November 7, 2011 Missionary Advice

[Advice to new ward mission leader] There´s a ton of blessings that come from missionary work. Somethings that have always helped me are having missionary family home evenings. That´s an activity where the ward´s invited and invited to bring a friend or a current investigator. Those at the very least are good for building relationships with the members and helping them have more desires to help in the missionary work. They could also be centered around inviting the members to give references or make plans to invite someone to church or something. It also helps if I have a list of all the priests and elders who could accompany us and their hours of availability, so maybe if he could do a list like that. If the missionaries are good they should also be filling out a progress report every week with their investigators and less active members and recent converts that they are working with. As a matter of fact Matt could start out by asking them in their correlation meeting if they have that. That´s another thing, Matt should have a meeting with them everyweek to talk about their investigators and how the ward council can help bring them to church and involve them in the ward so he knows what to say in the executive comitee meeting (where the priesthood leaders meet together.) Other than that I´d invite Matt to read chapter 13 in Preach My gospel where it talks about working with the ward council and defines all the jobs and callings in the ward leadership, since I have no actual authority or stewardship to tell Matt how to be a ward mission leader. All I know is that our mission president is putting a ton of emphasis on teaching the lessons of retention to all of the recent converts within this year and last year and finding new investigators through them, because the best converts come through the recent converts. He also puts a lot of emphasis on teaching more lessons with member than any other lesson, so that´s why I included the part about hours of members, because we´ve found that by teaching 15-20 lessons a week and never less than 10 a week, missionaries baptize more. Maybe that´s just true for my mission, so I´d definitely ask the missionaries about what their mission president wants them to focus on and read Preach My Gospel rigorously to understand what these missionaries need to be doing and how they need help so the ward can baptize weekly.

Training is pretty difficult because it´s hard to speak English so much because I notice that my spanish always suffers a bit after speaking english. I am also responsible for teaching him how to be able to function as a missionary because it´s pretty obvious that we don´t become used to the missionary lifestyle right away. It´s also a good experience and a lot of pressure knowing that this experience will be shaping the rest of his mission, so I´m always trying to be the example. I honestly have no requests for christmas... I´m good on socks, maybe a tie, I donno...How about a baptism or some cool missionary skills.  Investigators only dig missionaries with good missionary skills :)

COn Amor,
Elder Arrowchis