Can anyone help me understand what the stay at home senior missionaries do?
I ran into a lady I used to work with. She wore a missionary name tag and said she was serving a mission, but she was obviously living from her home and "serving" locally.
Working from memory -- it could be that she is serving as a full-time ward missionary, or as a missionary/worker at the local temple. Other possibilities include genealogical name extraction, indexing, or tracking down inactives. She could also possibly be working at a local welfare operation or church farm.
(I always call them ex, when in fact, they are not)--but they work in the church employment office as missionaries. I see the senior missionaries in Sam's all the time. Interesting that they come in with name tags on when, OBVIOUSLY, they are done with "work." I just adore those who are dressed up as though coming from going to the temple to shop. I see them at Costco, too.
A girl I've been working with is going to do a local mission. She didn't really explain to me why she couldn't go somewhere else (she wasn't happy that she couldn't) or what she is doing, as she couldn't really explain it as she didn't seem to know herself. Stay around and work for the church rather than earn money working? But she was not suitable for the job at Sam's in terms of she was TINY and she had to lift heavy things and wasn't able to.
My "husband" has an old coworker who retired and he was called to do something from home and he said he worked harder at his mission calling than he did while working. He was trying to figure out WHY he retired!!!
So it isn't necessarily temple work, though one of my daughter's mormon moms is in Nauvoo working in the temple with her husband and disabled daughter, so they could be working in the temple.
They could be tour guides at the local tabernacle (here in Cache Valley). I have neighbors who are also on a local mission. They already served one somewhere else like Pennsylvania.
I only know about a VERY elderly couple in my town that bragged about being local missionaries. It was their job to round up the Mormon kids who came to our midwestern university town and make sure they came to church. Seems lots of Utah kids come to our university and go AWOL from Mormonism, or try to. The wife was so proud of the students she tracked down and hounded into going to church.
Note to students: Make sure you have a P.O. Box address rather than a home address when you escape your Mormon homeland.
Pooped Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Note to students: Make sure you have a P.O. Box > address rather than a home address when you escape > your Mormon homeland.
Sorry, that won't work. All one has to do is send a letter to the Postmaster at *****zip code, asking for the street address of the holder of the P O Box # in question, and they will comply.
The P.O. Box address worked for me in getting LDS, Inc. off my back but you can also get a UPS postal address that shows a street address. I believe UPS will keep your home address private. The only people they are required by law to give your home address to is the government as in Homeland Security.
Not that it really matters, but there's a USPS form that attorney services can use to get the address behind the P.O.Box when they can show it's to serve process. But there is no form that allows you to get the address..."just because"...
She spends all day every day calling on inactives or any other person she can track down. She attends funerals and talks to relatives, gives them her card, and makes appointments to talk to them about going back to church or joining up.
She did this at my mother's funeral. It's a sad pathetic way to spend time harvesting names by going to funerals.
When I had a calling in the older LDS Singles (I quit, telling them that it was "not the Lord's work.") a lot of the women would go to funerals looking for husbands. They would look for dead women in the obits, who lived in nicer neighborhoods, go to the funeral, tell everyone they were a friend of the dead wife, and offer to bring dinner to the widower. Some would even do his laundry and house cleaning for him.
Anyway, the sleazy, time-wasting aspects of these "missions" probably make the volunteers feel a bit ashamed. There are no real skills or qualifications. This is probably why most senior missionaries seem to have a hard time explaining exactly what they do--it is sneaky, it is embarrassing, and it is stalking. These aren't the prestigious missions, like mission president or temple president. Even temple workers put themselves above the computer missionaries and name-extraction people. One very snobby widowed neighbor won herself a mission as a cleaning lady "housekeeper" in the mission home, for her friend who was the wife of a mission president. Men used to go on "work missions," which were really construction and building-maintenance missions. Now, I believe that ALL types of missions are lumped together, and just called "a mission." Hell, the pay's the same for all.
My parents worked in the mission home and handled the paperwork to keep the place running - making sure car service was kept up to date, handling car registration, repairs and paperwork for accidents, disposing of old cars and purchasing new ones (which was basically done through a church clearinghouse in SLC, but there was still local paperwork involved).
submitting baptism paperwork to SLC, arranging transportation for transfers and returns home after missions. Some of that was handled by the APs (travel, I believe), but my parents did at least all the car related paperwork and the reports to SLC. Zero proselyting.
From my observation, if you're a retired carpenter, engineer, doctor, or grasshopper collector and you raise you paw to volunteer, the church will snap you up and let you work for....hold the tears and applause.....for FREE!
They will use your training and skills when and where they want to.
What a racket. Of course, Sleazy Joe and Briggy were masters at that, so they learned from the worst.
I've heard of senior missionaries paying above market value for rental property owned by LDS,Inc. for living quarters while on their mission because tscc talks them out of renting from local landlords.
I think that pretty well defines "patsy" or "pigeon".
My brother and his wife, (he is 68 and she's a few months older) told me a while back that they are going to be on a senior mission this summer, working at a campground up near Ogden, UT.
They aren't going to be dealing with campers but more in the maintenance area (he had a life time of working in HVAC, owning his own business at one point.)
The live in Bluffdale, south of Salt Lake so they will have at least an hour's drive each way to get there. Talk about good missionary work.
After doing an 18 mo mission in Europe, relatives did a mission at home. They worked at a mission office in SLC, she being a receptionist and I think he did bookkeeping.
And I keep thinking what a waste of your retirement years. Once a few years ago we sent them free tickets to a dinner and a history conference we couldn't attend. They couldn't use them because they were temple workers that night. We never found out if one of their children used them. These people aren't rich. A nice free dinner at a nice venue with nice, smart people?
Well, serving from home beats selling your home and spending substantial retirement funds to go to an unfamiliar place for a year or more. My aunt/uncle dropped more than $100K for their 18 month stint in Sweden.