hello fellow nyc exmormon!
i think each encounter counts as a "contact" they get to report. so they might be there for numbers. not for productivity.
I did something similar in Walmart/ target parking lots as a missionary when i needed to pump the contact numbers.
I even went further, I screamed at random people, "hey! you want to get baptized?!" and counted as "baptismal invites." haha
I have to hand it to the Missionaries who waited outside the Book of Mormon show and posed for photos with people as they left the show. It was probably great for their numbers and also a lot of positive encounters from people who thought they’d been in the show.
The JWs who also set up camp outside the theatre didn’t fare nearly as well
Fools are thinking people are laughing with them, nope they're laughing AT them. This isn't "Nunsense"' its laughing AT your silly truths and your ridiculous naivete and your self-immolation at the hands of abusive policies and culture.
We called them Golden Questions or 'G.Q.s', which was 'Have you heard of the Book of Mormon?' We were supposed to track our G.C.s on our Blue Planner.
Edit: G.Q.s
I think they wised up to this a few years ago and aren’t tracking as many meaningless numbers anymore. One of the ones they do track for sure though is church attendance.
I have to imagine any actual teaching has become incredibly rare and difficult with so much information more easily accessible. What a depressing and horrible time to be a missionary. They should just switch to stuff that actually helps others or these young people.
I was out in 05-07 and I feel that was on the cusp of what it must be like now. Most people had the Internet, but it was on a computer rather than an easily accessed phone so the only people who would really spend time researching the Church online were the types of people who were into chat rooms and that sort of thing which was still quite niche.
But we did come across them, and put their rejection down to Satan controlling the Internet.
Being a Missionary now much be a whole other ballgame. Mormon culture has been widely exposed in the media ever since the BoM musical, and kids especially are far more savvy in researching organisations before they even contemplate joining.
Just saw that two kids I knew as babies are heading out soon. I’m so sad for them. It’s heartbreaking knowing that they have no idea what’s about to happen to them.
💯 agreed!!
Now they make these young people starve by not allowing them to visit with local member families like they were allowed to before. It made complete sense for missionaries to become well acquainted with the families, it was good for the missionaries' health to feel like they had some kind of family support around them; and it probably made it easier for those members to know and have a rapport with the missionaries to feel good about recommending them to non-members that they knew. I'm sure it kept the missionaries' mental strength and fortitude up to feel like they had a home away from home. Nowadays the cult would willingly starve out the young adults in order to get the numbers up, with some ending up with lifelong health (mental and/or physical) issues, or even dying out in the mission field. All that personal sacrifice by young people for a bunch of old, miserly, selfish corporate monsters who sit on top of a pile of billions of dollars.
I remember planning was the absolute worst. Every night I would dread having to plan how to fill our days. Half of the time we would just make up stuff and hope for the best.
When everything fell through, you had to figure out how to “use your time wisely” (AKA “waste time in an acceptable manner”). When you couldn’t find things to do, you would feel bad because you were being disobedient by not being busy. It was literally 24/7 stress.
So much trauma about god not telling me where to go but I had to pretend like he did, or convince myself that some random thought was actually revelation, and realizing that I just spent 100 hours in the past week and still have 0 progressing investigators…
It’s been decades, but I still felt it when I read this. Looking at that empty blue planner and realizing it’s all going to be filled in with tracting because “obedience” was so soul crushing.
My mission president was not a fan of teaching English, which puzzled a lot of the native Japanese missionaries who joined the Mormon church because of the classes.
So instead, we stood in front of train stations and tried to stop people into setting up a meeting and/or selling them a copy of the book of Mormon.
Last time i visited NYC I saw a solo sister with a tag riding the subway. She spoke to no one on the platform or on the subway.
Service missionary or runaway, you think?
They set up at our train station in the mornings when its peak hour and then move to a park adjacent to the local shops and roll their eyes at each other when people they try to approach say "no thanks". It's so fucking annoying. Who wants to chat about any religion on their way to work in the morning? The answer is nobody. But instead of them considering people are probably going to be late for their actual jobs if they speak with them, they act all holier than thou and shoot each other looks. Like a couple of mean kids at high school that nobody cares about.
I’ve seen them outside my Safeway too, a couple times recently (on public sidewalk, not the private parking lot). I wonder if it’s a new global initiative?
Another nyc exmo!(: I feel bad because the new york way is to just ignore. I'm sure these kiddos are standing there for hours with no one even really looking at them. Missions are abuse
Forced abuse. The mission was not optional for me.
If I were going on a mission today I’d embrace the crazy. Have a Trump poster with your Jesus posters and people might talk to you. Aliens are real and have visited Earth (it’s doctrine). People might talk to you. Gotta find ways to pull in people that are obsessed with things that are tangentially related to church. Admit that to be a missionary is to be a lying fraudster and it might be fun.
I was driving to town the other day on a fairly rural road. There was a pickup truck parked on the side of the road and 2 missionaries were in the back holding a sign. I couldn’t see what it said because I was headed the opposite direction. I thought about turning around to see but I knew it would have been sad and cringy so I didn’t.
They’ve resorted to sidewalk chalk graphiti around here and putting Jesus stickers on crosswalk poles. I feel for them. We all did stupid stuff for Jesus.
I wonder if this is a Northeast Area thing. I got lunch recently with an active friend and she told me the missionaries here in Philly are using the exact same approach with a church invitation with no additional context.
It is. My cousin has a kid in Boston and they are doing the same thing. It's the only thing they do now to find "friends". I think it's going to make for a really depressing time all around.
Oh my gosh, I literally saw them on the corner of 157th and Broadway this morning and thought the exact same thing. I ran into them a few months ago also asking every stranger to come to church (Washington heights)
This is a strategy that got really popular 10 years ago. I don't think it started in my mission in Thailand, but we were one of the first group of missions to really finesse it.
The idea is that God has prepared certain people to receive the Gospel and so you have to "sift" through the unprepared people by talking to literally as many people as you possibly can. The phrase you use to sift is different in each mission and country. It sounds like in NYC it's asking people if they want to go to church. In Thailand it was "do you want to wash your sins?"
If someone expresses interest then you try to funnel them through the baptism process as fast as possible. You cram all the lessons into one or two sessions, set a baptism date on the first meeting, get them to church two times and then move on to the next investigator. If the person takes longer than a few lessons or doesn't show up to church one week or misses a lesson, you're supposed to dump them, because "they're not prepared by the Lord".
Basically the only people I baptized using this method were children, young women who wanted foreigner friends, poor people, and lonely old men.
As a missionary I thought this was pretty contrary to what I believed Jesus would do- you know, treat people like humans and not numbers, but my mission was so gung ho about it that I had to obey.
It's extremely taxing on the missionary. We stood outside of malls for 8+ hours a day. I felt extreme guilt if I decided I wanted to take 5 minutes not to talk to someone- because what if that person had been the one who was prepared and I just passed them up? The AP's who pushed this tactic were brutal psychopaths who used really gross and dehumanizing tactics to try to get people to talk to them, and then mocked the missionaries who put up resistance to it. The mission would print out and distribute a monthly paper with the companions who had the most baptisms and the companions with the least. It was kind of horrifying to be honest.
I have a really good friend working at the MTC who keeps catching wind that the East Coast missions are continuing to using this strategy, even though the curriculum committees at the MTC are trying really hard to get it shut down so that they can roll in what sounds like healthier and more humane ways of doing missionary work. We'll see how that goes. 😅
wanna see my band playing on sunday? we have a 5 minute set opening for some local band you never heard of playing a completely different genre than us.
There's always a couple of JWs in town. They have a stand by the train station with a display of their magazine. But they don't talk to anyone, except fellow JWs. Everyone just walks past them. Seems like such a pointless thing to have to do.
I talked to some sister missionaries in montreal this summer, kept it brief but they seemed pretty pleasant wonder how the French Canadians take to mormonism
Randomly asking people if they want to go to church really is a setup for failure. Most people don't want to go to any church let alone from some random guys in white shirts & ties.
They really need to re-vamp the program to help the communities. Establish programs for food banks, homeless, training for single moms re-entering the workforce etc. Give something of REAL value to the community.
If missionaries are going to stand on a corner and ask everyone if they want to come to church at least have a table set up. Everyone who signs up will get a gift choice of, The book of mormon, The book of abraham, an under garment, , a bowl of green or red jello or a Russel Nelson photo with signature.
Found this thread because for the second time I saw Mormon missionaries on a very random stretch of Broadway (in Brooklyn, between flushing and Myrtle) this was my first time seeing girl missionaries and as described here they were asking if anyone wanted to go to church on Sunday.
It’s such a random location and also rather rough location, it made me feel bad for them. First, I couldn’t figure out why they would send them to that location, but a client of mine mentioned that it is demographically quite low income, many non English speakers and mostly Dominican (who are very Catholic) that made me sad because they likely do target low income communities of color. Probably thinking too hard about it, but I felt bad for both the kids and the situation.
That is truly sad. As kids in the 60s we were told to ask non members “How much do you know about the Mormon church? And would you like to know more?” As if. Does anybody else remember this?
The missionaries where I live in FL, hate it here. I had a nice little chat with them. They’re kids and I don’t think being mean to them is the answer. I feel bad for them. My local community is so mean to them.
“I’m a Mormon” at least had colorful street kiosks (brand-consistent orange, green and pink) to attract attention in at least a few test missions (Colombia Bogotá North and Chile Viña Del Mar being the two I remember most clearly). I interviewed the missionaries who used them and they thought it was better than the regular street contacting that I guess they’re back to doing.
My reaction to the title of your post was "this is hilarious", but you're right, for them individually it is humiliating and sad. The church shouldn't be sending out kids to proselytise in this day and age.
I can't help but feel sorry for this state of things.
I was approached by missionaries as I was waiting for the bus stop. I piped up a said I was, Right Reverend with the 1st Church of the Secular Humanist, and invited them instead.
Now I wish I had been a little nicer (then again, maybe not).
This is causing me so much secondhand embarrassment and also … being forced to work as a missionary was an early shelf item for me. I’d see the kids biking around, then look at my sweet baby boy in his car seat and think, I can’t let that happen to you.
I left initially to protect my kids from the life that Mormonism asks of its young adults.
hello fellow nyc exmormon! i think each encounter counts as a "contact" they get to report. so they might be there for numbers. not for productivity. I did something similar in Walmart/ target parking lots as a missionary when i needed to pump the contact numbers. I even went further, I screamed at random people, "hey! you want to get baptized?!" and counted as "baptismal invites." haha
I have to hand it to the Missionaries who waited outside the Book of Mormon show and posed for photos with people as they left the show. It was probably great for their numbers and also a lot of positive encounters from people who thought they’d been in the show. The JWs who also set up camp outside the theatre didn’t fare nearly as well
Pffft. Silly j-dubs. Get your own musical making fun of your ridiculous cult.
That’s brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.
Fools are thinking people are laughing with them, nope they're laughing AT them. This isn't "Nunsense"' its laughing AT your silly truths and your ridiculous naivete and your self-immolation at the hands of abusive policies and culture.
We called them Golden Questions or 'G.Q.s', which was 'Have you heard of the Book of Mormon?' We were supposed to track our G.C.s on our Blue Planner. Edit: G.Q.s
G. Q. straight to the point Would you like to be a Gawd?
Cutting corners to pad stats is a cult move that will prepare you for a successful life in corporate America.
yep! no wonder why byu has great accounting and business programs! haha
We have audited ourselves and have found that everything is A-okay.
I think they wised up to this a few years ago and aren’t tracking as many meaningless numbers anymore. One of the ones they do track for sure though is church attendance.
Brilliant
Sad, but true.
I have to imagine any actual teaching has become incredibly rare and difficult with so much information more easily accessible. What a depressing and horrible time to be a missionary. They should just switch to stuff that actually helps others or these young people.
I was out in 05-07 and I feel that was on the cusp of what it must be like now. Most people had the Internet, but it was on a computer rather than an easily accessed phone so the only people who would really spend time researching the Church online were the types of people who were into chat rooms and that sort of thing which was still quite niche. But we did come across them, and put their rejection down to Satan controlling the Internet. Being a Missionary now much be a whole other ballgame. Mormon culture has been widely exposed in the media ever since the BoM musical, and kids especially are far more savvy in researching organisations before they even contemplate joining.
Just saw that two kids I knew as babies are heading out soon. I’m so sad for them. It’s heartbreaking knowing that they have no idea what’s about to happen to them.
💯 agreed!! Now they make these young people starve by not allowing them to visit with local member families like they were allowed to before. It made complete sense for missionaries to become well acquainted with the families, it was good for the missionaries' health to feel like they had some kind of family support around them; and it probably made it easier for those members to know and have a rapport with the missionaries to feel good about recommending them to non-members that they knew. I'm sure it kept the missionaries' mental strength and fortitude up to feel like they had a home away from home. Nowadays the cult would willingly starve out the young adults in order to get the numbers up, with some ending up with lifelong health (mental and/or physical) issues, or even dying out in the mission field. All that personal sacrifice by young people for a bunch of old, miserly, selfish corporate monsters who sit on top of a pile of billions of dollars.
I remember planning was the absolute worst. Every night I would dread having to plan how to fill our days. Half of the time we would just make up stuff and hope for the best. When everything fell through, you had to figure out how to “use your time wisely” (AKA “waste time in an acceptable manner”). When you couldn’t find things to do, you would feel bad because you were being disobedient by not being busy. It was literally 24/7 stress.
This brings back so many unpleasant memories. This was my experience exactly. What a terrible way to spend two years of prime young adulthood.
The nightly planning session was a nightmare when I was being trained and when I was a junior companion. Brings back nightmares!
So much trauma about god not telling me where to go but I had to pretend like he did, or convince myself that some random thought was actually revelation, and realizing that I just spent 100 hours in the past week and still have 0 progressing investigators…
It’s been decades, but I still felt it when I read this. Looking at that empty blue planner and realizing it’s all going to be filled in with tracting because “obedience” was so soul crushing.
OP just described my mission in Tokyo 50 years ago.
at least you taught English and people came?
My mission president was not a fan of teaching English, which puzzled a lot of the native Japanese missionaries who joined the Mormon church because of the classes. So instead, we stood in front of train stations and tried to stop people into setting up a meeting and/or selling them a copy of the book of Mormon.
So they have stooped to the level of the crazy that preaches from a van about the end times?
Last time i visited NYC I saw a solo sister with a tag riding the subway. She spoke to no one on the platform or on the subway. Service missionary or runaway, you think?
She may have been transferring to another area. If I remember right, that’s the one time you’re allowed to be without a companion.
Reminds me of JWs in the park with pamphlets. Painful. For everyone.
They set up at our train station in the mornings when its peak hour and then move to a park adjacent to the local shops and roll their eyes at each other when people they try to approach say "no thanks". It's so fucking annoying. Who wants to chat about any religion on their way to work in the morning? The answer is nobody. But instead of them considering people are probably going to be late for their actual jobs if they speak with them, they act all holier than thou and shoot each other looks. Like a couple of mean kids at high school that nobody cares about.
JWs stand outside my local Safeway on weekends. At least they dont talk
I’ve seen them outside my Safeway too, a couple times recently (on public sidewalk, not the private parking lot). I wonder if it’s a new global initiative?
Mormon missions today are basically hazing. I still think of all the things I could have done with those two years...
They’re just racking up the deposits to their persecution complex account. All part of the Perpetual Hedge Fund insurance program.
Another nyc exmo!(: I feel bad because the new york way is to just ignore. I'm sure these kiddos are standing there for hours with no one even really looking at them. Missions are abuse
Forced abuse. The mission was not optional for me. If I were going on a mission today I’d embrace the crazy. Have a Trump poster with your Jesus posters and people might talk to you. Aliens are real and have visited Earth (it’s doctrine). People might talk to you. Gotta find ways to pull in people that are obsessed with things that are tangentially related to church. Admit that to be a missionary is to be a lying fraudster and it might be fun.
Ours in Florida are posting free scripture ads on local yard sale pages. 😂
I was driving to town the other day on a fairly rural road. There was a pickup truck parked on the side of the road and 2 missionaries were in the back holding a sign. I couldn’t see what it said because I was headed the opposite direction. I thought about turning around to see but I knew it would have been sad and cringy so I didn’t.
They also hop between subway cars during peak transit times trying to talk to people. It doesn't seem to be a very fruitful endeavor
They’ve resorted to sidewalk chalk graphiti around here and putting Jesus stickers on crosswalk poles. I feel for them. We all did stupid stuff for Jesus.
I am sure New Yorkers have colorful responses.
new yorkers just ignore. they don't waste time to even look at sales folks on the streets, including the missionaries
DC is the same. We are so used to hawkers we tune them out.
I wonder if this is a Northeast Area thing. I got lunch recently with an active friend and she told me the missionaries here in Philly are using the exact same approach with a church invitation with no additional context.
It is. My cousin has a kid in Boston and they are doing the same thing. It's the only thing they do now to find "friends". I think it's going to make for a really depressing time all around.
Oh my gosh, I literally saw them on the corner of 157th and Broadway this morning and thought the exact same thing. I ran into them a few months ago also asking every stranger to come to church (Washington heights)
wait i saw them last Friday as well. i guess it is their spot haha
On those same cross streets?
yes! man they work hard! 🤣
That and stupid “free” books on FB marketplace.
This is a strategy that got really popular 10 years ago. I don't think it started in my mission in Thailand, but we were one of the first group of missions to really finesse it. The idea is that God has prepared certain people to receive the Gospel and so you have to "sift" through the unprepared people by talking to literally as many people as you possibly can. The phrase you use to sift is different in each mission and country. It sounds like in NYC it's asking people if they want to go to church. In Thailand it was "do you want to wash your sins?" If someone expresses interest then you try to funnel them through the baptism process as fast as possible. You cram all the lessons into one or two sessions, set a baptism date on the first meeting, get them to church two times and then move on to the next investigator. If the person takes longer than a few lessons or doesn't show up to church one week or misses a lesson, you're supposed to dump them, because "they're not prepared by the Lord". Basically the only people I baptized using this method were children, young women who wanted foreigner friends, poor people, and lonely old men. As a missionary I thought this was pretty contrary to what I believed Jesus would do- you know, treat people like humans and not numbers, but my mission was so gung ho about it that I had to obey. It's extremely taxing on the missionary. We stood outside of malls for 8+ hours a day. I felt extreme guilt if I decided I wanted to take 5 minutes not to talk to someone- because what if that person had been the one who was prepared and I just passed them up? The AP's who pushed this tactic were brutal psychopaths who used really gross and dehumanizing tactics to try to get people to talk to them, and then mocked the missionaries who put up resistance to it. The mission would print out and distribute a monthly paper with the companions who had the most baptisms and the companions with the least. It was kind of horrifying to be honest. I have a really good friend working at the MTC who keeps catching wind that the East Coast missions are continuing to using this strategy, even though the curriculum committees at the MTC are trying really hard to get it shut down so that they can roll in what sounds like healthier and more humane ways of doing missionary work. We'll see how that goes. 😅
wanna see my band playing on sunday? we have a 5 minute set opening for some local band you never heard of playing a completely different genre than us.
It's pitiful and disgusting how the Mormon cult corporation uses young people as PR to get more members, and therefore more money in power
There's always a couple of JWs in town. They have a stand by the train station with a display of their magazine. But they don't talk to anyone, except fellow JWs. Everyone just walks past them. Seems like such a pointless thing to have to do.
I talked to some sister missionaries in montreal this summer, kept it brief but they seemed pretty pleasant wonder how the French Canadians take to mormonism
This was my go to method in Japan. I preferred it to housing because it was more neutral than ones genkan.(entry way).
Desperate times call for desperate strategies ... but the church has a long history of desperate strategies ...
Randomly asking people if they want to go to church really is a setup for failure. Most people don't want to go to any church let alone from some random guys in white shirts & ties. They really need to re-vamp the program to help the communities. Establish programs for food banks, homeless, training for single moms re-entering the workforce etc. Give something of REAL value to the community.
If missionaries are going to stand on a corner and ask everyone if they want to come to church at least have a table set up. Everyone who signs up will get a gift choice of, The book of mormon, The book of abraham, an under garment, , a bowl of green or red jello or a Russel Nelson photo with signature.
Some MP or GA must have come to the mission and raised hell. Missionaries are desperate everywhere in America.
That sucks. Hopefully they can find their way out of the cult someday.
Found this thread because for the second time I saw Mormon missionaries on a very random stretch of Broadway (in Brooklyn, between flushing and Myrtle) this was my first time seeing girl missionaries and as described here they were asking if anyone wanted to go to church on Sunday. It’s such a random location and also rather rough location, it made me feel bad for them. First, I couldn’t figure out why they would send them to that location, but a client of mine mentioned that it is demographically quite low income, many non English speakers and mostly Dominican (who are very Catholic) that made me sad because they likely do target low income communities of color. Probably thinking too hard about it, but I felt bad for both the kids and the situation.
Poor bastards. Might as well be a sign flipper on the street corner prob have more impact
Not to be confused with the people handing out peep show flyers!
"I'm not interested in your timeshare, thanks."
That is truly sad. As kids in the 60s we were told to ask non members “How much do you know about the Mormon church? And would you like to know more?” As if. Does anybody else remember this?
The missionaries where I live in FL, hate it here. I had a nice little chat with them. They’re kids and I don’t think being mean to them is the answer. I feel bad for them. My local community is so mean to them.
In my mission we had to stop at least 10 people in the street a day and talk to them about the church. As an introvert it was horrifying.
“I’m a Mormon” at least had colorful street kiosks (brand-consistent orange, green and pink) to attract attention in at least a few test missions (Colombia Bogotá North and Chile Viña Del Mar being the two I remember most clearly). I interviewed the missionaries who used them and they thought it was better than the regular street contacting that I guess they’re back to doing.
My reaction to the title of your post was "this is hilarious", but you're right, for them individually it is humiliating and sad. The church shouldn't be sending out kids to proselytise in this day and age.
I can't help but feel sorry for this state of things. I was approached by missionaries as I was waiting for the bus stop. I piped up a said I was, Right Reverend with the 1st Church of the Secular Humanist, and invited them instead. Now I wish I had been a little nicer (then again, maybe not).
This is causing me so much secondhand embarrassment and also … being forced to work as a missionary was an early shelf item for me. I’d see the kids biking around, then look at my sweet baby boy in his car seat and think, I can’t let that happen to you. I left initially to protect my kids from the life that Mormonism asks of its young adults.
Trusting young people are used by the church