I served an LDS mission in Guatemala in the late 1980s. As my mission progressed, we began to average over 700 baptisms per month, with some companionships baptizing over 40 in one month. When I confronted my mission president about the issue–the response wasn’t what I hoped it would be. After returning home, I wrote a letter to Elder Dallin H. Oaks. Today we claim 12+ million in the Church, but truth be told, less than 1/2 of them actually consider themselves Mormon….and thus perhaps the reason why activity rates are so closely guarded.

This PDF includes my full correspondence with Elder Dallin H. Oaks.

Full Transcript of this episode:

Hello and welcome to the inaugural Mormon Stories podcast. It’s an honor to have you with us today. I’ve been listening quite a bit to the podcasts out there — Catholic Mormon podcasts, Latter-day Slant, several others that have nothing to do with Mormon-related issues at all, and I’ve also spent significant time listening to the podcast from thechurchisnottrue.com. I find all those podcasts fascinating and informative. But I felt called to do something a little different. Rather than focusing on current events or specific issues in isolation, my goal is to provide an open forum for all types of Mormons to tell their stories — true believers, Sunstone Mormons, ex-Mormons, post-Mormons. It doesn’t matter. I’m simply interested in giving any type of Mormon an open forum to share their story and bring those stories together with people who are interested in listening.

You can contact me at mormonstories@gmail.com. If you’re interested in telling your story, there’s some new software called Skype that allows you to make voice calls over the internet for free with pretty decent sound quality. Those of you who want to share your story can come on the podcast, we can talk, I can record it, and publish it as part of Mormon Stories. So if you’re a Mormon, used to be a Mormon, or part Mormon and feel like you have an interesting or compelling story to tell, I’d love to get it on this podcast.

Without further ado, I’m going to kick off the first episode and tell you a little bit about me. The story I’m going to share is about my mission experience in Guatemala. I was raised in Texas and grew up a pretty devout and zealous member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. My parents were divorced at an early age, and so the church raised me in many ways — not completely, because my parents also did a very good job, but I definitely clung to the church for support and guidance when things were rocky at home. After a year at BYU, I received a mission call to serve in Guatemala in the late 1980s. To be honest, I didn’t even know where Guatemala was. My dad wasn’t super excited about me going, but my parents were supportive, and in late 1988 I entered the mission field.

The story got interesting a few months in, when certain companionships in my mission started having what seemed to be incredible success. There were companionships baptizing between 30 and 40 people a month — astonishing numbers to all of us. Before long, those elders were made zone leaders, and within a very short time their zone was baptizing upwards of 120 people per month with only four or five companionships. Imagine that: 8 to 10 missionaries baptizing over 120 people a month.

Word slowly got out about how they were doing it. These elders would go to a soccer field in an impoverished part of Guatemala and play soccer for an hour. Then they’d invite the kids — many of them 8, 9, or 10 years old, some as young as 7 — to come back to the church and cool off. The children would follow, the missionaries would put them in white clothes, and without any discussions, without parental consent, and without ever having attended church, these young kids would be baptized — 5, 10, 15 at a time.

When I found out about this practice, it made me sick. Early in my mission, during an interview with the mission president, I raised my concerns without naming specific elders. I told him it felt like it was relatively easy to achieve numerical success on the mission, but that it didn’t seem to be leading to genuine conversions and I was worried about that. The mission president went to great lengths to tell me that we were planting important seeds that would sprout later — that we were getting a Book of Mormon into homes, giving people the gift of the Holy Ghost, and that even if they fell inactive, the Spirit would eventually kick in. Being new and having obedience and respect for priesthood leaders heavily emphasized, I let it go and moved on.

I experienced some good success on my own during the mission. After a few months, I was called to open a brand new area and serve as branch president. Four months after that, I was called to be a zone leader, and I was able to achieve relatively good numerical success without using the tactics I had heard about. About a year into my mission, those same elders who had become zone leaders were now assistants to the president, spending much of their time traveling the mission and teaching other missionaries to do similar things. Before long, we were the second highest baptizing mission in the world — the mission president told us that only the Chile Viña del Mar mission had more baptisms. We were getting 700 baptisms a month as a mission.

The mission president instituted all sorts of incentives to encourage baptisms. If you baptized seven people in a month, you received a certificate at Zone Conference. If you baptized ten or more, you received a Janice Kapp Perry “Serving with Joy” cassette tape the first time you hit that mark. Any companionship with ten or more baptisms received an invitation to a party where they could play soccer, basketball, and tennis and enjoy a catered lunch. The highest baptizing zone in the mission got a steak dinner with the mission president. Sales incentives were implemented in a very strong and deliberate way.

Once I became zone leader, the mission president set a goal that every companionship in the mission would have at least one baptism each month. For a couple of months my zones were fine, but one month in particular, we had done a large number of baptisms toward the end of the previous month, and for a couple of companionships the investigator pool was low. Near the end of the month, the mission president called me and told me to have those two companionships fill their fonts, because the next day he was sending out the assistants to the president to help those missionaries achieve success and teach top leaders how to fulfill their goals.

I obeyed, called the companionships, and waited the next morning for the APs to arrive. They took me to the first area, picked up the local missionaries, and asked to see their investigators. The companionship only had one real investigator, and the APs tried to pressure that person to get baptized — but they refused. Growing desperate, the APs started driving around town until they reached a poorer part of the pueblo and found a dilapidated old shack. Inside was an elderly woman who had to have been 70 or 75 years old, missing most of her teeth and partially blind. The APs essentially said, “Hey, hermana, vamos a bautizar — you want to follow Jesus Christ? You want to get baptized?” This woman had no idea what was happening. She lived in a one-room shack with a dirt floor and a tin roof, and here were these tall, well-dressed Mormon missionaries showing up in a minivan. She didn’t have a telephone. She didn’t have shoes. Of course she loved Jesus, so she said yes. Before long, the elders were guiding her down a barranco to the bottom of a river. She was praying to Mary on the way down. She’d had no discussions, never attended church. And the elders baptized her. The APs were so focused on getting both companionships their baptisms that they baptized her in the river and then left her alone with the other two missionaries to be confirmed while they jumped back in the van and drove to the next area.

I was sick. The rumors I had heard about these baptismal methods had seemed so shocking that I’d partially written them off as hyperbole. But here I was experiencing it firsthand. In the next area, nearly the same thing happened. A young man had received only two of the six discussions, with his baptismal date set for a week or two out. Even though he had back problems, the APs pressured him, offered him gum, offered him ice cream, and finally convinced him to get baptized that day. On the way home, the missionaries stopped at a telephone to call the president, and I’ll never forget what I heard: “President, we’ve witnessed a miracle today.”

I was a very naive missionary at that point, and my first assumption was not that the mission was corrupt — it was that the mission president simply didn’t know, and that if I told him, he would fix things. A Zone Leaders Conference was coming up in a few days, where all the zone leaders would interview with the president. I waited for my turn and told him the whole story in detail, fully expecting him to be shocked, angered, and resolved to clean up the mission. Instead, he was angry — at me. As best I can recall, he essentially yelled, “Do you support your leaders? Are you kicking against the pricks? Do you believe in the priesthood?” He made clear that the next time I came to him with complaints like this, he would demote me. A day or two later, even though my companion had more seniority in the area, I was transferred to one of the most remote areas in the mission: Uspantán, Quiché — a five or six hour bus ride to the nearest telephone and an eleven or twelve hour ride to the mission home. It was clear I was being exiled.

Earlier in my mission I had developed a severe allergic reaction to dust mites, and the president had been careful to keep me in relatively clean, sanitary areas — I’d spent time in Vista Hermosa, the wealthiest area in the country, near the temple. Uspantán was among the most unsanitary areas in the entire mission. Within a month, my asthma had flared so badly I couldn’t breathe. I was going to the local farmacia for pills and inhalers just to get through the night. About a month in, I called the mission president and told him my condition. He sent word back through the APs that I should come to the mission home. I made the long bus ride back, and the next day he told me I was going home. That was about 20 months into my mission — a terribly sad ending to my time in Guatemala.

Back in Texas, I seriously considered ending my mission with honorable release, but I really wanted to finish. They transferred me to the Arizona Tempe mission for my last four months. I had expected the Guatemala mission president to pass along damaging information about me, but to my surprise, he told the Arizona mission president — Darrell Woolsey — that I had been an excellent missionary. They immediately made me a zone leader over the Spanish-speaking elders. I had a wonderful final four months, met great elders, and learned to my relief that not all missions operated the way mine had.

I was also eager to make sure Salt Lake City knew what had happened. When Darrell Woolsey — who had just been called as a general authority — sat with me, I told him the whole story. His jaw dropped. He said he needed to let Salt Lake know and promised to follow up. A week or two passed with no word, and when I finally asked him, he seemed uncomfortable. His answer, as best I recall: “I told Salt Lake what happened, and they expressed their regret. But your president is only a few months from finishing, and they didn’t want to embarrass him or make waves — so they’ve decided to let him finish out.” By that point I was deeply depressed and demoralized. I started to wonder how far up the corruption went. I finished my mission, had genuinely good experiences in Arizona, loved my companions and the work we did — but it was deeply distressing and saddening to see the church I loved, had dedicated my life to, and believed in, tolerating what I had witnessed.

I spent the next couple of years back at BYU pretty depressed and angry, wondering how to let the world know what was happening. I seriously considered contacting 60 Minutes, 20/20, or Time Magazine for an exposé. My experiences were further complicated by the climate at BYU during the early 1990s — the Cecilia Farr, David Moulton, and September Six situations — and I’d seen how vocal, disgruntled members were treated, sometimes with excommunication. So I went to a couple of professors I trusted and told them the story. One very special professor in particular asked me: what’s your purpose? Do you want to marginalize yourself from the community and incur all sorts of damage by going outside the church with this story, or do you want to actually try to make a difference? I said I wanted to make a difference within the church. He told me to write a letter, said he knew Elder Oaks personally, and offered to include a cover letter and send it along on my behalf.

I wrote a detailed account of my mission experience — the letter will be posted on my website — and after a couple of professors helped me trim the anger and vitriol, we sent it to Elder Oaks. Several months later, while I was doing an internship in Washington, D.C., my roommate came to tell me there was a phone call. I went upstairs and heard: “This is church headquarters. Could you please hold for Elder Oaks?” Elder Oaks came on the line, asked how I was doing, apologized on behalf of the church, asked whether I still held a testimony and was still active, and said he was going to do everything he could to make sure this never happened again. He promised to send me a talk he was preparing for future mission presidents that would address the issues I had raised, and to share my letter with every member of the Quorum of the Twelve, the First Presidency, and the Church Missionary Committee. I was genuinely hopeful that the letter would make a difference. Later, at the Arizona mission reunion, my former mission president — now a general authority — told me he had seen the letter and felt it had made a real impact.

For several years after that I felt much better about my mission experience. But over time, as I talked to other returned missionaries, I learned of similar practices elsewhere: “cheeseburger baptisms” in black slums in North Carolina, where elders offered food to young boys; a cousin who served in Montana, where missionaries had taken names from gravestones and faked baptisms on paper; beach baptisms in the Viña del Mar mission in Chile, where investigators were lined up and baptized at beach parties. Years later, when I worked at church headquarters, I saw the activity rate data firsthand — in some Latin American countries, as low as 12 to 15 percent. One tenth of the people ever baptized were actually active. I read about the baseball baptisms in 1960s Great Britain, where young people couldn’t play baseball unless they were baptized first, and about similar tactics tied to English-language teaching programs in Japan. Every time church leaders in general conference celebrated 11 million, 12 million members, I wondered how many were truly active — and why activity rates were guarded so carefully.

It all came into sharp focus for me when I was working for a technology company and heard rumors in online chat rooms that Elder Holland had gone to Chile and closed over 20 stakes. The church had expanded wards and stakes based on baptism numbers, but the active membership wasn’t there to sustain meaningful programs — youth programs, quorums, relief societies. Units were so weak that not only new converts but longtime members were falling away as well. The rumor persisted until, after my basement flooded following a move to Utah, I happened to be talking with a man from Chile who came to help remove the water. I asked him how the church was doing there. His face fell. He told me Elder Holland had by then closed over 40 stakes, and that some wards had only two to ten members attending on a given Sunday. He said entire stakes had been collapsed repeatedly just to try to get enough people in one place to function.

I thought about Elder Oaks in the Philippines, and about the missionary program as a whole, and I came to realize that the church had suffered from a baptismal culture — in many areas — that prioritized numbers, metrics, and sales tactics over genuine conversion. That matches what I understand from censuses conducted in places like Chile and Mexico, which show a fraction of the self-reported Mormon membership that the church claims in those countries. It matches the activity rates I saw at church headquarters. While the church claims 12 million members, the number of truly active Mormons is likely much closer to 5 or 6 million at most — and there are millions more kept on the rolls who do not consider themselves Mormon but are still counted.

None of this proves the church is not true. None of it proves the church is corrupt at its core. It simply shows how, with the right emphasis on authority, power, and a top-down ecclesiastical structure, things can go severely wrong. The lessons I take from my experience are these: never ignore how you feel in your conscience, even when priesthood leaders seem to be pointing in another direction. Trust what we would call the Holy Ghost. And avoid what Elder Oaks himself called priestcraft — taking the honors of men and the mechanisms of corporate America and trying to apply them to spiritual work. It simply doesn’t make sense.

A couple years back on a business trip, I ran into Elder Oaks in an airport and dropped him a note of thanks for his phone call to me years earlier. He wrote back and told me that my letter had done a lot of good, and that every time he now speaks to missionaries around the world, he tells them: never set a goal on something that rests on someone else’s free agency. To set a goal on a baptism is wrong, because you cannot ultimately control whether someone chooses to be baptized. You can set goals on how hard you work, how much you pray, how many hours you put in, how many Books of Mormon you deliver — because those are within your control. And most significantly, the talk Elder Oaks sent me following our conversation categorically called those high-pressure baptismal techniques priestcraft, and stated that any time we apply sales methods to the mission experience, we are engaging in what the Book of Mormon calls evil.

I remain an active Mormon to this day. I teach elders quorum in my ward. My children attend church and are active. I hold a stake calling. I am committed to the gospel. But my view of how the church operates and how I engage with it has been dramatically revised by my experience — and I wouldn’t trade that revised understanding for anything, even though arriving at it was very painful.

My fondest wish is that in the MTC, this story and others like it would be told openly to elders and sister missionaries — that they would be told directly: there is a tendency in missions toward these types of baptisms, and we want to state clearly that these practices are wrong. Until these issues are openly and publicly addressed, I fear they will continue to surface in future missions with future missionaries. And you have to wonder what it does to a missionary’s soul to be caught up in these kinds of baptisms, and how they later reconcile what their mission meant — both to themselves and to the people they were ostensibly there to serve.

That’s my story. I hope you found it worthwhile. I’ll be posting copies of my letter to Elder Oaks, his letters back to me, some of the certificates and newsletters from my mission, and other supporting materials on my website so you can see that this is all real. Most importantly, I invite you to reach out to me at mormonstories@gmail.com with your feedback and, if you’re interested, your own story. I also have a goal to produce Mormon Stories in video form — to create documentaries about people like Leonard Arrington, T. Edgar Lyon, and Lowell Bennion, and to interview figures like Michael Quinn, Lavina Fielding Anderson, and Jan Shipps, so that their stories aren’t lost. The more openly these topics are discussed, the better off we will all be. Thank you so much for joining me. We’ll catch you next time. Goodbye.

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