Just had a relative get a mission call. Seems like they make such a big deal about this event anymore. Posts on Facebook and YouTube for everyone to see. I get the part about letting everyone know, but when did they start making major productions out of this ritual of "opening" their call. They wait til evening, or even the next day in my relatives case, so they can have everyone there and make a big deal about it. Then they post on Facebook. Search "mission call" on YouTube and many pop up.
Disclaimer: Don't search if you have a weak stomach for things mormony.

Back in my day you picked up the mail and opened it. Read where you were headed, and then called a few friends. No big deal. Or was I an exception? Curious to hear if others have noticed this.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/22/2014 08:21PM by mankosuki.

the fall for those who don't make it.

A neighbor from childhood posts these types of things on fb. She put many posts about her daughter going on a mission. Guess what. . . she was supposed to leave in August and by October, she was going to a movie with her mother. Now what? Do you post "my daughter couldn't hack it."

I think they need to be much more careful about making such a big deal about it. I think the backlash could really hurt the kids who end up coming home.

Great point cl2. I was thinking the same. Its more indoctrination and added pressure. Not just for those that are opening the calls, but the added guilt and pressure on the younger siblings and friends that will feel the need to do the same even if they have no desire to go on a mission.

Totally agree...The pomp and circumstance of going on a mission (the temple, the farewell, the open house, the setting apart) was bad enough way back when I left for my mission in pre-social media 1992, now it is totally out of control becuase we now have to have the opening of the envelope fanfare for all to see the reaction, which was unheard of back in those days, but now is posted on the Internet for the WORLD to see.

When I got my call, I opened the envelope by myself as soon as I took it out of the mailbox, I then told everyone else on my terms, and that was the end of it.

Not to mention that, at least back in the early 1990s, mission calls CHANGED, and fairly frequently I might add. I recall many mission calls being changed while fellow Elders and Sisters had already left home and were at the MTC! So members at the ward level may think these events are necessary and inspired, but apparently, the Missionary Department thinks nothing of pulling the rug out from missionaries by changing their oh-so-inspired calls!

I see this as an extension of everyone being pressured into the same conformity. It's made into an over the top emotional event, but it's still not about the person going per se. Every person in the church is a cog and interchangeable. And the next step is to adopt the uniform and get your gauzy photo taken with your shiny Book of Mormon and post that on your newly minted Facebook page as Elder or Sister so-and-so, just like every other teen.

I received my letter from the prophet, SWK in 1976. I called my bishop and my grandmother. That was it.

I saw a mission call announcement in the Salt Lake Tribune today!Complete with picture of missionary and details of the farewell. I was stunned. Who does that?

It's almost as bad as getting a formal announcement in the mail for some kid's baptism...so and so has "chosen" to be baptised......yeah, right.

I got my call to SLC, I opened it with my family and then went to a Cubs game.

The paperwork came in a #10 envelope, telling me where I was going, when to report to the Salt Lake City mission home and what to plan on bringing. I told my mom and dad and then called my girl friend. I suppose I mentioned it at church. Well, obviously I mentioned it at church because I was involved in planning my farewell program!

I don't know who did it, but obviously it was someone at church, because it was common: I had a nice big announcement in the Las Vegas Sun, probably about 10 column inches, with the same photo that they used on my farewell program. This was in 1965. My girl friend cut it out and pasted it into the mission scrapbook she was keeping for me. There's lots of detail in that scrapebook, up until month five in Mexico, eight months into the mission, when the last entry was a copy of her Dear John letter...

Newspaper announcements of missions, while I have seen some as well, seemed to be the exception, not the norm, and were rarely if ever done for missionaries whose hometown newspapers were outside the Morridor. These youtube mission call opening ceremonies have definitely added a whole new dimension to the experience.

My mom just loves the mission call videos and is constantly posting ones of total strangers because they are going somewhere interesting or had a funny reaction to their call. Any excuse. My favorite was the guy who got his mission call while on Trek. They arranged for him to have the letter delivered by pony express. Everyone is standing around, cooking over campfires or doing other pioneer activities in this big meadow, dressed in full pioneer regalia. Then some guy come racing into the camp on horse saying he had an important message for Elder "Jones." The kid opened his mission call in front of a crowd of pioneers who had come running to hear the news from the "Pony Express" rider. The kid got called somewhere like Cleveland - very anticlimactic but the BEST part was that it made Mormons look bat-crap crazy. Any non-Mormon who saw that on FB would be seriously doubting the sanity of Mormons, not knowing that it was a pioneer reenactment.

In fact it was so bad, I asked my mom to take it down. Partly because she mentioned how exciting it had been for our whole family to get my mission call and I didn't want my name on that sort of nonsense. And partly because it made Mormons look so bad that even I felt sorry for them. It was like letting a baby play with a knife - you just couldn't bear to allow it to happen.

My mom just loves the mission call videos and is constantly posting ones of total strangers because they are going somewhere interesting or had a funny reaction to their call. Any excuse. My favorite was the guy who got his mission call while on Trek. They arranged for him to have the letter delivered by pony express. Everyone is standing around, cooking over campfires or doing other pioneer activities in this big meadow, dressed in full pioneer regalia. Then some guy come racing into the camp on horse saying he had an important message for Elder "Jones." The kid opened his mission call in front of a crowd of pioneers who had come running to hear the news from the "Pony Express" rider. The kid got called somewhere like Cleveland - very anticlimactic but the BEST part was that it made Mormons look bat-crap crazy. Any non-Mormon who saw that on FB would be seriously doubting the sanity of Mormons, not knowing that it was a pioneer reenactment.

In fact it was so bad, I asked my mom to take it down. Partly because she mentioned how exciting it had been for our whole family to get my mission call and I didn't want my name on that sort of nonsense. And partly because it made Mormons look so bad that even I felt sorry for them. It was like letting a baby play with a knife - you just couldn't bear to allow it to happen.

Great analogy! I love a good analogy. Best way to make a point.

So funny to think about how Mormons think everyone else is in awe of them when really non mormons mostly think they are odd.

I teach in the same college department with a devout Mormon. Occasionally if someone asks me about my weekend, I will say I spent some of Sunday marking. He ALWAYS jumps in to state very piously that his entire Sunday is always devoted to church and family. He thinks we are all awed by his devotion while really we are all thinking "sucks to be you".

Yeah, because only Mormons care about spending time with their families.

Really went off topic with my last comment. Sorry, just following my train of thought imaging how bizarre the rest of the world thinks the previous poster's ride in pony express story is.

Another way of looking at it is that it's technology-driven. I'm not sure how old the OP is, so I can only ask whether his mission was before the advent of FB, YouTube and other social media. And since everything's digital now, it's no problem to take a gazillion video or still images.

I've been lucky enough to be able to travel a lot in the past seven years, which has taken my husband and me to many European cities. We're constantly surprised by the increase of Selfies and other instances of people focussing on taking pictures rather than looking around them. (It's gone really over the top.) But the technology's available, so people use it. (Latest we've seen: Extenders for cameras so selfies can be taken a distance greater than arm's length. So people take videos of themselves walking along the street.)

Anyway, you couldn't post videos in earlier decades, so the private moments remained necessarily private. You couldn't afford to take pictures and mail them out or send videos to the entire family. So people didn't do it.



Edited 5 time(s). Last edit at 11/23/2014 06:36AM by Lorraine aka síóg.