lose their testimonies while on their missions? Or do they come home more gung ho than ever? I've heard of some couples who serve multiple missions.

My own parents seemed to have mellowed quite a bit on their mission. By the time they got back I'd been out of the church for nearly ten years and they just seemed to accept that I wasn't coming back.

Anyone here know of any couples coming back from missions who were disapointed or plain old pissed off?

I was corresponding on the internet with a lady who was on a mission. Her husband had no idea that when she was online she was researching church history.

She totally lost her testimony out there.

My mother had a friend who went on a couples' mission. They were very devout mormon. They went to some church welfare mission and when they came back they said if they didn't have such a strong testimony that the things that went on while they were on their mission were so disturbing (amongst the people assigned as their leaders), that they would have left the church.

I have a friend who went on a couples' mission. They came back 6 months early and she has never told me why. She still goes to church--but I often wonder how much she believes. She is the ONLY mormon friend who has never told me she KNOWS I still believe, never tries to get me to go back, and when I have voiced my anger to her about the church, she always says, "I understand." I sometimes think she has too much invested and she really likes the culture. Her kids are all extremely active, temple married, lots of grandkids--she has the perfect mormon family--but she cant' get out of bed most days even on antidepressants.

Thanks Cl2 that's what I wanted to hear. I have family going on some kind of welfare mission. I'm hoping that it really opens their eyes.

It's sad to see them so eager to go and waste a year and a half of their lives in a dangerous third world city. But they've been saving up to go for years.

To be fair, at least a welfare mission has a chance of doing some good in the world. So take some comfort in that.

If the Mormon Church wanted to be truly Christlike they wouldn't have any proselyting missions, only welfare ones. Unfortunately the organisation is self absorbed and see's Itself as more important than the poor and the needy.

The worst that can happen is that they'll go, serve honourably and do some people some good. They may even see the hypocrisy between what they do on their mission and what the Mormon Church does.

Unless of course the welfare mission is to serve on one of the Church's commercial hunting reserves, as has happened in the past...

about how her mission to Africa shook her testimony. Her talk is online somewhere, and it was very good. It was basically about how she realized how poor and desperate these people were and the church wasn't really interested in helping them out. They just wanted to convert them. She knew she could do MORE, but she wasn't able to do that until after she finished her mission and went back to Africa later.