Posted by:
Wally Prince
(
)
Date: March 28, 2019 12:20AM
Seems like they tried that once and it didn't work out very well.
At this point it looks like the "Brethren" are just making changes for the sake of making changes so that it will look like they're working hard and deserving their stipends, expense accounts and subsidized housing, along with all the adulation, praise and worship.
What's next? Another change in the meeting schedules? A First Presidency pronouncement concerning appropriate colors for men's socks? A restoration of the Five Points of Fellowship? A new "every member a missionary" campaign?
If they go to 18-month missions for the foreign language missions, it's going to be a disaster. (Well, it already is. But it will be a worse disaster.) For the harder languages, you'll just have clueless kids fresh out of high school spending a year and a half not understanding what people are saying to them, while simultaneously being unable to say anything comprehensible to anyone but their English-speaking companions. That'll be fantastic!
I think it would be better to just scrap the whole preaching, evangelizing and proselyting mission template and replace it with a real service-oriented mission. Do good works that make a real difference and people who see that will think that the Church is a fantastic organization (even if it really isn't in many ways).
If they did that, they could reduce the mission time to 1 year easily.
Project ideas:
Creating, staffing and supplying homeless shelters
Cleaning up polluted bodies of water, picking up trash, learn how to filter out pollutants...and then filter out pollutants.
Preserving and maintaining historical sites.
Refurbishing old bicycles and supplying them to people who can use them.
Forest fire prevention work (making fire breaks, removing built up tinder in strategic locations, helping with controlled burns, etc.)
Building, maintaining, repairing water-supply systems (learn how to check water purity levels, troubleshoot pollutant sources, etc., teach filtration technology to villages, towns, etc.)
Big Brother type activities. Devote resources to helping young kids have opportunities to be mentored in school studies and fun activities (camping, sports, hiking, photography, etc.) under good supervision.
Just imagine if the term "Mormon missionary" became automatically associated in people's minds with all kinds of real-world beneficial services similar to the examples listed above. The PR benefit for the Church would be enormous. As it is now, the term "Mormon missionary" (or "Church of Jesus Christ Missionary" (Yeah, right, Nelson)) is associated with weird sets of companions with matching white shirts and name tags who go around trying to persuade people that if they look at the pages of the weird Book of Mormon and pray about it, the Holy Ghost will tell them it's true. That hasn't been working for a long, long, long time.