You probably haven't heard, and I actually just found out Tuesday evening after devotional with Elder Hinckley (he looks/sounds so much like President Hinckley!) that, come this Summer, I will no longer be serving in the Switzerland Zurich mission--we will now be serving in the Muenchen (Munich)/Oesterreich mission. Switzerland has been having too many issues with visas and the Church has decided to just merge the Zurich and Munich missions. It's bittersweet. Our mission now covers the southern half of Germany, the majority of Switzerland, and all of Austria. I fear that the work in Switzerland will slow down because we won't be there long enough to really connect with investigators. However, the Lord knows all and things will work out.
The 13 February 2010 Church News reported:
Combine the Switzerland Zurich Mission with the Germany Munich/Austria Mission, and portions of the Germany Frankfurt Mission. The resulting mission will be named the Alpine German-Speaking Mission, with headquarters in Munich.
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The five German-speaking missions will soon be merged into three missions. The Frankfurt mission will take a zone from each of the other existing missions. The rest of the Hamburg mission will then be merged with the Berlin mission and the Swiss and Munich/Austria missions will merge to make the German-speaking Alpine mission.
This is not a bad thing, but a great thing as the work in Germany is becoming more established and putting more onto the members. Last year the German-speaking missions had a combined 300 fewer missionaries and baptism rates jumped up by 20%. Elder Kopischke, currently the area president, has expressed that he anticipates those baptismal dates to continue rising as the missions merge.
The sentiments of Elder Kopischke are shared by Elder Texiera and Elder Uchtdorf, as expressed in the last stake conference broadcast to all German-speaking stakes. They commented that the work in Germany/Austria/Switzerland was about to really take off and Elder Uchtdorf dedicated the land for missionary work. There are many prophecies that still have to be fulfilled-- prophecies of dozens of temples, thousands of wards and hundreds of stakes-- it sounds like the work will continue to accelerate in that direction.
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