Missionary Work and its transition to social media, technology, and video conferencing!

June 2020
Missionary work has changed because of the COVID-19, and the California Riverside Mission has taken on the challenge. While we became a “technology mission” in 2018, we did not dabble much in social media. Then came the coronavirus with vengeance and moved us inside, holed up in our apartments.

Young men and young women, many of them just six years out of primary, are not mean to be inside for longer than twenty minutes at a time. For the most part, though, our missionaries are succeeding in keeping productive and following the missionary schedule.

We literally do all of our missionary work online via social media and video conferencing.

All zone conferences, which we fondly call “multi-zone conferences,” are done via video conferencing. Before COVID-19, we held four different multi-zone conferences with two or three zones together (we have ten). We would travel to a church building and be the missionaries from 9:00 a.m. to about 3:00 p.m. We stopped for the lunch, and the members from the Relief Society, the phenomenal women’s organization in the Church, prepared and served a delicious and nutritious lunch.

Before lunch, we always took pictures of each individual zone to post to the blog and for their parents to see on Facebook. Then, we spent an incredible afternoon of presentations and trainings from the zone and sister training leaders, the missionary leaders in our mission. The final event was the testimony of those who were new in the mission and those who were leaving during that transfer of six weeks. It was highly spiritual and often teary, especially with those going home.

Then the Coronavirus drove us inside and onto video conferencing and social media to a different way of having multi-zone conferences.

Now, we have truncated our scheduling, primarily because it is challenging to sit in an apartment and stare at a small telephone screen for six hours and not become mesmerized with smallness. We went to a three-hour training time with five zones on the video conference at one time on one day and then the other five zones the next day. We usually had them read or study talks or doctrine prior to them arriving to the video conference.

All musical numbers, which have always played an integral in our meetings, were pre-recorded because of the difficulty of hearing them live, primarily because they could no longer get together to create a choir from a zone full of missionaries. Nonetheless, the musical numbers did not diminish in quality. In fact, they were enhanced because of the missionaries who performed them.

The testimonies of those going home were short and powerful. The Assistants to the President now have the outgoing missionaries pre-record their testimonies. Then during the north zone multi-zone conference, we play the pre-recorded testimonies of the south zone, and then the missionaries from the north zones give their testimonies live. Then, the reverse happens when we the south zones gather for their multi-zone conference. The testimonies are powerful and poignant.

As we moved these multi-zone conferences to video conferencing, we worried that the Spirit might not be as plentiful. After the very first one, we did not have to worry because the Spirit was even more powerful and plentiful as we gathered via video conferencing. We all felt it and testified of it.

Yes, missionary work has changed—missionaries now spending more time in their apartments than out of it physically. The irony is that missionaries now have great connections to so many people who could not connect with by our missionaries walking down a street. But what has not change is the Spirit and the testifying by the Spirit, and the teaching from Preach My Gospel and from the scriptures.

Their telephone screens may be small, but the missionaries loom large into homes of people. Our rediscovery is that the Spirit teaches, no matter the location, no matter the modality, and no matter the language. It is the Spirit that touches the lives of the people and aligns with their Light of Christ.

Missionary work or gathering Israel still continues in ways never before imagined, and we are a grand part of these pioneering way of helping Heavenly Father