Wednesday, April 2, 2008

Missionary Letters--Rome Italy

We just came up with a new plan to help our members do missionary work. We made a jigsaw puzzle and are giving them a piece every week with a different assignment in preach my gospel to read and an invite to put it into practice. It will last 7 weeks and in the end they will have 7 habits of a successful member missionary. This week we had them read about the power of bearing personal testimony in chapter 11 and the role of members in missionary work in ch 9. The invite is to bear personal testimony about prophets and invite someone to general conference. The habit they are developing is to be ready to bear testimony to anyone and to avoid the mindset that certain people would not be interested. Our goal is to invite the branch president to support this program and at the end of it when all of the members have learned how Preach My Gospel teaches them to do missionary work to have the branch make their own branch mission program.

One time I heard that one thing you can do to really have an impact on where you serve is to not just do good missionary work but help the members to be better missionaries by teaching them. Anyways it is a lot of work but I have a lot of hope that it can work if we can just get the trust and support of the leaders in our ward.

2 comments:

Trafford R. Cole said...

It sounds like an interesting initiative.
Often it is not because members don't know the procedures for member missionary work that impedes them from participating, but rather they are discouraged from too many false hopes and disappointments from the past. As Yeats said: "Teaching is not the filling of the pail, but the lighting of a fire." Maybe more than teach them you need to ispire them.
Do you know Elder Cole in Rome?

Dr. B said...

The following is an email response from the missionary in Rome Italy:

That is so funny that A. Coles dad posted on your blog. He is in my district so we are together every Monday for DDM and other random times like to watch conference etc. He is an awesome missionary and it doesn't hurt that he is an native Italian speaker lol.