you read assignments in school. But remember that this is different. Back then, you just wanted to finish the book. Here, your objective isn’t necessarily to finish the book. It’s to find out if it is true.”

John did this. At the next lesson, John’s face had changed. He had only read one chapter, but because we had taught him how to pray and how to read the scriptures, he received more benefit from one chapter than he would have gotten had he read the whole book in the way he had learned to read novels. What subsequently happened in that lesson is exactly what God promised in D&C 50:17-22. The missionaries came prepared to teach through the power of the spirit, and John had come prepared to learn through the power of the spirit. We were edified.

It is important that we give investigators an adequate understanding of the doctrines of the church before baptism. But in my experience, missionaries take at least 95% of the time in discussions teaching the doctrine. Because learning the doctrine is a life-long process, we must do a much better job teaching investigators how to study and pray in a way that brings spiritual nourishment into their lives.[v] And then, after baptism, we need to continue nourishing them.

Being Prepared to Nourish New Members

We have been asked to provide continued nourishment to new members in two ways: teaching the five missionary lessons; and taking them to the temple to be baptized for ancestors. We aren’t doing it. In the system prior to Preach My Gospel, only 36% of those who were baptized in the Northeast were taught all six new member lessons.[vi] While the stakes in our temple district together baptize about 70 people each month, we see only a few new members each month in the temple baptistry.

Let me propose a mechanism to help us provide this nourishment more consistently. When we call ward missionaries, we should ask them to reserve the same times every week – Wednesday evening and Saturday afternoon, for example – when they will commit to serve as missionaries. Committing to serve on this regular rhythm will bring structure to their work. It will help the full-time missionaries know when to schedule appointments. More importantly, ward missionaries can then be called to continue serving as home teachers for new members for the first 3-4 months of their membership, and visit them on this weekly rhythm.[vii] I use the word continue because they will already have been teaching the lessons with the missionaries before baptism.

Yes yes yes…I think this is a key—keeping the frequency and amplitude of their interface with a Gospel teacher at the level it is with the full-time missionaries.

Like it or not, home and visiting teaching occurs on a monthly rhythm if it occurs at all. It is a shock to new members to go from the daily nurturing of missionaries to monthly visits of home and visiting teachers. Assigning ward missionaries to be home teachers to new members creates a home teaching district in which these special home teachers are called to serve on a weekly rhythm – in fact, because they assist missionaries in teaching the lessons, they actually begin home teaching a couple of weeks before baptism. A lot of important nourishment can be delivered in these weekly visits for 3-4 months. As noted next, getting the new member to the temple to be baptized for ancestors should be the special home teacher’s top priority. When this is underway, then the weekly visits can be filled with teaching new member lessons, teaching the new members how to fulfill their priesthood responsibilities and ward callings, and so on. If the new member is struggling to overcome addictions, rhythmic weekly visits can be invaluable. Three to four months after baptism, we can turn most new members over to the monthly rhythm by which most home and visiting teachers do their work.

In small units where no ward missionaries are serving, bishops should assign the member who helped the missionaries teach the before-baptism lessons, to set this regular time aside every week to continue providing this nourishment after baptism without interruption, as the special home or visiting teacher.

Nourishment in the Temple

On the first home/visiting teaching visit after baptism, this special home/visiting teacher should start helping the new member prepare to visit the temple within eight weeks to be baptized for his or her ancestors. Elder Packer mandated this in his December 2004 letter.

I’ve heard from many sources that about 80% of new members who do baptisms in a temple within 3 months of their own baptism stay active. I’ve been skeptical of this assertion, thinking that it might be a statement of correlation and not causality – in other words, I thought that converts who remain worthy and willing to go to the temple are those who would have stayed active anyway.

But after interviewing many new members who have done this and others who haven’t, I’ve decided that visiting the temple soon after baptism exerts a strong causal influence on new members remaining active – for three reasons. The first is nourishment. Those who have gone to the temple report that after the spiritual high of baptism, they just needed another deeply spiritual experience. The second is responsibility: Doing this work for ancestors helps them feel needed – because they are needed. The third is friends. They go to the temple with friends, to be sure. But perhaps even more importantly, those relatives who have accepted the gospel in the spirit world and have been waiting and praying for one of their descendants to accept the gospel on the earth, will surround and support this new member in ways that may be unseen, but profound. I’ve heard many stories that lead me to this conclusion.

Rather than it being the general responsibility of everyone to get new members to the temple, each ward’s mission plan should give specific responsibility to the special home/visiting teacher and the High Priests Group Leader / ward family history specialist to begin working on this immediately after baptism.

I struggle to understand this one in practice. I made a list of all the people I knew over the past 6 years who are new members—who I worked with as a ward mission leader, ward missionary, or home teacher. Granted, I wasn’t always as intense about getting them to the temple as I should have been—and I think this is a major need we have, to be sure there is a system that enforces follow up and intensity around getting them to the temple. But when I was the point-person assigned…the home teacher, I ran into frequent concerns about the temple. New members were just not excited about finding family names to take to the temple, and the greater Church membership is pretty pathetic at demonstrating excitement in that way—me included! Further, I ran into a general feeling of the member thinking they had “arrived” at baptism…it was made the “end all” of their journey with the missionaries—and the missionaries seemed to be always shooting toward baptism as the destination. Therefore, there was little motivation to do anything significant to get to the temple. My most recent experience as a home teacher over a recent convert in Longfellow Park 1à he felt that he just wasn’t ready. Somehow, the temple had been described in a way that made him feel it was unattainable, or too serious, or too intimidating? He kept asking for time, and eventually, I couldn’t shake the feeling that my continual discussion of the temple (every time we met), felt like a high-pressure situation. I’d like to understand what the root causes are when we have people working to push temple attendance.

Further—about temple attendance…there is a major breakdown from those who see the benefits of it to those who ensure it happens. We KNOW it’s importance, but we are never held accountable for it. We ask how a new convert is doing in PEC, but we don’t stop and say, “this council/committee should be turning heaven and earth to get these individuals to the temple—above all else.” Instead, we hear the WML say, “well, we’ve taught one new member lesson, but the guy is hard to get in touch with, and he wants to pay his tithing more regularly before the temple, and we don’t have a trip scheduled for the ward…” and all these reasons that are inappropriately accepted by ward leadership…. We should do something more dramatic…like, stop PEC and make a call to the new member right then—to setup an interview, or we should give more signals about how important this is.

To connect solidly at this element of the interface between investigation and membership, our new members must have been taught how to be nourished by the spirit, and our wards must be ready with a systematic mechanism to provide the needed nourishment to each person without interruption. (yes!), but everyone at every leadership position needs to know it is a priority.

Responsibility

We must also do a better job of connecting on both sides of the responsibility part of the interface – ensuring that when new members are baptized they are prepared to accept responsibility; and by our being ready to give them the right responsibility at the time of baptism.

Prepared to Accept Responsibility

The scriptures define preparedness to accept responsibility as an element of the investigation-membership interface. Those approaching baptism must be “…willing to bear one another's burdens, that they may be light; Yea, and are willing to mourn with those that mourn; yea, and comfort those that stand in need of comfort ….” (Mosiah 18:8 - 9). They must be determined to serve Christ to the end (Moroni 6:3; D&C 20:37) How can we know before baptism that an investigator is indeed willing to accept responsibility to help others? There are at least two litmus tests.

Making and Keeping Commitments

The first test of investigators’ willingness to accept responsibility is whether they have kept the commitments they have been asked to keep as they have studied with the missionaries. Making and keeping commitments is a repeated exercise of faith, repentance, and experiencing a forgiveness of sins. Missionaries’ objective in preparing and teaching lessons should not simply be to help investigators understand doctrine. Rather, they should teach towards commitments – instructing in such a way that the investigators understand the nature of the commitment they will be asked to make and how to do it; inviting them to make the commitment; and inspiring them to do it.

Preach My Gospel instructs missionaries to “Help people qualify for baptism and confirmation by teaching them true doctrine and inviting them to repent and change their lives, through making and keeping commitments that build their faith in Jesus Christ.”[viii] In my experience to date, however, it seems that the culture of our missions has historically so strongly emphasized helping investigators understand the doctrine that a tiny fraction of the time in most lessons is spent instructing, inviting and inspiring investigators to make and keep commitments.

I described above how our friend John hadn’t been taught how to keep the commitment of scripture study and prayer. Here’s another example. Of the many times that missionaries have taught people in our home and invited them to attend church, I never remember them ever taking the time to teach our friends how to keep this commitment in a way that would change their hearts. Missionaries should not just invite investigators to attend church. They should teach their investigators what it means to keep the Sabbath Day holy; help them define unholy things they habitually have done on the Sabbath that they should stop doing; give them ideas and assignments of holy things they can do to fill the Sabbath; teach them how to dress and how to prepare for and benefit from meetings; and so on.

We need to teach our missionaries that they should generally budget 15 minutes in each lesson to teach investigators what these commitments are; how to make, keep and benefit from them; inspiring investigators through testimony to accept them; and following through to ensure that investigators are benefiting from keeping these commitments. This is how the new habits that characterize the life of a worthy latter-day saint are established. I don’t know what to think here—I don’t know when my commitment keeping and covenant prioritizing really began—it was after years and years of being a youth in the Church…and somehow gaining the fire of the Spirit in my bones…how can we do that? I’m not sure full-time missionaries can really be the ones who do this. Although, Elder Holland did a broadcast to full-time missionaries in the summer of 1997 that was incredible—in which he told missionaries they needed to be more powerful in extending commitments…and that when investigators didn’t keep commitments, the very first thing they should do was BE DEVASTATED…teaching investigators that when they give their word to something the Lord expects, they must not treat it lightly.

Getting themselves to church (absolutely important—we hold their hands so much we don’t teach them to sacrifice and work hard to achieve their spiritual objectives)

The second test of investigators’ readiness to accept responsibility is their willingness to get themselves to church. I visited a ward recently where 62 people had been baptized in the prior 14 months. Only nine of those new members were at church on the day that I visited. Most of these new members were dependent upon members for rides to church. I suspect that when the missionaries first invited them to come to church, the investigators said, “I don’t have a car.” The missionaries responded, “That’s okay. We’ll have a member pick you up.” Many of these people had been baptized without ever having taken responsibility to get themselves to church. It is hard to imagine that investigators are prepared to accept responsibility to serve and strengthen others if they’re not willing to accept a simple responsibility such as this. The missionaries would help their investigators tremendously if they responded by asking, “Who do you know who has a car who could come to church with you?” If there credibly is no non-member friend or relative who can drive them to church, then bus, bicycle, and walking should be the next alternatives to explore (it was not that many years ago that walking five miles was not considered onerous).

“As the twig is bent, so grows the tree.” If we and the missionaries can inspire even the weakest and most tentative investigators to make and keep simple commitments first, and then more challenging ones, it will set a tone that carries forward. They will be better prepared to accept responsibility as members. Many missionaries assume that if we make it as easy as possible to meet the requirements, more people will be baptized. But man’s ways are not God’s ways. Because the Savior promised that those who lose their lives for the sake of His gospel will find their lives and that His burden is light if we will only take His yoke upon us, we can be confident that in preparing investigators to accept responsibility, we will not deter honest people from baptism.[ix] It requires faith; but doing what appears to be hard actually will make it easier to baptize and retain more people. Members should be willing to give rides; but this should be our last resort, not the first.

My mission president always told us that Church attendance was the greatest tool and filter in missionary work—and we never used it the way we could…which was as a measuring tool of the investigators’ commitment to long-term life as a Latter-day Saint. We can give them ideas about how to get to Church, we can try to monitor their experience at Church and improve it, we can be sure they get nourished when they come, but we have to let them show their faith by their works… My mission president was always very strong in enforcing the church-attendance metric before baptism…if they didn’t come, or if they came but did it “weakly”, they were not considered ready for the major covenants –and blessings—of being in the Lord’s kingdom.

Prepared to Give Responsibility

Despite President Hinckley’s persistent call that we give new members responsibility, on average only 34% of new members ever receive a calling in the church.[x] Why? It’s the confluence of two factors.

The first factor is the process of falling away. Many converts come to church after baptism and see most members wearing nice clothes and sitting in families. They listen to members speak and teach with confidence and competence. This triggers a feeling in many of them that “I’m not like these people.” About 60% of new converts, as a result, begin attending only sporadically within four weeks after baptism.[xi]

The second factor is that the process of issuing a calling typically takes four weeks. It’s the case for me right now in my new ward in DC…cannot believe I am not being utilized more—though I’m asking for home teaching assignments and willing to do anything ad hoc in the meantime, we are SO SLOW. Most requests for people to be called come to the bishop from auxiliary and priesthood leaders. Often those who are requested are not available. Through a process of negotiation, desperation and inspiration, agreement is reached, the leaders pray for confirmation, and the call is issued. It takes four weeks. By the time bishops have decided upon a calling, therefore, they then find that most new members aren’t attending dependably enough that they can extend the calling and count on them to do it.

New members – especially those whose previous lifestyle doesn’t fit easily into the culture of our wards – need to know that they are needed in God’s Kingdom. And the data above suggests that they need to feel needed right at the time of baptism. The best way to do this is for bishops to give ward mission leaders responsibility to tailor an ideal calling for each new convert, and to recommend this calling to the bishop a week before baptism. If the bishop is inspired to accept the recommendation, then he can issue the call immediately after baptism. Converts must be ready to accept responsibility, and we must be ready to give it when they need it most.

An ideal calling for new members has each part of President Hinckley’s interface: I LOVE THIS FRAMEWORK—absolutely!

1. Friend: Always serve with another member. Friendships are best built by working together, not by sitting together. THIS IS SO TRUE—WE DON’T do enough to support this powerful converting/retaining tool of working together.

2. Responsibility: The right responsibility has three characteristics:

o Special: It helps the new member feel important and needed in the ward

o Sunday: It requires attendance at church every Sunday

o Straightforward: The assignment must not be unstructured or open-ended.

3. Nourishment: Service in the calling helps the new member learn the gospel and feel the spirit while serving.

Very few standard callings have all of these characteristics. That is why ward mission leaders need to customize them. A calling as primary teacher, for example, satisfies some of the characteristics: It makes them feel important, requires Sunday attendance, and helps them learn the gospel. But is not straightforward. It can seem daunting and complicated to a new member; and it entails serving alone. A calling as assistant primary teacher, however, satisfies all characteristics. Another example: A calling as chorister is straightforward, requires Sunday attendance and helps the convert feel important. But if the new member were also asked to telephone a ward member each week and ask what his or her favorite hymn is so that the ward can sing it on the next Sunday, the calling would also build friendships.

Most bishoprics keep a list of standard callings in the ward, and know which of those positions are not filled. It seems easy to give one of these unfilled callings to a new convert. But often these callings aren’t filled for a reason: they aren’t very important. Most of these are not good assignments for new members. If they will think creatively and prayerfully, ward mission leaders can design callings that have all or most of the characteristics of an ideal calling. They can then recommend to their bishops a responsibility for each new member that is tailored to each person’s capabilities. The normal process for issuing callings doesn’t work for new members.

There are isolated incidents where new members have been driven to inactivity because their wards asked too much of them too quickly. But we must be very careful not to generalize from these exceptions. In the first place, 66% of new members never even receive a calling. And second, callings that conform to the criteria listed above will energize, not discourage, new members.

Of the three elements of the interface between investigation and membership, responsibility is perhaps the piece that we do most poorly. Many new members are poorly prepared to accept responsibility, and we are not ready to give responsibility when it is most needed. Making the changes noted in this section will not require more work: we just need to change the way we work.

I love this section on responsibility! It is something that I think is immediately actionable—and can show immediate results.

Friendship

The role of friendship at the interface between investigation and membership generally is framed as the need to substitute new friends for the old friends of new members – because the social system in which most new members previously lived involves too many temptations and attractions back into a lifestyle of sin. I’d like to address the friendship challenge at the baptismal interface in two parts: friends at home, and friends at church.

Friends at Home

We can assign members to act in a friendly manner towards new converts, but it is hard to assign people to be friends away from church. Whereas most new members can fall away within a few weeks of baptism, friendships are built over a much longer timeframe – and they are generally built by sacrificing for the friendship, not just by receiving friendly behavior.

There are at least two things we can do to help new members have supportive friends at home. The first, as mentioned above, is to ask ward missionaries to home teach new members during regular blocks of time on a weekly rhythm. Some ward missionaries wisely have held their weekly home teaching visit in the home of a different member every week to enlarge the network of friendly people.

The second thing we should do is for full-time and ward missionaries to focus much more intently on baptizing groups of family members and friends. Instead of baptizing investigators individually and then facing the challenge of exchanging new friends for prior ones, we should do all we can to help investigators bring friends into the church with them. The table below shows what a profound difference friends at home can make. It summarizes data on new members that I collected from 3 wards – Lamoille Valley (Montpelier VT Stake), Jamestown (Jamestown NY Stake), and Gardner (Springfield MA Stake). In these wards in the past 3 years 181 people have been baptized. The left-most column characterizes the living environment in which these people were living when they were baptized, on a 1-5 scale where 1 = no support and 5 = strong support for living the gospel.[xii] Those judged to have enjoyed strong support were baptized with other friends or family members, or were living in a home at the time of baptism where family or roommates already were supportive members of the church. Those whose living environment was judged to be providing little or no support were baptized alone, in a living environment where there were no other active LDS members.

Note that of those who were baptized into supportive environments, 49% are today temple-worthy, and another 34% attend church at least three times per month (adds to 83%). In contrast, of those who were baptized singly into environments where there was little or no support, only 9% are temple-worthy. Most are totally inactive. Clearly, it makes a big difference when new converts bring friends and family with them into the church. In each of these wards, the converts who became strong and those who fell away were exposed to similar efforts by members to be friendly. What made the difference was whether there were supportive LDS friends and family at home.

This data reinforces the importance of asking investigators who don’t have a car, “Who do you know who has a car who could bring you to church?” We have long suggested to missionaries that they should solicit referrals from investigators, but we have recommended this as a means of finding new investigators. Perhaps more importantly, we must do better at this because it heavily influences the probability of the investigator remaining active. Indeed, the scriptures state that a demonstrated willingness to stand as a witness of God (to friends and family, for example) is an important standard of qualification at the baptismal interface (D&C 20:37; Mosiah 18:9-10).

Is baptizing groups of people a pipedream, or is it within our reach? President Hinckley recounted a ward in Brazil that suffered from typical problems of new converts falling away quickly. New members sapped rather than added to the strength of the ward. The bishop took ownership of the problem, and working through the missionaries and ward council, found ways to begin baptizing people as members of family groups, rather than individually. He reported that 85% of those baptized in family groups remained active – and that striving to baptize people in family groups did not reduce the total number being baptized.[i] These numbers are stunningly similar to those in the sample above. President Hinckley urged us to adopt this practice as a standard – where the bishop and ward council take ownership of the problem – but we have not.

We certainly should not keep people who have no prospect of support at home from being baptized. But if the data above are generalizable – that those who have supportive friends and family at home have a 5x higher likelihood of becoming and remaining temple-worthy than those without that support – missionaries and church leaders must do everything we can to baptize people into situations where there is support at home. This should be a key item of discussion when investigator progress reports are reviewed in ward council and PEC meetings.

There are exceptions that support these rules. For example, in the early years of the church in Korea the vast majority of converts were baptized singly, under age 23. These have become the spiritually powerful, visionary leaders of the Korean church today. Why? Though they were baptized singly, they shouldered tremendous responsibility as young, inexperienced people. The lesson: when we baptize people who do not bring friends at home into the church, we must be doubly careful to provide responsibility and nourishment, and be sure they are prepared to accept the same. I love this entire section—the data, the conclusions…they ring so true. Fantastic work that should be shared with all bishops/ward leaders/mission leaders.

Friends at Church: Wards that God Can Trust

In my studies of how we can better build the Kingdom of God, I have come to know three wards whose cultures inspire their members to do many small things, especially for the least of their brothers and sisters – and where great things have resulted. While the wards surrounding them struggle to baptize a few people in a year, these three wards each baptize twenty to thirty – and most remain faithful. The only way I can explain it is that God seems to trust these wards. Whenever someone new walks into these three chapels, they report feeling instantly loved. I don’t think that there are more “prepared” people living within the boundaries of these three wards than are living in neighboring wards. One ward is in Ireland; one in rural northern New England; and one in a comfortably affluent suburb of a major eastern city. I think the difference is that God trusts these three wards. He knows that when His children pray to Him for help and guidance, He can put them in the path of missionaries and members, or prompt them to go directly to the church, knowing that they will feel His love and His spirit when they arrive.

A convert in one of these wards recalled, in fact, that the first time she walked into the foyer of the church a two year-old girl walked up to her with her arms outstretched and gave her a hug – mimicking what she so often had seen adults do when someone new had walked through that door.

How can we transform the culture of a ward where most members do not even notice investigators and new members, let alone express their love to them, into a ward that God can trust? It can be done in three steps. The first step is for the bishop to articulate this vision for his ward. Here’s an example. I attended church in Tokyo several years ago. When I introduced myself as bishop of the Cambridge University Ward in Boston, a man commented, “I’ve heard of that ward. Isn’t that where all of those brainy students intellectualize the gospel and teach all kinds of strange things?” I was deeply troubled that my ward had that reputation even in such a distant place.

Later that day I read in the gospel of John, “By this shall all men know ye are disciples: if ye have love one to another.” When I returned to Boston I recounted this story in a sacrament meeting talk and said, “Here the Savior gave us the single most important way that we can distinguish His disciples from everyone else. He did not say that you can tell someone is His disciple if he pays his tithing or keeps the Word of Wisdom; and He certainly did not say that His disciples were those who indulged in skeptical speculation about doctrines that have yet to be revealed. Rather, He said we can tell who His real disciples are because they’re the ones who show love for one another.” I then expressed my hope that when I introduced myself as bishop of the Cambridge University Ward a distant sacrament meeting five years hence, I wanted to hear someone say, “I’ve heard of that ward. Isn’t that where the members show such love one to another?”

The second step in transforming a ward into one that God can trust is to repeat this challenge over and over in our talks. (how else? This is such a huge thing we should be better at, but it’s so difficult to change a culture!) Doing this in the University Ward gave our members a sense of “true north” that guided their interactions in many ways. We assigned specific ward members to ensure that nobody ever sat alone in a meeting; and to ensure that anyone they did not recognize was personally welcomed by at least ten people.

The third step is to convene a brief meeting of a small group of members at the end of each Sunday’s meetings, to ask the question, “Who could have been here today, who didn’t come?” I love this approach—They can then to make assignments to themselves and home / visiting teachers to contact each of those people that very day with a message like, “Are you okay? We missed you. Can I help with something? Can you come next week?” Most shepherds of the Lord’s flock count the number of sheep who returned to the fold on Sunday and store that number in a safe place for the quarterly report. However, the Lord said that the good shepherd would go out that very day and find the one sheep that did not return to the fold. A simple “huddle” that would net great results.

One other idea: in LP1 we also assigned people to different segments of the chapel to introduce themselves to new faces, and bring them forward to meet welcoming committee/bishopric members so no one left feeling unloved—this is certainly something that should be more naturally inherent in the fabric of the ward than planned for, or systemized.

Wards that do these three things can become wards that God can trust. God will know that if He moves upon people to walk through the doors of those chapels, He can trust the members to help them feel His love. It seems as if the Lord developed feelings of trust for the Cambridge University Ward. Baptisms the next year increased from 5 to 18.

I mentioned above the importance of asking ward missionaries to set aside the same regular time each week to serve, to ensure that nourishment in the good word of God continues uninterrupted. A couple of years ago we introduced the gospel to one of my students and her husband, who was a less-active member. When we baptized Connie I was concerned because her testimony seemed tenuous. But she wanted to be baptized, and we went ahead. We had no ward missionaries in our ward, but our wise ward mission leader set up a rhythmic system for teaching Connie the new member lessons. In 30 minutes on the Sunday evening before their baptism, he asked six different families in our ward to have Connie and Andrew into their home for home evening on the next six Mondays, to teach the sequence of new member lessons. He asked each to be sure that these would be deeply spiritual lessons filled with testimony and faith-building stories from their own lives. He gave the schedule to Connie and Andrew, and as they went through these new member lessons, I saw the light of the gospel change Connie’s countenance. The conversion that we had not been able to achieve in the pre-baptism lessons occurred in the post-baptism ones. What is more, Connie and Andrew felt deeply loved, and grew to love, each of these families. All were with us on the first anniversary of Connie’s baptism when they were sealed in the Boston Temple. This is a fantastic story! How can we really inspire people to reach out and develop genuine love and concern for those who are brought into the Church who don’t match our demographics? Assigning friends doesn’t work…and yet, genuine friendships are incredibly powerful…I struggle with this one in a big way—because I’ve been “assigned” and have tried very hard to see my efforts net little fruit.

Accountability

In the past we have chosen measures of retention that are easy to collect or easy to achieve. One common measure of “retention” is the percentage of males over age 12 who have been ordained to the Aaronic Priesthood. Ordaining them is a good thing to do. But because we are supposed to ordain these people within a week of baptism, we should not fool ourselves into thinking that this percentage of converts has been “retained.” Another common measure of retention is the percentage of members baptized within the past 12 months who attended at least one meeting during the last month of the quarter. Someone who attends once per quarter can’t hold a calling in the church or contribute to its strength and growth. I have seen a draft of a new report form that will measure retention as the percentage of members who attend two meetings per month. Is this what we strive for? What good is accomplished by setting a standard that is inadequate for salvation?

False or inflated measures of retention breed complacent behavior. At a recent stake conference, for example, I offered to take some time during the Saturday priesthood leadership meeting to discuss the strengthening of new members. The stake president confidently replied that this wasn’t necessary – in his stake, retention consistently was above 70%. I subsequently learned that in each of the prior two years, about 40 adult men had been baptized in that stake; and yet only 5 adult men had been ordained to the Melchizedek Priesthood during the prior year. The stake actually was doing a horrible job transforming adult male converts into worthy Elders; and yet the stake president was unconcerned because he was succeeding on the irrelevant metric the church had chosen to use.

The reason why we get what we measure is that the act of measurement spawns behavior to maximize that metric. This, therefore, is the measure of retention that we should use: Of those baptized within the last 24 months,

1) How many are known to the bishop as being temple-worthy?

2) How many are known not to be temple worthy?

3) What is the number whose temple worthiness is not known to the bishop?

We may be horrified at what we see when we strip away the padding and stand naked in front of the mirror with this true measure of how well we are transforming our new members into capable, committed, worthy latter-day saints. But taking this measure, and then holding ourselves accountable for improving it until every new convert remains temple worthy, is the best way to get the result the Lord and His prophet have asked us to deliver. It is within our power to begin using this measure now, within each of our stakes. There is no need to wait until the official quarterly report forms have been revised.

We need to create a return-and-report atmosphere in our ward leadership meetings where we ascertain the extent to which each progressing investigator is learning how to be nourished, being prepared to accept responsibility, and bringing friends and family from home with them into the church. This will make the discussion of the investigator progress report much more productive. And in these same meetings we must verify that each new member is being nourished, has an ideal tailored responsibility, and is developing more friends within the church.

This issue of accountability is one of the biggest areas I think we fail to understand and implement.

WE should hold investigators more accountable—just like encouraging them to get themselves to Church, I think there is power in giving them a checklist of new things to do as a new member, and then have regular interviews where we hold them accountable—accountable to get training for their calling, to make friends/reach out/give service, and accountability to make it through meaningful personal worship day in and day out—prayer, Sabbath observance, service, tithing, WofWisdom, Scripture…etc.

Just as I think accountability for home teaching is a huge gap we don’t fill (I’ve never been appropriately held accountable for my home teaching work), I don’t think we hold ward missionaries, ward mission leaders, or others accountable for preserving new members.

Summary

Friends, responsibility and nourishment in the good word of God are the three specified elements of the interface between investigation and membership. Because we don’t meet up at these three points, this interface is a crevasse into which most new members disappear. Those who disappear are children of our Heavenly Father whom He loves. Christ loves them so much that he suffered for their sins in advance, in the hope that that they would accept him. Ours is, therefore, a failure of colossal and eternal proportions. While we may forget the names of these people a few months after they fall through this crack, God and Christ do not forget them. They sorrow. They know and love these people as much as they know and love us.

Doing the things outlined above won’t take any more time and energy than we currently are expending to work around and fix and repair things at this broken interface. We need to make the specification clear, so that those who work on each side of the interface know what they need to do, when to do it, and how to do it. We need to train. We need to hold ourselves accountable. If we can embed the doing of these things into structure and processes and stop relying on sporadic individual initiative, the more regularly we will be able to do these things – and the better we will be able to help our new members enjoy the blessings of the gospel.

[i] I cannot cite the reference for the talk in which he recounted this story, unfortunately. Bishop Steve Temple of the Lowell MA Ward in the Nashua NH Stake told me of a similar experience that his son Chris has had, serving in the Brazil Ribeirao Preto Mission. His mission president in early 2005 declared that no women and children could be baptized unless the father also was baptized. Baptisms fell to nearly zero, but within four weeks the missionaries were bringing families to be baptized; and the pace of baptisms has not fallen. It is possible that a key reason why we aren’t baptizing family groups is that we haven’t tried hard enough. This mission president imposed a draconian rule that forced missionaries to engage the fathers in the families they were teaching.

[ii] Preach My Gospel, p. 215.

[iii] Preach My Gospel, p. 221.

[iv] Preach My Gospel, p. 111.

[v] The three locations in the scriptures that specify how we can tell whether an investigator is ready for baptism – Mosiah 18:8-10, Moroni 6:1-4 and D&C 20:37 are very consistent: None specify that knowledge of doctrine is a pre-requisite. In fact, Moroni 6:4 says that nourishment happens after baptism. This is contributes to my belief that, while both are important, it is more important to teach them how to be nourished by the scriptures, than it is to teach them what the scriptures say.

[vi] I collected this data from twelve stakes in the North America Northeast Area between 2000 and 2003.

[vii] Most ward missionaries languish in their jobs – not knowing clearly what to do, when to do it, and whether they have succeeded. As a result, most bishops aren’t motivated to call valuable members as ward missionaries, because they seem to do so little. Why do we see this? Many callings in the church are highly structured – and that structure helps members who serve in those positions magnify those assignments. For example, when we call a woman to serve as adviser to the 16-18 year-old young women, we don’t just say, “Your responsibility is to strengthen these girls,” shake her hand, and then let her wander off to do it. We create a structure around her that helps her know what to do, and when to do it. When she accepts this calling, she knows that she is signing up to spend every Tuesday evening from 6:30 to 9:30 with these girls, and that she needs to prepare in advance an activity for this time. She knows that every Sunday she’ll need to teach them a lesson from 11:10 to 12:00. A young womanhood award defines the path of progress that her girls are expected to follow. The structure doesn’t get in the way of her being inspired how to help these girls. It helps her tremendously.

In the face of this evidence that structure helps, what do we tell ward missionaries and home teachers of new members? “Your responsibility is to strengthen new members.” We then do little more than shake their hand and let them wander off to do it. We have lessons that new members should be taught. But that’s all the structure we give them. If we bring more structure to the work of ward missionaries in ways that are suggested here, I suspect that many more of them will feel good about, and motivated in, their callings.

[viii] Preach My Gospel, p. 8

[ix] See Isaiah 55:8 Mark 8:35 Matt. 11:28-30

[x] This statistic is from the 14 stakes in the Northeast that I’ve been tracking since 2000

[xi] This statistic comes from a survey done by one of the missions in the North America Northeast Area.

[xii] These judgments were provided by the bishops and/or ward mission leaders in these units.