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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Episode Transcript
This transcript is machine-generated and lightly edited for readability. The audio is authoritative. Please excuse occasional errors in names and spelling.
Welcome and Introduction to Mormon Stories
Guest [00:00:09] 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. Listen to Catholic Mormon podcasts. I've listened to Latter Day Slant, several other podcasts that have nothing to do with Mormon related issues at all. And I felt called to begin a podcast about Mormon stories instead of dealing necessarily with oh. I've also spent a significant time listening to the podcast from thechurchisnotrue.com and I find all those podcasts fascinating and informative and interesting. I feel called to do something maybe a little bit different. I'm not so much going to be talking about current events or specific issues sort of in isolation, but instead what I'm interested in doing is providing an open forum for all types of Mormons to tell their stories. They can be true believers, they can be Sunstone Mormons, they can be ex Mormons or post Mormons, it doesn't matter. I'm just interested in any type of Mormon having an open forum to be able to tell their story and to bring their stories together with people who are interested in listening. You can contact me@mormonstoriesmail.com that's mormonstoriesmail.com and if you're interested in telling your story, there's some new software out called Skype. And Skype is cool because basically what it lets you do is through voice over IP on the Internet, it'll allow you to talk to someone for free with pretty decent sound quality. And so those of you who want to tell your story, I can bring on the podcast and we can talk and I can record it and publish it as part of the Mormon stories. So if you're a Mormon or used to be a Mormon or part Mormon and you feel like you have an interesting or compelling story to tell, I'd love to get it on this podcast. So without any further ado, I'm going to begin and kick off the first podcast and tell you a little bit about me. The story I'm going to tell you is one about my mission, 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 sort of raised me in many ways. Not completely because my parents also did a very good job raising me, but I definitely clung to the church for support and guidance when things were rocky with my family. After a year at byu, I received a mission call to serve in Guatemala. And in the late 80s, and to be honest, I didn't know where Guatemala was, and my dad wasn't super excited about me going, but my parents were supportive. And in late 1988, I entered the mission field. Well, the story got interesting a few months into my mission because a few of the companionships in my mission started having what seemed to be incredible success in the mission field. There were companionships baptizing between 30 and 40 people a month. These were astonishing numbers to us, and we all kind of wondered how they were doing it. But these elders sure enough were baptizing up to 30 or 40amonth. Within a month or two, these particular missionaries were made zone leaders over a particular zone. And within a very short amount of time, this zone was baptizing upwards of 120 people per month with only four or five companionships. So imagine that, eight to ten missionaries baptizing over 120 people a month. This was astounding. And, you know, very early on, you know, missionaries started talking and wondering how, you know, two missionaries or a zone of missionaries could baptize so many people. So word slowly got out that what these elders would do would be to go to a soccer field and start playing soccer in a sort of impoverished part of Guatemala. And they'd play soccer there for, you know, an hour. And then they'd say to the kids, hey, you know, let's go back to the church. A lot of these kids would be 8, 9, 10 years old. Some of them, turns out, were even 7 years old. But the missionaries would say, hey, you know, let's go back to the church and cool off. And so the little boys or girls would follow the missionaries to the church, and they'd put them in white clothes, and without any discussions, without any parental consent, without ever attending church, these young kids would get baptized 5, 10, 15 kids at a time. You know, when I found out about this practice, it kind of made me sick. So early in my mission, I had an interview with the mission president, and I didn't want to name the elders by names or telling them, but I just kind of said to the mission president, you know, president, it feels like it's relatively easy to get numerical success on this mission, but, you know, it doesn't feel like it's necessarily leading to conversions. And I'm a little bit concerned about that. And the mission president went into great extent to tell me that, you know, elder, we're, we're planting important seeds that are going to sprout later. We're getting a Book of Mormon in their home. We're giving them the gift of the Holy Ghost. And if they get the gift of the Holy Ghost, even if they fall inactive, you know, later on in their lives, it'll kick in and we will have planted important seeds that will have sprouted later. So being new and having, you know, obedience and respect for priesthood leaders heavily emphasized, I kind of forgot about it and, you know, experienced some good success on my own during my mission. After a few months in the mission, I was called to open up a brand new area. I was called to be branch president. And you know, those are very exciting times. Four months after that, I was called to be a zone leader. And I was able to have relatively good numerical success as a missionary without using the tactics that I had heard were going on within the mission. So about a year into my mission, you know, these elders who were zone leaders had become assistants to the president and they spent a great deal of time traveling around the mission teaching other missionaries to do similar things. Before you know it, we were the second highest baptizing mission in the world. And the mission president would tell us that that the Chile Vinha del Mar mission was the only mission in the world that had more baptisms than us. We were getting 700 baptisms a month as a mission. And the mission president instituted all sorts of incentives to encourage baptisms. So for example, if you baptize seven people in a month, you would get a certificate in zone conference that showed the number of baptisms you received. If you baptized 10 or more a month, you received Janice Kat Perry, serving with Joy Servieno Congoso cassette tape. For the first time, you exceeded that 10. Also, any companionship in the mission that baptized 10 or more received an invitation to a party for that month. So all the companionships with 10 or more baptisms would go to this party where they could play soccer and they could play basketball and they could play tennis and there'd be a catered lunch there. And it was a celebration for Those who got 10 or more baptisms. And the highest baptizing zone in the mission would get a steak dinner with the mission president that month and he'd take them all to dinner. So as you can tell, sales incentives were implemented in a very strong way throughout my mission. So there was lots of incentive, sort of extrinsic incentive to achieve the mission goals. So once I became zone leader, as I mentioned before, we were able to achieve a relatively high amount of success. And then shortly thereafter, the mission president set a goal that Every companionship in the mission would have a baptism each month. So he wanted every companionship to baptize at least once every month. And for a couple months my zones were fine. But one month in particular, we had done a bunch of baptisms towards the end of the previous month, and for a couple of the companion ships, our investigator pool was a little bit low. So towards the end of the month, the mission president interviewed me and found out that there were a couple companion ships who were not really set to baptize. So the mission president said, hey, Elder, I want you to. He called me up one day and he said, elder, I want you to ask the two companionships who haven't baptized yet this month to fill their fonts. Because tomorrow I'm sending the APs out the assistance of the president. They're going to pick you up and they're going to take you around to help these missionaries achieve success. And they're going to teach you how top leaders in the mission fulfill their goals. So I obeyed and I called the companionships and told them to fill their fonts. And I waited the next morning for the assistance of the president to arrive. So they arrived and took me to the first area and we picked up the missionaries who were from that area and we said, the AP said, well, take us to your investigators. And they basically said, well, we only really have one investigator. And the APs went to that investigator, tried to pressure them to get baptized, and they wouldn't do it. So the AP's started feeling a little bit desperate and they started driving around town and they drove to a poorer part of this pueblo and found this really dilapidated old shack. And they drove up to the shack and stopped and went into the shack and, and found this really old lady. She had to have been 70, 75 years old, missing most of her teeth, she was partially blind. And they basically said, hey, Hermanna, vamos, vamosar. Quier segira Jesu Cristo. You know, you want to follow Jesus Christ, you want to get baptized. And this lady had no idea what we were doing. This is a woman who lived in a one room shack with a dirt floor and a tin roof. Here are these, you know, tall, white, handsome, not me, but you know, the other elders, handsome Mormon missionaries showing up in a minivan. You know, this woman didn't have a telephone, didn't have shoes, let alone a fancy automobile. So here we were showing up at her door saying, hey, you want to follow Jesus? And of course she loves Jesus. So she says, absolutely. And before you know it. The elders were guiding her down a barranco, down this path to the bottom of a river, and she was praying to Mary on the way down. She'd had no discussions. She'd never been to church. And the elders baptized her. And the APs were. So they were so interested in making sure that both companionships got baptisms that they actually baptized her in the river and then said to the elders, hey, elders, can you confirm this lady? We got to go on to our next appointment. So we actually left the lady there alone with the other two missionaries to get confirmed while we went to hop back in the van and go to the next area. So, of course, I was sick, you know, because the rumors that I heard about the baptismal methods, you know, didn't seem, you know, they seem so shocking to me that I just sort of discounted them at least partially to being just hyperbole or rumor. But here I was experiencing it for the first time in my mission. So we travel to the next area, and almost an identical situation happens. There's a young man who had only had two discussions. He had four to go. His baptismal date was set for the next Sunday or the Sunday after. And even though he kind of had back problems, the assistance of the president pressured him. They offered him gum, they offered him ice cream, and finally they convinced him to get baptized that day, and they took him to church and baptized him. On the way home, the missionaries stopped at a telephone and they said, hey, let's call the president, you know, so they called the president, and I'll never forget the words that came out of the elder's mouth. He said, presidente, we have witnessed a miracle today. And he told them that we had been able to help both companionships baptize. Now, I was a super naive missionary, super naive about a lot of things. And so my immediate assumption wasn't that the mission was corrupt. Instead, my assumption was that the mission president just didn't know and that if I could just let him know, then he would fix these problems that were happening.
Receiving and Preparing for a Mission Call
Challenges and Conflicts in the Mission Field
Speaker B [00:16:00] So
Guest [00:16:04] the Zone Leaders Conference was a few days from that event where all the zone leaders and all the mission got together to talk to the president, and all the zone leaders would have interviews with the President. So I waited, and during my interview with the president, I told him the whole story. And I said, president, you know, when you sent the APs out to my area, you know, let me tell you what really happened. And of course, I told him the story, thinking that he would be shocked and Offended and angry that he would demote those assistants to the President and, you know, you know, scour the mission to make sure that none of this was happening anywhere else and rid the mission of any impurities or improprieties. Well, much to my surprise, he was angry, but he was angry at me. And the best that I can recall the conversation, he basically yelled at me and said, you know, Elder, do you support your leaders? Are you kicking against the pricks? You know, do you believe in the priesthood? You know, the next time you come to me with complaints or issues like this, I'm going to demote you and you'll no longer be his own president, his own leader, and just basically let me know that it was totally unacceptable and inappropriate for me to be telling him the things that I told him, you know, A day or two later, even though my companion had more time in the area than I did, I was transferred to one of the most remote areas in the mission, Uspantan kiche, which was five or six hour bus ride to the nearest telephone and about 11 or 12 hour bus ride to the mission home. So it was clear to me that I was being exiled for sort of exposing or trying to discuss or, you know, raise issue with the practices of the mission. Well, it turns out that a little bit earlier in the mission, I contracted a pretty severe allergy, allergic reaction to dust mites. And so after discovering this, the President had tried to keep me in relatively clean and safe and sanitary areas. So I spent at least a few months in the district that the temple, the Mormon temple was in, in the Vista Hermosa area, which was the most wealthy area in the country. But this Uspantan Kiche obviously was among the most dirty and unsanitary of all the areas in the mission. So within a month, my asthma had flared up considerably to the point where I couldn't breathe. I was having to go to the local pharmacia and obtain pills and inhalers to keep breathing. Each night I couldn't breathe. And it got so bad that about a month into my time at Uzpantan, I called the mission president and said, president, my asthma's flared up, I can't breathe, you know, what do I do? And he sent the message back to me through the APs that I should come to the mission home. So I came to the mission home, took that long bus ride back, and the next day he told me that I was going home and he sent me on a plane home. And that was about, that was about 20 months into my mission. So it was a terribly sad ending for me to my mission in Guatemala. And when I got home back in Texas, I seriously considered just ending my mission. And they gave me the option to do that with honor, but I really wanted to finish. So they transferred me to the Arizona Tempe Mission, and I served my last four months there. Now, I expected the mission president to pass on really bad things about me to discredit me or to make me look bad, but much to the contrary, he informed the mission president there, Darrell Woolsey, that I had been an excellent missionary in Guatemala. They immediately made me a zone leader over the Spanish speaking elders in the Arizona Tempe Mission. And I served the last four months of my mission, had a great time, and met a lot of great elders, and found out to my satisfaction and surprise that not all missions were like this, which was important for me. But I was also excited to make sure that my mission president, my new mission president, and Salt Lake City more specifically, knew what was going on because I was sure that they weren't going to stand for it. So when Darrell Woolsey, who had just been called to be a general authority, called me in, I told him the whole story. And his jaw literally dropped, you know, to the floor. And he couldn't believe the story I was telling him. So he just said, elder, you know, we've got to let Salt Lake know. Thank you so much for telling me, and I'm going to call Salt Lake and I'll let you know when I hear back from him. And so I waited a week or two and didn't hear back from him. So I asked him later, I said, hey, President Woolsey, what happened when you told Salt Lake? And he seemed a little bit uncomfortable telling me, but his basic answer that I recall was, well, Elder, you know, I told Salt Lake what happened, and they expressed their regret. But, you know, you're president only a few months from finishing his mission, and they didn't want to sort of embarrass him or make a bunch of waves. And so they just decided to let him finish out his mission. And by that time, I was extremely depressed and demoralized about the church because I started to wonder how far up the corruption went. And I finished out my mission and, you know, sort of made it through, had some good experiences, had some great experiences in Arizona, loved my companions and loved the work we did, but it was just, you know, extremely distressing and saddening for the church that I loved, the church that I dedicated my life to, for the church that I'd committed so much to and believed in, to find out that such things went on, let alone were tolerated. So I spent the next couple years back at byu, pretty depressed about the church, pretty angry, and wondering how I was going to let the world know what was happening. I considered very heavily trying to contact, you know, 60 Minutes or 2020 or Time magazine and to do some sort of expose. And my experiences were amplified or complicated by the fact that I was at BYU during the Cecilia Farr, David Moulton, you know, sort of the September 6th or October 6th or whatever. They were sort of academic freedom issues that were swirling around BYU at the time, you know, in the early 1990s. And I had seen how some of the more vocal people were treated by the church when they were being, you know, sort of disgruntled or outspoken. And I saw that they're excommunicated. So I went to a couple professors of mine who I was very close to, told them the story. And one very special professor in particular, you know, basically said, you know, what's your purpose? Do you want to marginalize yourself from the community and incur all sorts of damage by trying to go outside the church and tell this story, or do you want to try and actually make a difference? And of course, I still felt like I wanted to make a difference in the church. So I told him the latter. And so he said, here's what you do. Write a letter. I know Elder Downley chokes personally, and I'll put a cover letter on your letter and I'll send it to Elder Oaks, and, you know, that's all I can do for you. But, you know, I think we have a pretty good shot of maybe trying to make a difference here. So I wrote a letter explaining my mission experience. I'll be putting it up on my website so you can actually read the letter that I wrote. And after a couple professors helped me edit it down and take out a lot of the venom and the anger and the vitriol, basically we sent it to Elder Oaks. And I don't remember how long it was. It seems like it was another six months or a year. I was doing an internship in Washington, D.C. and one night I was at a little get together and one of my roommates came down to the apartment I was in and said, hey, there's a telephone call for you. So I went upstairs and answered the phone, and lo and behold, I heard on the other line, this is church headquarters. Could you please hold for Elder Oaks. And of course, I was stunned and sure Enough. Elder Oaks talked to me, and he asked me how I was doing, and he apologized on behalf of the church. And he asked if I still had a temple recommend and if I was still worthy and active. And he basically said, I'm really sorry this has happened, and I'm going to do everything I can to make sure it doesn't happen again. And he promised me to send me a talk that he was working on that would be given to future mission presidents addressing the issues that I had brought up when I wrote him the letter. He also promised to give a copy of my letter to every member of the Quorum of the Twelve and First Presidency and also to the church missionary committee. So I was excited, and I became really hopeful that my letter was actually going to make a difference. And I remember attending the mission homecoming or reunion for the Arizona Mission. And my mission president, my general authority former mission president, told me that he had seen my letter and that he felt like it really had made a big difference. So I sort of spent the next several years feeling a lot better about my mission experience until I started reading and talking to other missionaries as well. And I found out that in North Carolina, there were cheeseburger baptisms where the elders would go around the black slums and offer cheeseburgers to little boys. I found out that a cousin of mine had served a mission in Montana where missionaries had taken names off of gravestones and put them on baptismal records and faked baptisms. I found out that in the Vinha del Mar mission in Chile, they used to have beach baptisms where they just have big beach parties and then line up the investigators and baptize them. Years later, I was able to actually work at church headquarters, where I saw firsthand the activity rates and saw that in Latin America, the activity rates were literally as low as 12 or 15% in an entire country. In other words, a tenth of the members that had been baptized over the years were actually active. And then I read about the baseball baptisms in Great Britain in the early 60s where young British youth weren't allowed to play baseball unless they were baptized first. And so hundreds and thousands of British youth were baptized in hopes that that would lead to a stronger church in England. And I saw the same types of things that happened in Japan with English language teaching programs. And I started to really feel uncomfortable every time. In general conference, the leaders seemed to brag about 12 million, 11 million, all the millions of baptisms. I wondered how many actual members there were, and I wondered why the activity rates were guarded so Carefully. So this was sort of all driven home to me last year as I was working for a technology company and as I participated on some chat rooms. It was rumored that when Elder Holland went to Chile, he had closed down over 20 stakes while he was in Chile. Closed 20 stakes, shut them down because the church was imploding under its own weight. They had expanded wards and stakes based on baptisms, but the activity rates weren't there and the critical mass of membership wasn't there to provide the youth programs that were strong enough to keep the youth active, the quorums to keep the men active, the relief societies, everything was just weak. And so not only were the new converts falling inactive quickly, but the longtime members were falling inactive as well because the units were so feeble. And so I had heard that other Holland had closed over 20 stakes. And this maintained a rumor until just this year my basement flooded. I moved to Utah. My basement flooded one day and we had some guys over to suck the water out of my basement. And it just so happened that the gentleman who came to remove the water from my basement was from Chile. And so I asked him, how's the church in Chile? And he got this really sad look on his face and he said, it's really horrible. Elder Holland's now closed over 40 stakes in Chile. I don't know if that number is accurate, but that's what I was told. He said the rewards with this view is 2 to 10 members attending in an entire ward. And so he had to just collapse and collapse and collapse and collapse the wards and collapse the stakes to try and get a critical mass again. And I thought about Elder Oaks in the Philippines, and I thought about, you know, the church missionary program as a whole. And I realized that the church has suffered from a baptismal program in many areas that focused on numbers, that focused on metrics, that focused on sales techniques and tactics instead of true conversions. And that jibes now with my understanding that places like Chile and Mexico have done census, have done censuses. I don't know what the plural is for census, but those censuses basically show a fraction of the number of self reported Mormons that our church claims in each of those countries. And it jibes with the activity rates that I saw when I worked at church headquarters. And it made me realize that while we claim that there are 12 million Mormons in the church, that in reality the number of active Mormons is much closer to around 5 million or 6 million at the most, if you count semi actives. But there's a whole set of millions and millions of people that we keep on our roles that don't consider themselves Mormons, but we continue to count them as such anyway. And it sort of made me look at the church and missions in a whole different light. To me, this doesn't prove that the church isn't true. This doesn't prove that the church is corrupt. It has nothing to do with any of that. It just shows how with the right emphasis on power and the right emphasis on authority and sort of a top down, authoritative ecclesiastical leadership structure, things can go awry, sometimes severely so. And so, you know, I sort of take from my experience all sorts of lessons. All sorts of lessons. Never ignore how you feel in your conscience, even if your priesthood leaders seem to be indicating other things. Go with, you know, what we would call the Holy Ghost or your conscience. Avoid what Elder Oaks referred to as priest crafts. Taking the honors of men and the mechanisms of corporate America and trying to apply them to the spiritual world just doesn't make sense. A couple years back on a business trip, I ran into Elder Oaks in an airport, dropped him a little note and thanked him for his telephone call to me. And he wrote back to me a second letter which basically said, your letter did a lot of good. And every time I go to missionaries throughout the world now, I tell them, never set a goal as a missionary on something that rests on someone else's free agency. In other words, to set a goal on a baptism is wrong because you can't control ultimately whether someone decides to get baptized or not. But you can set a goal on how hard you're going to work or, or how you're going to work or how much you're going to pray or how many hours or how many books you're going to deliver, because those are things that are under your control. And most importantly, the speech that Elder Oaks sent me after our conversation basically called these techniques priestcraft. And he said that anytime that we try and apply sales techniques to the mission experience, we're engaging in what the Book of Mormon calls as evil and priestcraft. So just to let you know, I remain an active Mormon to this day. I teach elders quorum in my ward. All my children, you know, go to church and are active. I also have a stake calling. I'm committed to the gospel, although my view of how things work in the church and how I interface with the church has been dramatically revised since my experience. I wouldn't trade it for the world, but at the same time it was very painful. And I do hope that the church will learn its lesson. And you know, my fondest wish is that in the mtc, this story and other stories will be told to the elders and the sister missionaries and that they'll be told. There is a tendency in all missions to do these types of baptisms, and we want to categorically state up front that these practices are evil and wrong and you shouldn't do them. And until these issues are openly and publicly addressed directly, I fear that these practices will continue to rear their ugly heads in future missions with future missionaries. And you have to just wonder how it corrupts a missionary to get caught up in these types of baptisms as they then leave the mission and sort of serve or not serve in the church to think back on what types of missions they had and what the missions really meant to the people that were being served. So that's my story. Hope you enjoyed it. I'm going to be putting copies of my letter to Elder Oaks, his letters back to me, as well as some other information, maybe some of the certificates and the newsletters that we received on my mission so that you can see that this stuff is for real. Most importantly, I'd like to invite you to send me your email@mormonstoriesmail.com to let me know how you liked how you like this story and if you'd like to see podcasts like this continue. And most importantly, whether you'd like to have your story told through Skype. Skype is spelled S K Y P E. You can go to skype.com to download the program and computer to computer. Telephone calls are absolutely free. So I would welcome those of you to do that and I hope that you'll tune in to future Mormon Stories podcasts. I also have a goal to produce Mormon stories in video form, to do documentaries on people like Leonard Arrington and T. Edgar Lyon and Lowell Bennion and Eugene England, and to tell their stories so that their stories aren't lost. And current Mormons I hope someday to be able to interview Michael Quinn or Lavina Fielding Anderson or Jan Shipps, any of the current Mormons, to have them tell their stories as well, because I feel like the more that these topics are openly discussed, the better off we'll all be. So with that, I'm going to go ahead and sign off. I want to thank you so much for joining me. Please again, email me@mormonstoriesmail.com with your feedback and with any interest you may have in participating in future Mormon stories. Thank you so much. Take care and we'll catch you next time.
Reflections on Mission Baptisms and Their Aftermath
Speaker B [00:38:38] Goodbye to your hope. Your heart's desire has a castle that you must keep in all of its splendor. It's draughty with lowly. This heart is too hard to heat. But when I get lonely now that's only a sign. Some room is empty, but that room is there by design. If I feel hollow, that's just my proof that there's more for me to follow. That's what Colonel is for. Is it a curse or a blessing, this palace of promise? When they empty, chill makes you weep with only the thin fire of romance to warm you. These halls are too tall.
25 Responses
John,
Elder Oaks did address the bogus baptism issue within the last 2.5 years or so, but he didn’t use that exact phrase.
President Hinckley addressed the baptism machine too.
Naturually, they both used generic terms so as not to single out anyone, and to make their advice more universally applicable.
Elder Oaks talked about not forcing (though he didn’t use that word) people into baptisms, and to respect their agency about the decision to get baptized. If you’ll search his conference talks in Oct 2002, 2003, or April 2004, you’ll find it. He talked about either to be very careful, or to avoid having goals for a certain number of baptisms since baptism is completely within the agency of the person taking the discussions.
President Hinckley’s talk was either in 2004, or April of 2005. Probably 2004. One of his key words was to avoid using sales techniques. So you could probably use that as a key word.
Personally, I think it is okay, as Elder Packer said in the early 80’s, to use LEGITIMATE “sales techniques” to get people INTERESTED in the gospel, and get them to at least listen to one missionary discussion. But sales techniques, legitimate or not, should not be used to get people in the waters of baptism.
In my mission, in the early 80’s, I experienced similar problems you encountered about missionaries baptizing people who weren’t ready, and in many cases kind of strong-arming, or “brow beating” or emotionally/verbally manipulating them into baptism instead of waiting until they were fully committed.
Many people of South America are very humble, meek and timid, and most of the poor and down-trodden were easy to lead. The missionaries would lead them to baptism, and then move on to new people, and the growth was so fast, that members couldn’t fellowship the converts.
I only saw one attempted child-baptism that was completely inappropriate. Though rumors were rife of it being common.
I was unaware if many of our baptisms were in situations where the person only had one, or none, discussions, and never went to church before being baptized. So it wasn’t as bad as what you described in your mission.
Thanks for the feedback and perspective, GreenEggz.
I’m always glad when I hear these things being addressed/discussed. I know that the bretheren don’t like/support a lot of this that goes on. It’s great to learn about times they’ve tried to teach against it. I hope it continues (I’m sure it will). After speaking with Elder Oaks, I’ve never felt like this was condoned by them….just really hard to stop/guard against. That’s partly why I try to speak up about it….to help build awareness.
Anyway, I value your thoughts. And welcome to MormonStories!!!! Thanks for stopping by!!!
John
It’s always refreshing to see honesty and transparency in the church, such as we see in this podcast. It makes you feel that issues will not be hidden but rather dealt with, and that members will be respected for voicing their concerns about THEIR church. Hopefully that day will come before too many people stray into apostasy.
I think in the podcast you said you were going to post the reply letters from Elder Oaks. Are those somewhere on this site?
Thanks!
I served in the Peru Arequipa mission in 78-80. We had Elders teaching church welfare with the same results… lots of baptisms followed by universal inactivity. Peru was where I first observed the numbers game. Sadly, I saw the same emphasis throughout my tenure in the church. Home teaching percentages, sacrament meeting attendance percentages, temple attendance percentages, etc, etc, etc. It came to look less and less like Christ’s church. I finally resigned, another statistic I’m sure.
As John pointed out, this kind of ‘bad’ baptism practice has been endemic in the missionary program, at least since the baseball/ basketball baptisms of the early 1960’s, which impacted Australia as well as England.
A particularly noxious example was the strongarm ‘Day of Pentecost/ Baptismal Discussion’ program conceived by Elder Loren C. Dunne when he was President of the Australia Sydney Mission in the late 1970s, then spread to the rest of Australia when he moved up a level to Area President (or equivalent). Missionaries faced the same baptismal body count pressures as did John in his mission, with the result that local activity retention rates for converts, after 6 months, dropped below 10%. The high pressure tactics forced on missionaries (such as the ‘Wilford Woodruff’ weeks, where they had to put in 18 hour days door-knocking to meet their tracting goals) did incalculable damage to the image of the Church locally that took years to recover from.
These particular programs were stopped only after an investigation and highly critical report by Joseph McPhie, then of the Church Missionary Dept., who was sent out to take over as Mission President. (I had done several statistical studies on recent convert retention rates, which I provided to him and which I know he made use of.)
What saddens me is that, despite assurances to the contrary, the Church seems entirely unable to prevent these recurrent lapses. This leads me to suspect that they arise out of fundamental flaws in the administration of the current proselyting model.
Excellent podcast. I just heard it today. I can’t imagine how demoralizing that must have been for you at the time.
I’ve heard several similar stories from friends who served missions. I agree with Bob Birks comment that it is an administration issue and would extend it to the stakes as well. I was in one 5 or so years ago where the stake prez told the leadership of a certain ward that he wanted all the members to extend invitations to all their friends to come to the chapel on Christmas Eve and he was going to issue a baptismal challenge for that very evening. He was hoping many would get baptized on the spot. A friend who was there called and told me about it, understandably freaking out. He had served a foreign mission in the mid 80s and had been pressured into tactics like making kids be baptized in order to play baseball.
Evidently, feedback from all parties was very negative and the ward Christmas eve idea was never rolled out. Phew.
I’m on my second stint as a Ward Mission Leader, with 2.3 years in this second calling. My bishop is very missionary minded and huge on goaling baptisms, as is the new stake president. I refuse to participate in goaling baptisms, and told my bishop so several nights ago at my last PPI. This is the third time we have discussed the matter together. He used language this time, however, that he may be releasing me due to my unwillingness to participate in goaling. I remain steadfast and immovable on this issue.
I appreciated the posts and went and read the Ensign article from October 2003, from Dallin H. Oaks about the inappropriateness of goaling something that is largely out of your control because of someone else’s free agency. The full-time missionaries also tell me that Elder Bednar recently spoke at one of their mission meetings and said the same thing when answering a question about goaling baptisms.
I disagree, however with the excuse that this is an administrative matter that the Church is essentially powerless to change. If they wanted it changed, they could change it. I believe that it concerns them, but apparently not enough to do much about.
Can some body please help me find an old article by Paul H Dunn. It has to do with te Word of Wisdom and what happened while he was serving in the army? I think the title of the story is Sargent Iso. It has a sentimental value to me. Please help.
:'( Damn, I can’t stop crying… I was a Missionary. I saw it. I objected to it. I got sent to the worst areas too. 10,000 baptisms a year was the goal in my Mission. What you said is 100% true. It happened to me too. I about threw up when I heard this podcast. Over 25 years and I thought I was alone. No one believed me. I was so lonely on my Mission (I was in South America). My letters to home were intercepted and burned. My letters from home were opened and censored. Considered suicide. Threatened with excommunication if I told. Was told I would never amount to any position in the Church, I would have a mark on my “secret record”, and now it’s become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Now I think I’m going to throw up…
I’m currently an investigator and I’m glad I found this podcast. I do want you to know that the sister missionaries I’ve been speaking with have taken their meetings with me really seriously, they’ve explained the word of wisdom, law of chastity, and I read a chapter of the Book of Mormon between each meeting. I’ve also been to church twice. They’ve asked me to pray and read and let them know what I think. So I think that your podcast has made an impact, at least on some missions. They’ve seemed really sincere. Thank you for sharing this.
Where can I find the documents you referred to : your letter and Dallin Oaks’ “priestcraft” talk?
It’s here, Richard: https://www.mormonstories.org/other/oaksdocs/JohnDehlin-ElderOaksMissionCorrespondance.pdf
Hi John,
I served as a missionary in Guatemala- El Salvador from 1968 to 1970. I am so surprised that many of the practices that you described were going on 10 years prior to your mission. When I arrived to my mission in 1968 our mission president issued “challenges” each month to pairs of missionaries. The first month the “challenge” program was initiated we were to set a goal to find 5 people to baptize. Recognition was given to all sets of companions that met “challenge” by putting their names in the mission monthly newsletter. The district with the most combined baptisms were allowed to go on a “paseo” of their choice. We could rent a van and go to Honduras and see the ruins of Cuban, or many other of those types of paseos that were not normally allowed. Some districts chose to travel from Xela and visit costal areas. The zeal to win a paseo was crazy. As in your mission, the top baptizing set of missionaries “won” a steak dinner at a nice restaurant with the mission president and his wife.
Soon it was nothing to get 5 baptisms a month, so “challenge” was increased to 10 a month for all pairs of missionaries. When 10 was being met easily, then “challenge” went up to 15. By the time I left my mission in 1970, it was common to see 20 to 25 baptisms being performed by pairs of missionaries.
Some of the ways that were suggested to us to reach our goals was to find all inactive members or families and to baptize the children that had reached the age of 8 and had not received baptisms. We called those types of baptisms “candy bappers”. The reasoning behind these baptisms was to reach out and reactivate families and to also get all members baptized. Many of the “challenge” baptisms came from “candy bappers”
The other suggestion given to us was to “challenge” investigators to be baptized after the first lesson or even before receiving a lesson. This was using the “ gift of the Holy Ghost”. If they accepted the challenge to be baptized without the lessons, the members of the branch they went to, or missionaries could fellowship them into the branches.
Another tool we could use, was to invite our district leaders or zone leaders to our lessons and get them to add more support to doubting investigator to accept the challenge of baptism.
The zeal for reaching our “metas” or challenges each month was pretty intoxicating. By the end of my mission, I had reached well over 200 baptisms. I could not take responsibility for the actual baptisms because of course, I did not have the priesthood. I was a lowly Lady Missionary.
It makes me sick to my stomach at this point of my life to realize what I was caught up in. It was like being part of an MLM. I am fascinated that these tactics perpetuated and that 10 years later, you John, were still part of the same MLM. You at least in your naive thinking recognized that it was not right. I am in awe at the light you have brought into the world and that you have made huge dents in “The Church” and their way of thinking and doing business. You could be making so much more money in other areas but you for some reason chose to make a difference by getting stories out to the public. Thank you for accepting this “ challenge”!
This story is very interesting. I served in 2001-2003 in Chile during the time Holland presided over the area and closed down the many wards or stakes you referenced. We spent 50% of our time trying to reactivate people due to the mass baptizing you referenced in years past. There were wards with 1000 members on the roles and less than 100 members going. The rumors of the mass baptism stories still were told but thankfully not practiced that I knew of. Many apostles and prophets visited Chile to try to fix the problems created by the past. It was a weird environment to serve like you were in the Utah of South America with so many supposed Mormons there. Good memories and tough ones but definitely saw the aftermath of what had been done in the 90’s or earlier. There was even a video with Hinckley and others done that I remember watching about no baptizing people 1 day just to have them go out of the Church the next week. It made me question things for sure and wonder what we were doing since things were in such a crazy situation that baptizing another person into the situation things were in seemed uncomfortable. Baptism definitely continued but man it seemed like the whole country needed to be reactivated vs baptizing more.
I served a mission at the same time as John Dehlin, I think. Nov 16, 1988`to May30, 1990 Australia, Adelaide. When I got to my first area we met a family and the parents and son were baptized. We were invited to the mission presidents home to the Baptizers Dinner. I still have the engraved steak knife somewhere. Any missionaries with 3 baptisms in one month were invited to the special dinner. At the time I knew it was an incentive to work but it never occurred to me that this could have been much more. Thank you for the Mormon Stories Podcast. I went to a THRIVE event in Sacramento and that was great too.
Both of my parents served missions.
I remember as a kid in primary that the teacher asked which boys wanted to serve a mission. I excitedly flew my hand in the air. They laughed at me.
Like many my experiences are bittersweet. :)
Thank you
I was an LDS missionary in Germany from 1961-63 during the era of baseball baptisms which as I recall was instituted in Europe when Alvin R. Dyer was President of the European Mission. I specifically recall my months in Mainz when we elders in the city were teaching about a dozen young boys the basics of baseball followed by discussions of the gospel. We tried to do this in their homes with their families, but also taught the boys without families when parents indicated they had no interest but didn’t mind us teaching their boys the gospel. My clear impression was that these boys were mostly from dysfunctional families and that the parents were just happy to have some friendly young American males paying attention to their sons and didn’t really pay much attention to what activities they were involved in.
I was only involved in this program for a few months and have no idea how many baptisms resulted from it although I think one or two boys were baptized in Mainz with the approval of parent who had no interest in the gospel themselves but thought it might be good for their sons to be associated with a church. I’ve subsequently never heard that anyone baptized under the baseball program remained in the church but did hear that the Church later removed many names from the records of people baptized in Europe during that era and who had had no contact with the Church since.
I’ve often wondered whether this baseball baptism program played a role in Alvin R. Dyer future in the Church after he left Europe. As I understand it, he was ordained an apostle and spent some time in the First Presidency but never became a member of the Quorum of the Twelve.
I was a missionary in the Venezuela Caracas mission from 1985-87. Practices like you describe were going on in my mission as well but only in certain areas. Regardless, the pressure to meet monthly baptismal goals throughout the mission was intense and we missionaries carried a lot of guilt because failure to hit goals meant we weren’t working hard enough or had some other personal failing (so we were told). My first mission president was Lavar Skousen. I told him about some of the practices I thought were pretty shady and he told me to just keep quiet about it because he didn’t want to challenge the faith of the missionaries. Soon after this interview I was transferred to a remote location. Anyway, that’s how it was and I suspect similar practices were going on throughout Central and South America at the time.
This disgusts me. As a Mormon woman I was taught to date returned missionaries and now I wish I had been taught to date someone who isn’t just a yes-man or a con-man and someone who actually does the difficult emotional and communicative labor to think for himself. Thank you for this episode John.
Yes! I feel lucky to have served a mission myself so I could break through the indoctrination that “RM” automatically equals “good husband” and that a non-RM would automatically be a bad one. I see so many stories of women in bad Mormon marriages for this, and it’s even sadder when some of them ended relationships with better men because they couldn’t “take them to the Temple” only to end up with an abusive Temple marriage. Hugs to you.
I served in 2013-2015 and sadly it was very much the same. “If you don’t have baptisms every week, you are not being an obedient missionary, and not doing God’s work.”
This is what I was told. Yet the best missionaries were out here baptizing frogs.