Unreported Missionaries
By David O. McKay
(1935)
During a relaxation and general conversation period that followed a missionary meeting held in the amusement room of the fife brothers’ home at New Orleans, I heard Dr. Joseph Fife say that he had never been a missionary. I observed at the time that he and Mrs. Fife were entertaining eight or nine guests besides throwing open to the use of the entire group of missionaries the spacious room in which the conference was held. It occurred to me – as it has many times before in missionary experience – that there are many people in the Church, represented by this young couple, who are performing excellent missionary work of which there is and has been no formal report made on any Church record.
Generally speaking, there are three classes of missionaries in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints:
1. Men and women in organized wards who are called by the General authorities of the church to leave their vocations and to devote two, three, or more years to the preaching of the Gospel in one of the established missions of the world.
2. Men and women outside the organized stakes who are called and set apart by a president of a mission to labor with the regular missionaries. These, too, leave their daily work, pay their own expenses, and serve in every respect just as faithfully as any others in the field. ((Until about World War II – I don’t have the exact date at hand – missionaries who lived outside of stakes really were treated as a different class of missionary to those who lived in the stakes, no matter how long those mission-field missionaries had been members of the Church, and no matter whether they had lived in the stakes all their lives but moved to a mission area just before their service. Such missionaries were called and released by the mission president without their names appearing on the missionary registers in Salt Lake, and they always served in their own mission, not sent to any other part of the world. Few of them were able to go to the temple before missionary service. If you know that your grandfather served as a missionary in, say, the Eastern or Southern States, but you don’t find him listed on the missionary rosters, consider this as a possible explanation – where did he live just prior to his service?))
3. Local missionaries – men and women who retain their employment but who make spare time and devote it to missionary work in their own stake, ward, district or branch.
The labors of all included in these groups are carefully noted and recorded – meetings attended, conversations held, number of tracts distributed, books sold, and so forth, and so forth, are all summarized and each one is given credit for every hour spent and for every accomplishment made. ((President McKay is fudging a little here, in the ambiguity of his terms. The activities of all these classes of missionaries were tabulated in the mission offices for statistical reports sent to Salt Lake City, but except insofar as some mission president’s papers might have been sent to the Church History Library, there is no central record of their individual activities – it’s more a case of being recorded on the ledgers of heaven than on earth. Also, regular missionaries – those from the stakes – were released with a form (the “blue form”) going to Salt Lake City with remarks about that elder’s service, his leadership abilities, his language skills, and other evaluations that general authorities could refer to when they were considering someone for call to leadership or other Church service; missionaries called by the mission president to serve within that mission were released without such a form being sent to Salt Lake. It was an odd hierarchy, to our 21st century eyes.))
But there is a fourth group of missionaries whose names do not appear in the missionary roster, whose hours of service are not counted and whose beneficent efforts are not reported, yet they are found in every district, frequently in several branches in a district in the world:
They are the missionary hosts and hostesses – men and women who are ministers indeed, who in denying themselves for the comfort and happiness of others are true servants of the Christ. As their Master of old, they “go about doing good.”
The labors of these missionaries are unreported, but not unrecorded. In the hearts of the missionaries away from home the kind generous acts of these benefactors find everlasting lodgment. True, too often the appreciation goes unexpressed, but the effects of the kind deeds live on nevertheless. “Our echoes roll from soul to soul and go forever and forever.”
These unreported missionaries are designated variously – “mission mothers,” and “missionary homes” being the most familiar used. Every missionary who may chance to read these lines will have awakened in his or her heart a memory of some dear soul, or fond family, who has spent not weeks or months, but years in this noble service of love and of self-sacrificing devotion.
I met them in Scotland on my first mission and have since met them in every mission I have visited in the world, whether on continents or on the islands of the sea.
My recent brief visit to the Southern States and the Texas mission was no exception. Though my duties permitted me to stop in only three centers, I had ample occasion to note worthy examples.
My first meeting with President [Charles E.] Rowan and the Elders in Louisiana, as indicated above, was in the spacious upper room in the elegant home of the Fife brothers in new Orleans. To these commodious quarters every elder was as free to come and to go as if he were living at his own home. This combined amusement hall and chapel was no more open or more freely accessible than the hospitable hearts of Dr. and Mrs. Joseph Fife, who entertained from seven to nine guests all during conference. No host could be more hospitable, more cheerful, more obligingly kind and thoughtful. Yet Brother Fife say he has not been a missionary! I think he and his charming companion should be numbered among our most efficient missionaries.
In Kelsey I met another family equally deserving of enlistment on the roll of efficient missionaries – Brother and Sister James D. Bailey, who have set apart a room in their comfortable cottage for the express convenience and accommodation of those privileged to partake of their hospitality.
These two families whom I have mentioned and whom I have most recently met are but types of hundreds whose sweet and generous natures reflect the true spirit of peace and brotherhood.
God bless the unreported missionaries the world over whose self-denial and generous devotion to the work contribute so much to the advancement of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
—ooOoo—
I remember some of those unrecorded missionaries. There was Reine Mollard in Grenoble, and the entire family in Marseille whose faces I can see in memory but whose names are not coming to mind, and others. Is there anyone you’d like to pay tribute to as one who made mission life easier?
Your endnotes are great, Ardis. Thanks for them.
This of course foreshadows one of the statements made famous by President McKay two decades later: “Every member a missionary.”
There was a family in Kochi, Japan, who were baptized during my time in that city, who acted like the Fife family mentioned in Pres. McKay’s account–in the months preceding their baptism, we were always welcome in their home, and that hospitality continued for years after I returned from my mission.
And, speaking of local missionaries, there were at least a couple of missionaries who served in my mission (Japan Central/Kobe) who had not been to Hawaii to the temple to receive their endowments, or to Salt Lake City to the Missionary Home for the orientation/training the rest of us received there. I don’t know anything about the details of their calls, though–whether they came locally through the mission president or from the president of the church.
When I was younger, it was not uncommon to hear older members from the Mormon Corridor refer to everything outside the Mormon Corridor as “the mission field”, whether or not stakes were organized there. I wonder if this was an imperfect echo of the distinction in your footnotes.
In Buenos Aires, Vladimir and Elsita Compero were our mission family. They were born in Bolivia (his mother just liked the name Vladimir), and he was educated in Moscow, Russia, USSR. After they were married, they had lived in Australia, then later they were living in Argentina, and working for a Japanese company.
They helped missionary work tremendously everywhere. Later, they served as mission presidents in Ukraine, then he was an area authority. It was a wonderful day when I found them on Facebook!
In the Mexican border town of Nuevo Laredo, there was a family whose name escapes me after 20 years, but their kind and generous spirit lives on in my memory. They invited the missionaries (and whatever investigators we chose to bring) into their home for Family Home Evening every single week, for years. They were not affluent by any any definition, and I hope their service is recorded in the ledgers of heaven.
Also, like Gary said, the endnotes are fantastic. If it’s any point of reference, when my father served in Germany in the early 1970s, he had a German companion who entered the field with no training or endowment. So maybe it continued well beyond the WWII era.
Interesting, Other. It seems that local missionaries in Germany could easily have gone to Switzerland to receive their endowments–unlike the local Japanese missionaries of that same era–early 1970s, who would have had to travel to Hawaii, which would have required passports and perhaps a visa, to say nothing of the cost.
I served in Chile from 1973-75. One of my companions, Elder Jorge Duran Lima had not been endowed. He was from Chile and was a full-time missionary, called and set apart. At that time I think the first temple in Brazil was dedicated but the trip was difficult and expensive.