Posted by:
sonofaswede
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Date: March 28, 2014 06:08AM
This is a really long post so in short: This mission is an office job pretending to be a mission. The young missionaries in this mission are here because they were "honorably excused" from serving a regular mission.
I'm still pretty new to this site so sorry if this is the wrong place to post a topic like this but I felt like it's something everyone would like to know.
I'm an early returned missionary that came home from his mission last Monday. I put up with being there for over a year due to the pressures the Church put on me and stuff but I finally put my foot down and demanded to be released early which was thankfully done. I grew up a member in the church with a mormon family that goes back 5 generations but I've been a closet ex-mormon ever since I got my own endowment in Dec 2012. I heard the arguments that the mormon church is a cult a lot and never really paid much attention to it until I started going through the temple for my first time and realized that I was participating in weird cult-like cerimonies that no one has ever told me about before. (Yes I managed to remain blissfully ignorant about what goes on in the temple the whole time.)
I hated the entire experience and it made me very frightened and nervous about what I was really involved in but this all happened a week before I left on my mission and I didn't really have the courage to voice my feelings and just sort of kept it to myself because I was expected to be a missionary. I managed to get away with a lot of research while on my mission (discovered this site, in fact) and needless to say I don't believe in it anymore. I'm still not really sure how I'm going to get out of it all though.
Anyway that was just me venting, the reason I made this topic is I thought everyone would be interested in the mission I was on. It's called the Family and Church History Headquarters Mission and is located at church headquarters on Temple Square. It's a service mission for part-time and full-time senior missionaries but recently they started to allow young elders to join in to create a pretty unique mission.
The FCHH Mission is a service mission opportunity if you're a young elder but what makes it different is it claims to be a full-time mission that is just as worthy as a regular proslyting mission, except you aren't actually allowed to proslyte or teach anyone at all. Since it's not a proslyting mission you do not teach investigators or teach any gospel lessons at all. (Except at a specific time on Sunday and you're only allowed to teach the senior missionaries on the mission with you.) So basically what this means is that as a young elder in the FCHH mission you have to follow all the rules and standards required of a regular missionary except for the fact that you don't actually get to do what a regular missionary does. (That primary song is a lie.)
So what do you do as a missionary on this mission then?
Well this mission is one to help aid the family history and church history departments of the church. There are several "zones" in the mission that are scattered throughout various locations on Temple Square like the Church Office Building, Joseph Smith Memorial Building, Family History Library, etc. (I worked in the library.) Depending on what zone you're in you just do the things that the church needs done that they don't want to pay anyone to do basically like helping maintain familysearch.org by scanning or indexing images, or maintaing the library and helping the patrons there.
I worked in the library and my job was to help patrons with their family history problems assuming they needed help. (They rarely did.) But a lot of jobs you do on this mission require a computer and you're own cubicle as you fill out excel spreadsheets or quality check images or whatever.
So basically the FCHH Mission is a low wage office job disguised as a mission. You don't get paid because you're "serving the Lord." The young elders on the mission have to follow the standard missionary rules, so they get up at 6:30 AM, arrive at their zone at about 7:30-8:00AM, and work at their little cubicle or whatever until 9:00PM. Seriously. That's what we do on this mission.
Keeping track of your hours is important because we were told that the church liked to look at the hours we've worked for tax purposes and to see how much money they've saved from the missionaries by not having to hire people to do the work we do.
As said earlier, you have to follow the rules of a regular missionary: companion at all times, no wordly distractions, no visiting family and only one e-mail to them per week. Most of the young elders (myself included) live in Utah already so it was really awkward to have your family live within driving distance but were still not allowed to see them.
If you were apply for a mission normally you would never end up on this one as the only way to be a young elder on this mission is to have been "honorably excused" from serving a regular mission. If you've been deemed unable to serve a regular mission then you can apply for a service mission of your choice and this is one of them. Even though the process feels more like applying to a job then applying for a mission they still liked to tell us that we were "called by God" to be here.
To be "honorable excused" from serving a regular mission you have to have been deemed unable to serve a regular mission due to mental, emotional, or physical limitations. For me I have been on prescribed medications for anxiety since I was sixteen. Because of that my bishop got worried and sent me to the LDS Family Services division to have me evaulated. I had to fill out several forms with very personal and probing questions to see if I have what it takes to serve a mission, most people applying for a mission will never have to deal with this. A lot of the questions bothered me but I can remember the one that bothered me the most was a series of questions asking if I experienced any homosexual behaviors. After filling out all the papers they have me see a psychiatrist who asks me more questions while filling out another report. (You aren't authorized to read the report the psychiatrist writes about you.) The psychiatrist then sends that report to the bishop and he makes the final decision as to whether you can serve a mission or not.
My bishop decided that I couldn't serve a mission but told me that there are plenty of service missions out there that I could serve. The church has yet to go public about the young elders in the FCHH mission and it's not very widely know; the only way people seem to get in is by word of mouth which was the case for me.
If you want any sources there is a small buried page about the FCHH Mission on the church's website (it makes no mention of the young missionaries) and if it counts there are a couple of young elder missionary blogs floating around if you google the mission name.