I spotted on this missionary's blog close to my area of Dublin that they are being told to commit one person a Day to baptism!

How are they supposed to do that when the average is about one person per year if they are lucky!Yikes.
No pressure at all then...



http://eldermasonwynder.blogspot.ie/

That isn't anything new. I was told the same thing in '90s on my mission. It was very successful as nobody let us in the door or skipped out on a discussion

It is interesting to me that in 1958 I encountered no such pressures.

We were told to do the best that we could.

that changed drastically. Alvin R. Dyer arrived with his high-pressure sales program, and it was "baptize, baptize, baptize." The pressure on, and the manipulation of, the missionaries was horrendous.

He-was-one-evil-douchebag-ly yrs,

S

yeah his book, Refiners Fire, was full of guilt inducing craziness, which my parents lived by.

Translation: get 364 people per year to lie to you to get you to shut up and leave them alone.

Why not ten per day?

Yeah really. What slackers!

How are they supposed to do that with all the shrinking the morg is having in Europe and othe countries like the USa!?? Scotland not a third world country is it???

In Dublin? Uh... dream on. Ponies and world peace are nice too.

I find this funny especially since I have a friend who told me that "a testimony is hard to get, but if you really work at it it will come..." Yep. Like I haven't been through that one. Delusions and hallucinations might be hard to induce too, but with enough practice, it comes. I was super good at it. Now I'm doing my best to stay in a religion-drug-free zone.

So... people have free agency, but if you have enough faith, you can force them to be delusional too! Rainbows! Ponies! Lollipops!

alyssum Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------

>
> I find this funny especially since I have a friend
> who told me that "a testimony is hard to get, but
> if you really work at it it will come..." Yep.
> Like I haven't been through that one. Delusions
> and hallucinations might be hard to induce too,
> but with enough practice, it comes. I was super
> good at it. Now I'm doing my best to stay in a
> religion-drug-free zone.
>
^^^ This sentiment resonates with me!

I know a missionary who was under such pressure to "teach" that while tracting he and his comp would spit out as much of the Joe Smith story as they could WHILE STILL ON THE DOORSTEP...if they got much of it out before the door slammed......well, that counted as one discussion taught !

Challenging one person a day to get baptized has to be the stupidest thing ever, what kind of converts are you going to get this way?

That's what our mission president told us to do.

I got to the point where I could tell Joseph Smith's story in about a minute or two. Bing--1st discussion in the books!

And presto, our discussion numbers went up. The MP's superiors must have been so proud.

Luckily, we still were not baptizing anyone.

I feel so sorry for the poor naive missionaries who will actually believe this is direction from God's anointed. Those poor teens will knock themselves out and go home defeated in body and spirit. The not so naive will flip the bird to the MP and party hardy or just take it in their stride as they vacation or sleep their way through their mission.

My mission president talked to the zone leaders about me because I told him I went on a mission to simply talk to those who were interested in my religion and I was not going to play stupid baseball games with the names of my investigators. To me they were people I wanted to love and accept whether or not they committed to baptism or joined my faith. They were so much more to me than playing pieces on a game board. He just never got that.

That is so spot on, pooped. That is what I taught my kids growing up and preparing for missions--love and service came first.

That wouldn't be possible even if it were raining and the whole world was flooding.

Slave Driving.

Bring more strangers into this strange fold!



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/14/2015 04:48PM by moremany.

The church should throw something in with every baptism. Like a new toaster or a hair dryer. I mean literally throw it in. If you're gonna let them kill your free will, you might as well let them do the rest of you.

donbagley Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> The church should throw something in with every
> baptism. Like a new toaster or a hair dryer. I
> mean literally throw it in. If you're gonna let
> them kill your free will, you might as well let
> them do the rest of you.

LOL

Reminds me of the sad tale of the child Reverend Jimmy Joe Jeeter from "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman":


http://maryhartmanmaryhartman.webstarts.com/uploads/jimmyjoejeeter.pdf

It just doesn't make any sense to me!

What are they going to say? 'Hi can we tell you about our church?'...a few minutes later 'So would you like to be baptised?Let's set a date!'

I take more time than that choosing which flavor of dental floss to use. Can't imagine making a hugely life altering decision that fast!

Seems like the Holy Ghost is the guy they should be telling to do his job better.

Because the missionaries don't do the converting, right?

Back in the day of six discussions and the flannel board, the "commitment to be baptized" was a silly, sqirrelly thing.

The discussions were done from memory and in that first one, about the restoration, at the end, as a wrap up, you asked, "if you come to know that what we are telling you is true, and decide to be baptized, would Tuesday, the 8th be okay or is Saturday the 12th better?" (we were taught never to ask yes or no questions.)

Invariably, the 'mark' would say, "whoa, whoa! It's too soon to talk about baptism!"

And we'd calm the mark down and point we'd asked "if..." and eventually the mark would say "well, if..." and we'd count that as a 'commitment.

So in effect, the MP knows he's not asking for a baptism per day, he's just asking the troops for some rah-rah bullshit to help make everyone feel good.

So, if a person is expected to abandon their own church without knowing anything about the new one, does the soul of the new convert even matter?

If by souls you meant $ouls, then yes.

I heard that a recently sent out missionary called home completely distressed that he wanted to come home. Just didn't want to be out on a mission anymore.

While it broke his parents hearts that he was that upset, he needs to stay out and serve the Lord.

Poor kid. He is in for a miserable two years.

more and more, the MORmON desperation dangles in the wind

stupid organization.

Typical manipulation tactic by many mission presidents..set completely unattainable goals, and the chew the Elders out for not achieving the goal. My ancestors are from Dublin, and knowing of the Irish culture - the goal is particularly unattainable since the Irish know bull shiz when they hear it.

And while you're at it, I want you to high-jump 8 feet. And run
a 3:40 mile. Oh, and find a way to fit general relativity with
quantum theory.

You can do it if you have enough faith.

If you fail, it means, of course, that you're worthless.

When I served in Paris, we had about 100 baptisms per year. Our new MP came in and declared that we needed 1 baptism per team per year. With 180 missionaries, that was about 90 baptisms a month, or 10x as many. The ZLs asked us to commit to it. We told them it was crazy and not possible. They said to "pray about it". When they asked a week later, we told them the same thing. Finally, they browbeat us into saying, "yeah, sure whatever" just to get them off our backs.

During the year, we had an increase of 10% in baptisms, on pace for 110 baptisms. Instead of praising us for such a large increase, the MP and APs kept a running track of our "deficit". After 3 months, with 35 baptisms, we were supposed to have had 270, or a 235 convert deficit. We were told to increase our efforts to not only baptism 1 per month, but to make up for the months when we didn't. So, if we'd had 1 in that time period, we needed to have 4 the next month.

This kept going on for several months, when at zone conference we were nearly 500 baptisms behind. Never mind that would have been 5x what we'd had the previous year. Finally, after about 9 months, they dropped the entire program because we just scoffed when were told that we were 800 baptisms behind our goal. That would have been adding an entire ward to a mission that only had 5 actual wards, over 100 years after the 1st missionaries entered France.

Instead of motivating us, it just made us cynical. If you tell someone they need to run across the state of Texas, why would they bother just running across town?

Stories like this just reinforce that LD$ Inc. is all about sales and not about caring for people. The same kind of crap went on in my mission and for years I beat myself up over being a "bad" missionary. Stupid cult.

It's a numbers organization.

Growing up, it was regularly mentioned that if the members, and missing-narys, did enough, the wart could get enough members to get a new building. That's almost all members talked about from the pulpit on Sundays... besides the rest of the boring un-truths and crap many of us know.

If LDSink cared about people, the "church" would be structured entirely differently, and missionary-play, if it existed at all, would be so completely different as to be scarcely unrecognizable.

The missing pair program baptizes bodies, not souls... otherwise, it would take as long as it takes, as the spirit it supposed to be the one doing the work.

That's how one can see right through it [the church, as well as the missionary program]: IT IS A SALES PROGRAM - (attempting to) programing mostly the missionary, as well as the (poor) family.

+1

I remember visiting BYU while in Provo a few years back. I was eating a sandwich in the food court and overheard a young woman talking on her phone. She was beating herself up that she hadn't baptized anyone on her mission. She was so distraught that I was a bit worried about her mental health.

It sickens me that this disgusting corporation does this to people.

My niece is a new missionary. That fantasyland, guilt tripping statement makes me sick. I hope they continue with this absurdity so everyone will pack up and leave.

Where is the mission president's conversion line up? How many people did he baptize on his mission? (Since it clearly is all about statistics and tithing. Who cares if they continue, or are happier after their encounter of the Mormon kind?)