Posted by:
zliska
(
)
Date: January 11, 2025 11:56AM
The LDS Church claims to have more than 17 million members. President Nelson repeated that claim at the April 2024 Semi-Annual General Conference. The claim is typical of the deception which the Church has employed since its inception, as more than half of those individuals are completely inactive, and want nothing to do with the Church.
A disgraceful true story about the LDS Japan Tokyo South Mission is worth recounting. I have used some of the information provided by flattopSF in a post on the Recovery From Mormonism board, which is consistent with information provided by a family member who was called to the Tokyo South Mission nearly two decades after these events occurred. One of the two main characters in the story was Delbert (“Dee”) Holbook Groberg, a successful oil-industry executive, and the son of Delbert Valentine Groberg, the Idaho Falls, Idaho Temple president and his wife, Jennie Holbrook. Dee Groberg was also the brother of John H. Groberg, a member of the LDS Quorum of Seventy. Though I never met Dee Groberg or his wife, I knew his parents and his siblings, including John. The other main character was Yoshihiko Kikuchi, a successful business executive, who at the time was Japan Area Administrator for the Church.
After Spencer W. Kimball, the President of the LDS Church, appointed Dee Groberg as President of the Japan Tokyo South Mission in 1978, he and Yoshihiko Kikuchi formulated a plan to increase baptisms in Japan, a nation that was, historically, an abysmally-performing venue for missionary work. LDS missionaries generally spent two years there, unable to teach anyone about the Church. New-member baptisms were almost nonexistent. Their plan was to radically alter the standard LDS methods of targeting, contacting, teaching and baptizing, so as to take advantage of certain behavioral patterns of Japanese culture. The plan also took a charismatic approach to conversion, not unlike that of American Fundamentalist tent-meetings, which were accompanied by mass baptisms.
As part of the plan, missionary apartments were relocated to areas near major pedestrian shopping centers and transportation hubs. In Tokyo, existing chapels were used as teaching centers, and when distance from a chapel rendered that option unfeasible, offices were rented with the intent to use them for the same purpose and as branch meeting-houses. In outlying areas, missionary apartments were to be used as teaching centers as well as branch meeting-houses. Missionaries were instructed to no longer waste their time tracting (i.e., knocking doors), but rather to use the shopping centers and transportation hubs as a resource pool, to make street contacts through a variety of tricks, the most popular of which was to offer tutoring in English. Another was the establishment of baseball and basketball teams to attract the teenage boys. Missionaries were instructed to target teens, young adults, and needy types in their street contacting. These were easy targets. They were to take advantage of a the Japanese cultural reluctance to directly disagree or engage in confrontation in face-to-face interactions, and were given techniques on how to establish an easy rapport, and how to get the contact to repeatedly agree with the missionary. A patter was developed so that the missionary could steer and control the conversation. Then the missionary would get the contact to agree (easy by that time) to go with him/her and talk briefly about “Something Very Important”.
Missionaries were instructed that once communication was established, they were not to lose it. They were to bring the contact to the nearest teaching center, and begin the indoctrination process immediately. The standard six missionary discussions were rewritten and condensed into six short presentations that lasted between five and ten minutes each. The lessons were dramatized and endowed with a charismatic flavor. Missionaries were advised that they could "teach" all six discussions at once "if the spirit so directed." Following the mini-discussion presentation, missionaries were instructed to immediately challenge the person to baptism. If the person accepted, missionaries were to contact their zone leaders, who were never more than ten or fifteen minutes away by train, and schedule a baptismal interview. Apartments, teaching centers, and meeting-houses were all equipped with makeshift baptismal fonts. If the contact accepted and passed the interview for baptism (almost no one failed the interview), he or she was loaned a white jumpsuit or shift, and baptism immediately followed the six lessons and interview. Confirmation as a member of the Church followed. Zone Leaders witnessed both the baptism and the confirmation. The entire process (contact to confirmation) was timed and refined until it was streamlined down to approximately one and one-half hour. Most frequently, the six lessons, the baptism interview and confirmation all occurred in succession. The missionary was to exchange contact information (address and phone number) with the "new member," give him or her a copy of the Book of Mormon, as well as a small map and schedule that showed him when and where the nearest church services were held. The new member was, then, allowed to depart.
New baptism statistics were posted weekly in the mission newsletter, so as to increase the level of competition among the missionaries. Missionaries were required to meet regularly for "mutual encouragement" meetings, and Zone or Mission Conferences were regularly scheduled to raise the excitement level even further and sustain it at fever pitch. The whole concept was packaged and sold as a “Two Hour Secret Adventure”. Naturally, when the new members went home and talked to their parents about what they had just been through, they were almost certainly met with a huge negative response.
In retrospect, the Tokyo South Mission conversion plan sounds outrageous—and it was, but at the time, it revolutionized Japanese missionary work. Baptisms soared. Suddenly, missionaries who had been unable to baptize a single person were baptizing dozens of people every month. The Tokyo South mission soon averaged over 1,000 baptisms each month. In fact, for a time, it was the highest baptizing mission in the entire Church. News of this naturally spread like wildfire. What no one in Utah realized at the time was that most of these “conversions” were mostly teenage boys who wanted only to play baseball and basketball, as well as some teenage girls who were enamored with all things American. Though other missions in Japan were soon using some variation of the new techniques, none was as spectacularly successful as the Tokyo South Mission. Groberg and Kikuchi got the system up and running, and did what was necessary to keep it going.
The psychological cost to everyone involved in the process was enormous. Peer-pressure and leadership expectations were high, and every missionary in the Tokyo South Mission suffered some degree of personal emotional pain in the process. Many went home early after serving only a few months under Groberg. I assume that they simply did not want to be so inappropriately manipulated, nor did they want to continue to manipulate the Japanese people. Groberg reportedly became verbally and psychologically abusive when missionaries announced that they leaving the mission early and going home. This was to be expected. When I asked Boyd K. Packer some difficult questions about the Book of Mormon and church doctrine when I was a missionary, he became psychologically abusive. I suspect that those who left early dropped out of the Church completely—never to return, and many of those who completed their missions under Groberg subsequently left the Church.
Longtime Japanese members were shocked and horrified, as they were the ones who had to deal with some 30,000 membership records of new people who, even when contacted, displayed no interest, whatsoever, in the LDS religion. By 1982, a year following the departure of Dee Groberg and his wife, Sharon, the LDS Church in Tokyo had become the brunt of jokes and mockery by Japanese TV personalities, a situation which lasted for decades. The costs for Dee Groberg and his wife, who later divorced, were also high. Two of their sons died. If I remember correctly, one committed suicide at the age of 19; the other died of a drug overdose at the age of 38. Dee Groberg passed away in 2022 at the age of 81.
I suspect that Dee’s brother, John, was not promoted beyond the Quorum of Seventy because of his familial ties to Dee and to another brother, David, who had his Idaho license to practice clinical psychology revoked in the 1990s for having engaged in sex with a female client-patient. In 2005, at the age of 71, John was granted “emeritus” status. This tragic story demonstrates that within the LDS Church, looking good is often more laudable than doing good or being good.
Though growth rates are down from what they were three decades ago, the Church is still growing fairly rapidly for one reason: the conversion of large numbers of relatively uneducated people from the third-world countries of Asia, Latin America and Africa. This is really not a new phenomenon, as the Church has always had its greatest success among the uneducated, downtrodden masses. In the U.S., growth is fueled mainly by the exploding immigrant population. There are strong indications that white middle-class members (the principal tithe-paying group) are deserting the Church in increasing numbers. The Internet is likely responsible for that phenomenon. It is, without doubt, the most significant threat to expansion of the LDS Church among the informed and educated. Never before has such a vast array of information been instantly available to so many. Accurate information is the enemy of darkness, fraud and deceit. The adverse impact of the Internet will likely grow as the damning historical information relating to the LDS Church is translated into foreign languages, and access to the Internet in third-world countries increases. In another ten years, the Church will likely see the number of conversions in third-world countries begin to dwindle.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/11/2025 11:05PM by zliska.