The Unauthorized Investigator's Guide to
The Church of JESUS CHRIST of Latter-day Saints

Missionary Objectives

The object of this page is to give you a feel for what the people serving as missionaries--the real human beings behind the name tags--are trying to accomplish as missionaries. If you understand somebody’s goals, then you understand a lot about them.

People who have the academic training and credentials of theologians run most churches. In contrast, men with the training and experience of business leaders run the LDS Church. Thus, it shouldn’t be a surprise that they run the Church like a business. One thing successful businessmen absolutely love is quantitative goals to focus on. The single quantitative goal that missionary are trained to focus on is number of convert baptisms. The first sentence of The Missionary Guide says, "Your purpose as a missionary is to help people come to Christ through the ordinances of baptism and confirmation." Everything the missionaries do is geared around getting baptisms—that is their bona fide objective.

There are many secondary objectives that missionaries have as they serve their missions. Again, these vary a lot from missionary to missionary.  This list is to give a flavor for what individual missionaries try to accomplish while in the mission field.

  • Grow as human beings. This objective might be less frequent than you imagine. But a righteous secondary objective as somebody serves is to form good habits, learn important things, and develop a deeper spirituality.
     
  • Collect some good stories. In the minds of many, the most important moment of their missions is right after their missions when they receive a hero’s welcome in their home congregation and an entire worship service is dedicated to their homecoming with the returned missionary as the keynote speaker. The missionary wants to have some good stories to tell when that moment comes.
     
  • Make friends. Being a missionary forces you to meet new people, and there is a fantastic opportunity to develop many life long friendships with both investigators and other missionaries. Many missionaries take advantage of this.
     
  • Pass the time. If I may be blunt on this point, being a missionary isn't much fun. The rules tether you 24-7 to a companion that you probably wouldn't choose to hang around with 24 hours a day, and you spend your time trying to convert people to a faith that they have no interest in. It isn’t a fun lifestyle. All they want to do is do their time so that they can get the certificate that says they finished their missions and get all of the cultural benefits to which the bearer of such a certificate is entitled.
     
  • Find a mate. Although it is strongly discouraged, many missionaries end up marrying people they met on their missions. Missionaries are at the sexual peeks of their lives, and regardless of their dedication and integrity to the rules, the biological imperative of their physiology endures. Their job description causes them to continually meet many new people, and the focus of the religion that they are preaching is marriage. Throw all of that together, and many can’t help but think a lot about who they are going to marry, and can’t help but wonder if they will meet that person as a missionary.
     
  • Perform Community Service. The Missionary Handbook says missionaries are supposed to spend 4 off-peak hours a week performing community service. Many missionaries relish the idea of actually performing acts of service to others, rather than proselytizing their religion—an activity that usually fees like a waste of time.
     
  • Rise in the corporate ranks. Within each pair of missionaries there is a junior companion and a senior companion. The senior companion gets to be the captain of the team, deciding what they will do and how they’ll do it. Companionships are organized into districts led by district leaders—the top 20% of missionaries. Districts are organized into zones led by zone leaders--the top 10% of missionaries.  In the entire mission there are 2 Assistants to the President--the top 1% of missionaries. The higher up you get in the organizational chart of the mission, the more people you have under you to boss around, the more freedom you have, the more prestigious your resume looks, and the more time you spend doing leadership stuff rather than proselytizing stuff. Now, the right attitude is supposed to be that you want to spend all your time teaching investigators and thus shouldn’t want leadership. But the reality is that most missionaries would rather be a leader, and many missionaries obsessively covet leadership roles and structure everything they do around maximizing their chances of getting promoted within the corporate structure of the mission.

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If you have a question or would like to discuss these topics, I suggest that you go to a Mormon-related bulletin board (here are some recommendations). If you'd like to contact me with comments or feedback, you may send an email to analytics@lds4u.com.