Life Lesson from a Mormon Mission
I was called to "serve" in the Mexico, Mexico City North mission. It was a weird and unpleasant experience, overall, but I did have some takeaways from it that I appreciate still. One of them, the biggest one, arguably, was learning how to deal with bureaucratic red tape.
I was called to serve in an area near Huehuetoca, in a small farming neighborhood I'll call X. The neighborhood was a farming-and-construction community, and the ward was DEAD. 30 people still attending, and all of them were unpleasant. They had come by the unpleasantness honest - this was a community stricken with poverty and impoverished and overwhelmed people turn to vice. Ward members had secret sins that were eating at them, and they turned their shame into vicious criticism of others. Over a 5-year period the ward had gone from about 100 people to 80 to 60 to 40 to 30.
As missionaries, we were tasked with baptizing and converting new members; however, the area we were in was small and REALLY aversive to Mormons. The last companionship to spend time in the area had gotten into a yelling match with some Catholics and had insulted the chastity of the Virgin Mary of Guadalupe. As a result, they had been chased out of town by an armed mob of farmers, and the reputation of the church in that area had been irreparably tarnished to many who lived there.
As a result of this distrust between church members and other people in the area, it was a very underperforming area. My companion and I had been sent X because it was a "punishment area" where ineffective elders could be sent to allow better elders to focus their efforts in the areas getting results. I had been sent there for deliberate disobedience to mission rules - we were not permitted to be in the homes of single women alone, and I and my previous companion had blatantly ignored that rule to help some of the elderly widows in our area replace lightbulbs and repair appliances in their living spaces. This made me a liability, and I was sent to X. My companion in X was sent there because he was terminally shy - possessed by an eldritch, unknowable shame that prevented him from talking to others (honestly, it was probably autism).
We were troubled by a series of problems - ward leadership were stretched thin, ward members kept reminders of all grudges they held against other ward members, locals hated us because our predecessors had called La Virgencita a whore, and those locals who didn't hate us hated other active members in the congregation. On top of that suck salad, the area's housing organization made no damn sense and it was impossible to locate any building or residence without getting lost a lot.
Part of missionary work is we're supposed to set goals for how many lessons we'll have, how many people we'll talk to, how many baptisms we'll have, etc.
And part of that in our mission was our mission president's goal for our mission. He was a bureaucrat, a wannabe Elon Musk type - he believed he could just wave his hand and give orders and we'd all be so delighted to perform that we would just Do It, no questions asked. As such, he had set impossibly high goals for all missionaries. We were expected to have 25 lessons a week with non-members, and in all of those lessons we were expected to be accompanied by a member of the ward. Our ward had no members, the members it did have hated each other, and because the area was so impoverished nobody really had much time to join us in proselyting.
So, starting our Glorious Work and Wonder, we were beset by many difficulties. We were being monitored and policed closely by district and zone leaders, and we were being expected to meet mission standards. My companion, cursed with an alien torment in his soul (autism), was unable to manage the pressure. So we had a heart-to-heart discussion, where he expressed how overwhelmed he felt. I agreed that this would be overwhelming if we had to do it.
He was confused. The Mission President said we had to do it, so we had to do it, right? He's the one who tells us what's possible, if we fail it's just because our own faith was insufficient. I disagreed. Our MP had not been in the area ever. He was a self-congratulatory shitburp with no idea of what was-and-was-not possible, especially for X. So we talked about it and said "if we didn't have those goals, and our only job was to support the local ward, what would we do?" and I told my companion that we would do whatever that was instead.
We decided to focus on 5 things:
Mapping the area for future elders
Repairing relationships with active members
Seeking out less-active or inactive members(if you're ever baptized Mormon and stop going they don't treat you as a non-member, they treat you as a defective member) and trying to get them back to church
Whittling down the ward roster
Repairing community relations
Focusing on these things, my companion's concern as someone cursed by a need to follow rules (Autism) was - how do we report this to district and zone leaders?
Missions operate on a strict bureaucracy that we were expected to be accountable to. And I knew that, and he knew that. But what I knew, that he did not, was that this bureaucratic hierarchy was a sham. The mission was not prepared for this area to exist, and the rules we were expected to follow were predicated on a reality that was not here in the world we lived in.
So I told him I would handle it, and when the time came for us to report our weekly goals I lied. I said our goals were 25 member-present lessons with new people. The district and zone leaders both asked if I thought this was realistic, and I said,
NOT because it was realistic, but because the actual answer to the question was not allowed: We were not going to teach a single non-member that week. Or the next week. Or even the week following. We had no intention of trying to bring anyone else into this mess until the ward could take it.
When they asked if I had any realistic prospects for those numbers, I already had a response prepared:
"Elders, do you doubt my faith? We prayed over these numbers."
And they balked, because they can't say that my divine inspiration was false because it would mean that anyone's could be. So they just fake smiled and let me do what I was gonna do. And we did that, week after week, for 6 weeks. In the meantime, we were talking to former members, tracking down members who had moved, mapping the area, and keeping score.
After 6 weeks, the transfer cycle ended. We got word that we were going to be staying together a bit longer. Good. Because now things were picking up.
We kept giving them fake numbers, pulling the same "this is my faith" trick, and then doing what needed to be done.
By 4 weeks, we had openly confronted all the priesthood holders in the area. We were kind, because we knew where they were coming from, but we were fierce, because their pain was not a valid excuse to lash out at innocents and made collateral damage.
By 8 weeks in the area, I had been able to give two separate talks where I was able to call people out directly, one-by-one. The three biggest factors in people leaving the church and not coming back had been spoken to directly. Feelings of resentment against us had been brought up directly, and equally directly we were able to shut it down (i.e., "Elder's, I told my employee he had to listen to you to keep his job and you STILL couldn't baptize him? You're the reason this ward will never grow!" "Oh, interesting, because I've got a tally in here of the number of people I spoke to this week who refuse to come back to church until you're dead. I wonder if you might be selling yourself short a little bit, or giving us too much credit for destroying this ward?")
By 12 weeks we were able to start reporting our actual numbers, and they were better than anyone had expected. By a LOT. Our goals were now feasible. With some direct attention, some external pressure, and some patience and service, the members of the ward had learned to work with us really well. It was beautiful to see.
By 18 weeks (my companion and I got 3 transfers together, it was amazing) we had baptisms, and the ward had gone back from 30, to 40, to 60. My companion left at 18 weeks and a new one came in, a go-getter who was gonna take the baton and carry it to the finish line. By the time I left, the ward had 3 baptisms, and had gone to over 80 members.
By breaking the rules and lying to bureaucrats I was given the opportunity to do real good. By using their own rules and norms against them, they were left defenseless to my ability to do what needed to be done.
It's not always so easy - for all their pomp and circumstance, the Mormon church has very little power to do anything real to me. They can all agree that I was Bad or Defective, and they can tell me that they all agreed on that, and they can all tell me that because they agreed on that their punishments have to mean something, but their pretend rules don't make a difference when people are doing the real work. The impossible standards of perfection held by people who can't see past their own eyes, their views of how the world would work if everyone followed their rules, their belief that their rules made them more effective, didn't actually matter to me. I knew that their rules were false to me, so I broke them. Openly, directly, to their faces, and I changed the world of that tiny congregation.
And while the world was changing, I knew that they wanted me to believe their truth come hell or high water, no matter the cost, to uphold the integrity of their desire for the world to work the way they're told it is supposed to even at the cost of my objective reality. They wanted me to ignore the hurting of real people, to ignore the real distress that was happening and the real needs I could see in front of my fucking face, to pretend alongside them that the fantasy of an ideologue could come true in their minds. They wanted me to not see what was happening in front of me so that I could pretend alongside them that something different was happening. So that I could pretend the insane dream of a man so distant from The Work he couldn't even pretend to remember what it was like was real and meaningful.
In his dream-the-impossible-dream world, where everybody is readily and excitedly awaiting the opportunity to be baptized, where everyone will automatically, willingly alter their entire lifestyle to conform to his own expectations of how they should live, where everyone is able to give up anything at the drop of a hat and be rewarded for it, and where the only permanent aspects of people's identities were the ones he liked, his vision was doable. But in the real world, where I was living, it was incomprehensibly stupid, and so detached from reality that actively trying to enact The Dream would have been harmful.
This story is about missions being stupid, but it is also about abstinence only sex ed. It's about tax-exempt churches. It's about cutting social safety nets. It's about pontificating about values and virtues online but never acting on them in a tangible way. It's about being so concerned with nostalgia, or with an impossibly idealistic world, or being so concerned with maintaining virtue, that you overlook the person in front of you. It's about getting so caught up in playing by the rules that we get paralyzed. It's about not getting anything done.
Do what it takes, even if it means disregarding others. Do what it takes, even if it means betraying the dream world you want to live in. Do what it takes, even if you know it's gonna make people mad. Because no matter how they feel, no matter how many delusional dreamers feel put off by your actions, you will have done more than their fantasies have ever done. Lift where you stand, change the lives of people you know, build your communities, and do it by giving them what they actually need. Do it by giving them what you can see is required, even if it's not considered worthwhile. Use your eyes to see and your ears to hear the humanity around you, and the carceral nature of the overly rigid "perfect" fantasy world can disappear for you too.
And, as always, read more Terry Pratchett, snuggle your cats and loved ones, be gay, do crime.
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