Any reader who has served a mission is familiar with the concept of mission rules, written down, spelled out, printed up, in a hundred ways taught and enforced. There were fewer rules in the old days …
Hyrum W. Valentine, president of the Swiss-German Mission (1912-1916) compiled a list of rules for the elders in his mission (they were all elders, no sisters) in 1914. He handed a printed sheet with these rules to each elder as he arrived in the mission home, and mailed a copy home to parents so they could “check up and co-operate with the elder in seeing that the instructions are carried out.”
Mission Instructions
1. Learn these instructions and apply them.
2. Send in your address promptly.
3. Get out of bed at 7 o’clock in the morning.
4. Begin work the first day and keep it up.
5. Tracting: Standard, two hours per day, daily, minimum.
6. Attend all meetings where you belong.
7. Stick to the law, the testimony, and your own field.
8. When transferred, go direct and at once.
9. be orderly, energetic, and systematic.
10. Counsel with your companions. Argue with no man.
11. Observe strictly to keep “The Word of Wisdom.”
12. Discourage dancing. refrain from it yourself.
13. Act as the escort of no woman – anywhere.
14. Keep the Saints here. Keep still about America.
15. Baptize no married lady, nor children, without the consent of husband and parents respectively.
16. Be dignified men. Familiarity breeds contempt.
17. Expend your own money; save your parents’; spare the mission’s; borrow not the Saints’.
18. Write your folks Saturday. Enclose your week’s report.
19. Study daily: Gospel, Language, Music.
20. Our natural sightseeing is so rich: don’t ask for specials.
21. Keep a record of important things: neatly, accurately.
22. Love this people. Respect their laws. Criticise not their customs.
23. Fight your weaknesses: they are your enemies.
24. Keep your expenses within twenty dollars per month.
P.S. Set up your own ideal and keep it before you.
“Study daily: Music” surpised me. Also, “Familiarity breeds contempt” sounds weird.
Only 2 hours of tracting daily!? What a cushy mission … 🙂
In 1914, the missionaries were already being told not to encourage immigration to Utah. Very interesting.
Yes. Imagine that. Encouraging music study as an integral part of one’s responsibility as a missionary!
“Familiarity breeds contempt” is an ancient saying, the moral in Aesop’s fable about the lion and the fox. Of course, Mark Twain’s version is amusing in its own way: “Familiarity breeds contempt–and children.”
They look like good, concise, common sense sort of rules.
“20. Our natural sightseeing is so rich: don’t ask for specials.” This after the sixteenth missionary had asked for permission to run to Paris or London?
And, funny thing; two of the Utah slaves married men named Valentine, and in the process of writing a footnote this morning cautioning people not to confuse these two men with Hyrum’s family, I had just pulled up a book chapter I wrote on Rose Ellen Valentine, not only the beloved wife of the mission president and head of the Relief Society in the mission, but Utah’s first woman dentist. So many great stories about the Valentines’ missionary service during the war.
Ditto what Aaron said–interesting to see the gathering being redefined.
The rules seem so Germanically terse that I have to keep reminding myself that the author was an American.
“16. Be dignified men. Familiarity breeds contempt.”
This is why in Spanish speaking missions, the missionaries must use the formal grammar with each other. People thought it was so weird that we would be so distant even with our companions that we obviously loved and shared everything with. But losing that bit of formality would give footing (I have to think of this argument with the Spanish wording still) to to lack of respect. The more formal dress, title and language, made a big difference.
“Familiarity breeds contempt.” That must be why we use intimate forms of address, like “Brother” and “Sister”, or even “thee” and “thou.” Funny how we’ve decided to make all those signs of intimacy into formalities instead.
I’d much rather be “Brother Mike” than “Brother [lastname]”, seeing as how I don’t call my siblings by their last names…
This is a casual age, where people wear flipflops and shorts to wedding receptions, call everybody by her first name whether presidential candidate or elderly neighbor, and serve funeral luncheons on paper plates with plastic spoons. We don’t even shake hands at Church anymore, and object — loudly and one degree short of scornfully — at the request to wear white shirts at the sacrament table.
Consider “familiarity” in speech and dress and behavior in another age when formality was the expectation. An elder’s calling a woman “Sophie” instead of “Miss Jones,” or laughing quietly or whispering together while a lecturer was speaking, would be a far greater violation of norms in that era than in ours, and teasing and clowning around between elders and anybody else would quickly destroy respect — no?
I was recently reading about Jessie Benton Fremont who, at one point, went to President Lincoln in the White House and scolded him over his treatment of her husband. Apparently one rumor that got out that she had gone so far as to address the president as Abraham. The writer noted that anyone who publicly referred to her husband as Mr. Fremont (or Governor or whatever his current title was) and her father as Senator Benton, would be very unlikely to address the President of the US by his first name.
I can’t vouch for what she said in the White House, but I have read some of her writings, and she was always very formal when referring to family members.
Leave out the the “discourage dancing” part of #12, and you’ve got a good set of rules for missions of the present day.
And when i was a full-time missionary (in Germany and Austria), the few actual arguments i had with other missionaries generally centered around my wanting to follow #22 and them not wanting to (which wasn’t one of our rules, but i wish it had been).