I am reading the Book of a Mormon. In it the author talks about having to pay for a box of BOMs and missionary lesson books. Does tscc really make missionaries pay for this stuff?
I never served a mission. However, as a ward member, I used to buy Books of Mormon to write my testimony in and then give those to the church for missionary work. Best wishes!
Just seems cheap for a rich church to nickel and dime young missionaries, spending their own money to be there, to also force them to fund the sales brochures.
The more invested (financially, emotionally and time spent) one is in a thing the more value it accumulates and the less likely one is to give it up. simple psychology!
Yes. In my mission we would buy teaching materials and BoM's every month while at the mission home office for conferences. We paid for everything. This was 35-40 yrs ago and I'm not familiar with current protocol.
When I went on a mission we had to purchase the Book of Mormons. New were supposed to get people to buy them from us. I spent two years of my life selling Book of Mormons in a defined area for free labor. We also had quotas to make on how many Book of Mormon's we sold. Some weeks we would leave them on bicycle seats just to say we had placed (sold) our quota.
I was an unpaid fiction book seller that was promoted to unpaid toilet scrubber.
I had one asshat companion that would feel super spiritual if we left the apartment with only enough money to buy a one way ticket down the train line and enough BoMs to sell so that we could afford a ticket back. I hated him.
On your mission you didn't give away Book of Mormons? Or books of Mormon, or whatever it's supposed to be? You actually sold them? Where was your mission, and what years did you serve?
With the exception of right after the Book of Mormon was published, I've never heard of people actually trying to sell the Book of Mormon. I know they tried to sell copies in the 1830s, I know they tried to sell the copyright in Canada at one point, and I know there is an edition of the Book of Mormon that you can buy at Borders or online, but other than that it's pretty damn easy to get a free copy of the Book of Mormon.
And you were SELLING copies, door to door?
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/07/2017 07:53AM by midwestanon.
midwestanon Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Wait. > > On your mission you didn't give away Book of > Mormons? Or books of Mormon, or whatever it's > supposed to be? You actually sold them? Where was > your mission, and what years did you serve?
Same thing in my mission. France-Paris mission, '79-80. We bought the BoMs we took around with us. And we were told to sell them to 'investigators.' Because (as someone mentions below) they're more likely to treat it 'importantly' if they have to pay for it, than if they're given one for free.
> I've never heard of people > actually trying to sell the Book of Mormon.
You have now :)
> And you were SELLING copies, door to door?
Yep. Well, actually, nope. We were TRYING to sell them door to door. We weren't succeeding at doing so. In my 2 years, I 'sold' 4. I gave away 2. Yep, one every 4 months. And I was considered a "big success" in my mission...
When I was an "investigator" before I joined the church, we weren't given a Book of Mormon, we had to buy one off the missionaries. It wasn't expensive, but the reason we were expected to buy them rather than be given them was that it was thought that we'd be more likely to read it and appreciate it. This was in the mid 70's.
This may be the one where the church had hundreds of surplus copies of BOM, and couldn't get rid of them. 'Merchandise' or whatever you call them would 'buy' them from the printing dept. So printing dept bottom line looks good, but merchandise doesn't. They can't return them to printing, because then printing bottom line would suck.
So, some muppet came up with the idea of selling the books to members, they would write their testimony in and could either hand to a non-member, keep at their chapel for future investigators, or send back to the Church HQ, where it would be shipped if a non member requested a copy. The Church sold it as a great missionary opportunity, the testimony of someone in say provo utah, could be read by a non member in say edinburgh scotland and begin their wonderful journey to conversion!
It was all about the head of each dept having a good bottom line, they couldn't show a loss or surplus or supplies (assets). They have to impress the people at the top.
Now of course, BOM's are mostly paid for by wards/branches, for missionaries and members to use. I can't imagine anyone paying for a copy when it is available for free online.
Wow. My dad was a missionary in the seventies, I wonder if he had to do this. Just when I thought the church could not come up with a more devious or evil scam.
Well, actually when you think about it, this really doesn't even rate has being on the 10 worst of Mormon scams...
When I was a missionary in Finland in the mid 70s we had to buy them. I can only recall one person ever paying for a Book of Mormon. I was so damn brain dead.
There were elders hanging out outside the theater where The Book Of Mormon musical was playing, distributing BsoM to theater-goers, although not by the bunchful.
I assumed the Mission President (who was called this past Sunday at General Conference to Area Authority) contact Morg headquarters for a shipment of boxes of copies of the Book of Mormon to be handed out, but now it seems from the RM exmos here that may not be likely. Could a MP do that at no cost to him, or his elders?
Heavenly Father (at the gates of the Celestial Kingdom): "Let me see...ah, here it is, right in the Book of Life: You didn't pony up 2 bucks for a Book of Mormon when I sent the missionaries to your door in 1972, so you never read it, so you never learned about the Restoration, so you never joined the Corporation of the President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, so...you aren't getting the top level of Eternal Happiness! Hey, salvation isn't just *given* buddy, you gotta pay! Now, turn around and go wait wait for a 14 year-old from Boise to dead-dunk you."
I think the policy about missionaries paying for their own proselytizing supplies changed about the time ETB pushed his "Love the BoM" program. I know that members were encouraged to support the BoM fund and wards were supposed to raise funds outside of tithing. The church probably realized in 1987 (one of the lowest years for convert baptisms) that if missionaries had to choose between buying food or copies of the BoM, that missionaries would rather eat.
When I was a missionary in the early '70s, teaching the "Lamanites," we had a box of flip charts, film strips, a projector, cassettes and cassette player. They charged each of us $5.00 a month rent on it. The "rent" was supposed to make us value the materials and take care of them. The $240 my various companions and I paid over the course of our missions could've bought the stuff several times over. And since it was all produced -- from conception to distribution -- by the church (well, except for the projector and cassette player), they made some decent return on investment.
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 04/07/2017 07:10PM by Stray Mutt.
Best bom i ever found was at a hotel i stayed at in murray some one had stuck a post it with the address to this site and left thier recovery story inside.
On my mission (69-71) we got them for free in large boxes sent (by train, as I remember) from the mission office. We were encouraged to hand them out liberally. Just a few years later, the church began charging the missionaries for the books, saying that missionaries were too lax, handing them out to just anyone. The church contended that if they charged the missionaries just the cost of the books, they wouldn't be so prone to waste them. But then, at least in my ward, they asked the members to purchase BoM boxes for the missionaries. So--at least in my ward--the cost fell on the members. And back then, if you recall, you always had a quorum of Seventies in your ward. The church seemed to ordain only crazy men to the Seventies, men who were all fired up with the Gospel and Joseph Smith. The crazed Seventies would come after you in the hallway between meetings to hound you about doing missionary work and splits with missionaries, and buying them their damned copies of the BoM.
It was related here about 5 years ago the big BoM push which turned out to be a pretty obvious money maker for TSCC--unless your were a TBM Kool-aid drinker.
Steve Benson? SL Cabbie? RPackham? Baura? Bueller? Bueller?