Missionary Work Made Easy

This week's Relief Society lesson given my ME.


As of the end of the year 2010, there were 52,225 missionaries serving in 340 missions throughout the world. Missionary work is the lifeblood of the kingdom. President Monson made this statement in his opening remarks to last conference.

• Why would he say this statement?
• In what ways is missionary work part of God’s plan for His children?

The Lord revealed the gospel plan to Adam:

Moses 5:58 “And thus the Gospel began to be preached, from the beginning, being declared by holy angels sent forth from the presence of God, and by his own voice, and by the gift of the Holy Ghost.”

Later, Adam’s righteous descendants were sent to preach the gospel:

Moses 6:23 “They … called upon all men, everywhere, to repent; and faith was taught unto the children of men”

The Lord’s Church has always been a missionary church. When the Savior lived on the earth, He ordained Apostles and Seventies and gave them the authority and responsibility to preach the gospel. Most of their preaching was to their own people, the Jews. After Jesus was resurrected, He sent Apostles to preach the gospel to the Gentiles. He commanded the Apostles, “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature”.

Missionary work began again when the Lord’s Church was restored through the Prophet Joseph Smith. Today the Apostles and Seventies have been given the chief responsibility for preaching the gospel and seeing that it is preached in all the world. The Lord told Joseph Smith: “Proclaim my gospel from land to land, and from city to city. … Bear testimony in every place, unto every people” (D&C 66:5, 7). In June 1830, Samuel Harrison Smith, the Prophet’s brother, began the first missionary journey for the Church.

Since that time, over one million missionaries have been called and sent forth to preach the gospel. The message they take to the world is that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and our Savior. They testify that the gospel has been restored to the earth through a prophet of God. The missionaries are given the responsibility to preach the gospel to all people, to baptize them, and to teach them to do all things that the Lord has commanded (see Matthew 28:19–20).

That means we’re off the hook right? The full time missionaries have been given the responsibility to preach the gospel to all people.

D&C 60:1–2 (Lord warns those who are afraid to preach the gospel)
D&C 88:81–82 (all those who have been warned should warn their neighbors)
D&C 24:12 (Lord strengthens those who always seek to declare His gospel)
D&C 75:2–5 (those who declare the gospel and are faithful will be blessed with eternal life)

We have all heard the phrase: “Every member a missionary”. We should be missionaries even if we are not formally called and set apart. We are responsible to teach the gospel by word and deed to all of our Heavenly Father’s children. We have been told by a prophet that we should show our neighbors that we love them before we warn them (see Teachings of Presidents of the Church: Spencer W. Kimball [2006], 262). They need to experience our friendship and fellowship.

That being said, a strange thing happens to many of us whenever we hear the phrase “every member a missionary”.

• What goes through your mind?
• What are your feelings?
• What cause us to feel this way?

It’s not that we doubt that the work is true or think that the presidents of the Church, our prophets, have asked something unreasonable or impossible. It’s simply that sometimes we are timid and find it hard to see how we, individually, can do it. And when we feel uncomfortable about it, other activities expand in importance to fill up our hours and we let our moments of missionary opportunity slip away.

But that’s not the way it should be. And, best of all, that’s not the way it has to be.

It is true that everyone needs to be actively engaged in missionary work, but there may be as many different approaches to missionary work as there are individuals, personal styles, circumstances, and inspiration. Living the gospel and helping to spread it to others should be joyful. And when we find out what the Church really expects—that we don’t all have to be aggressive proselytizers—being a missionary will not seem such a scary thing. Suddenly we may begin to see how we, individually, can be actively involved.

There are many ways we can share the gospel.

We can show friends and others the joy we experience from living the truths of the gospel. In this way we will be a light to the world (see Matthew 5:16).

Do you remember what President Uchtdorf shared in last conference?

There are times when the Lord reveals to us things that are intended only for us. Nevertheless, in many, many cases He entrusts a testimony of the truth to those who will share it with others. Even more, the Lord expects the members of His Church to “open [their mouths] at all times, declaring [His] gospel with the sound of rejoicing.”

This is not always easy. Some would rather pull a handcart across the prairie than bring up the subject of faith and religion to their friends and co-workers. They worry about how they might be perceived or how it might harm their relationship. It doesn’t need to be that way because we have a glad message to share, and we have a message of joy.

Years ago our family lived and worked among people who in almost every case were not of our faith. When they asked us how our weekend was, we tried to skip the usual topics—like sports events, movies, or the weather—and tried to share some religious experiences we had as a family over the weekend—for instance, what a youth speaker had said about the standards from For the Strength of Youth or how we were touched by the words of a young man who was leaving on his mission or how the gospel and the Church helped us as a family to overcome a specific challenge we had. We tried not to be preachy or overbearing. My wife, Harriet, was always the best at finding something inspirational, uplifting, or humorous to share. This often would lead to more in-depth discussions. Interestingly enough, whenever we talked with friends about coping with life’s challenges, we often heard the comment “It’s easy for you; you have your church.”

Sometimes a single phrase of testimony can set events in motion that affect someone’s life for eternity.

Another way is to send a Book of Mormon on a mission. In 1977, they had the family-to-family Book of Mormon program. It is based on a simple, well-known fact: the Book of Mormon is a powerful missionary tool. It can convert people to the gospel if they will read it.

That’s why one of the best and easiest ways to be a missionary is to make a gift of the Book of Mormon. And in the case of the family-to-family program, it would be a “personalized” copy of the Book of Mormon, a copy with a picture of you and your family along with your written testimony tucked inside the front cover.
Why the personalized copies?

Because it sometimes happens that when a person chances to pick up a Book of Mormon, he glances through it quickly and sets it aside. It’s just another book to him. Knowing nothing about it beforehand, he doesn’t realize that it could be the most important book he might ever read in his life.

But when that person opens the book and finds a picture of a real family accompanied by a written testimony that the book is true and that it will change his life if he will read it, suddenly his contact with the Book of Mormon is personalized. He’s much more likely to examine it closer and read it—especially if the picture and testimony are from someone he knows. Already he’s in touch with a living testimony, and that warms up his approach to this sacred book.

The purpose of the family-to-family Book of Mormon program, therefore, is (1) to have families in the Church either send personalized copies of the Book of Mormon to people they know or provide them for missionaries to use in finding prospective members, and (2) to encourage members to establish family-to-family correspondence with these prospective members as a friendshipping activity.

Once your books are prepared, there are a number of things you can do. You can give them directly to your friends as part of your friendshipping efforts, and then later introduce the missionaries when the time is right. Or you can give them to your ward mission leader or seventies president to be used by full-time and stake missionaries within your stake or district. They will be taken to special nonmember friends you specify, or, if no names for recipients are given, they will be given to other investigators who show a special interest in the gospel message.

You can give Church Magazines

Church magazines give the prospective member an accurate and appealing view of what life might be like for him in the Church, and how the Church is oriented toward helping solve life’s problems. Equally important, however, is the fact that he can get a look at the Church in the privacy of his own thoughts and at his own unhurried pace, with no one peering over his shoulder.

Probably the most common way of sharing a copy of one of the Church magazines is to bring to someone’s attention an article that deals with a topic that has come up in everyday conversations. The great variety of articles and subjects covered in the Church magazines makes it easy for you to focus in on the interests of people with whom you are in contact. Special issues of the magazines are especially helpful in this regard. This gives us another reason for us to be reading our magazines.

Brother Nelson in October conference gave this suggestion: Now in this day of the Internet, there are new and exciting ways you can do missionary work. You can invite friends and neighbors to visit the new mormon.org web site. If you have blogs and online social networks, you could link your sites to mormon.org. And there you can create your own personal profile. Each profile includes an expression of belief, an experience, and a testimony. Because this is a new feature, most of these profiles are available in English.

Other ways of helping missionary work:

We can teach our children the importance of sharing the gospel and we can prepare them spiritually and financially to go on missions. We can also prepare ourselves to serve full-time missions in our senior years.

We can pay our tithing and contribute to the missionary fund. These donations are used for furthering missionary work.

We can contribute to the ward, branch, or general missionary fund to give financial support to missionaries whose families are unable to support them.

We can do family history research and temple work to help our ancestors receive the full blessings of the gospel.

We can invite nonmembers to activities such as family home evenings and Church socials, conferences, and meetings.

We can give copies of Church magazines. We can also share gospel messages by using features available on the Church’s official Internet sites, LDS.org and Mormon.org.

Our Heavenly Father will help us be effective missionaries when we have the desire to share the gospel and pray for guidance. He will help us find ways to share the gospel with those around us.

The Lord Promises Us Blessings for Doing Missionary Work

The Lord told the Prophet Joseph Smith that missionaries would receive great blessings. Speaking to elders who were returning from their missions, the Lord said, “Ye are blessed, for the testimony which ye have borne is recorded in heaven for the angels to look upon; and they rejoice over you” (D&C 62:3). He has also said that those who work for the salvation of others will have their sins forgiven and will bring salvation to their own souls (see D&C 4:4; 31:5; 84:61).

The Lord has told us:
“If it so be that you should labor all your days in crying repentance unto this people, and bring, save it be one soul unto me, how great shall be your joy with him in the kingdom of my Father!

“And now, if your joy will be great with one soul that you have brought unto me into the kingdom of my Father, how great will be your joy if you should bring many souls unto me!” (D&C 18:15–16).

Reference:
• Preach My Gospel, Chapter 33
• Missionary Work Made Easy, Lane Johnson, Oct 1977 Ensign
• Waiting of the Road to Damascus, Dieter F Uchtdorf, April 2011 General Conference
• Be Thou an Example of the Believers, Russell M Nelson, Oct 2010 General Conference