Part 18 

Part V. The Fourth Six Months: Removing the Barriers 

Overview

January 1980. My term as mission president was now half over. 'In spite of the growth the mission had made, we were still far from the vision President Kimball had, Elder Kikuchi had, I had, and now my missionaries had of bringing in thousands of converts. The prophet's words echoed in my mind (Kikuchi, 1981): 

            WE ARE THINKING AND HOPING FOR THOUSANDS OF CONVERSIONS BY INDIVIDUAL MISSIONARIES AND MISSIONS (p.96). 

            May we improve the efficiency of our missionaries, each bringing thousands of converts into the Church. (p. 63). 

            If your missionaries baptize thousands of converts, it will be a great challenge to the Church leaders to train and organize and indoctrinate the new converts, and we are anxious to assume that responsibility (p. 143). 

It still seemed possible to achieve that vision if more of the missionaries could just do what some of the missionaries were already doing. For example, in December 20 missionaries (about 12% of them) accounted for 120 convert baptisms (almost half of them). If all the missionaries were doing the same as these 20, we would be much closer to reaching our vision. These 20 missionaries were demonstrating that it could be done. As President Kimball (Kikuchi, 1981) had said: 

            It doesn't matter how many people don't do a thing; it's the one who does it who proves we all have the ability (p. 44). 

There were 16% of the missionaries who did no baptizing at all that month. Most of the others had brought in one, two, or three converts. I felt the key was to find ways to get more of them to do what a few were doing. I felt it was possible for them to do it, and I felt certain the missionaries wanted to do it. It was obvious to me that something was stopping them. In order to help them, I first had to understand what was stopping them--what barriers were standing in their way-and help remove those barriers.

I discovered it was not just one thing, but a combination of things that was keeping many of the missionaries from achieving their vision. I felt I needed to adjust and fine-tune many things so the various components of missionary work would mesh together to reinforce each other.

As I began this fourth six-month period, I began to identify and work to solve some of these components and barriers. Some of them were:

Investigator apathy: the missionaries needed to better prepare the investigators to listen to the message before they jumped in to teach them.

Problems with parental permission: they needed a better way of explaining baptism to the investigators' parents--we were losing too many fine people because of lack of permission.

Physical facilities problems: they needed to make better use of our rented spaces for both proselyting and Church meetings.

There were other problems, also. Removing these and other barriers and fine-tuning the mission became a major thrust during this period.

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