Full-Time Missionary Service

A Latter-day Saint mission is not a gap year and it is not chosen. A young man of eighteen or a young woman of nineteen submits papers to the church, and a letter arrives assigning a place, which may be the next state or a country whose language the missionary does not speak. The assignment is not negotiable and is understood as revelatory rather than administrative. Men serve two years and women eighteen months, and the cost is borne by the missionary or the family, at a flat rate that is the same for everyone regardless of where they are sent, so that a mission to Japan costs a family no more than a mission to Idaho.

Those sent abroad spend several weeks at a missionary training centre learning the language, and the standard of fluency reached in that time is high enough that the United States government and private employers have long treated returned missionaries as a language pool. Missionaries travel in pairs called companionships, assigned rather than chosen and changed every few months, and are almost never alone.

The daily rule is strict and has changed only at the edges. Missionaries rise early, study, work through the day, and keep a schedule; they do not date, do not watch television or films, use the internet only for church purposes, and until recently telephoned home twice a year, a limit relaxed in 2019 to a weekly call. They wear formal dress and a black name badge carrying the name of the church, which is why the two young men on a doorstep are the image most people outside the movement carry of it.

Missionary service shapes the movement at least as much as it shapes anyone it converts. About sixty thousand missionaries are in the field at any time, and the great majority of them return to ordinary life having spent two years speaking about their religion every day to strangers, most of whom were not interested. A returned missionary is fluent in a language, accustomed to rejection, trained in a fixed daily discipline and known in a congregation as someone who has done the thing everyone is expected to do. It functions as the movement's rite of passage into adult standing, and it does so more effectively than any ordinance.

The age change of October 2012 shows how much rests on it. Lowering the minimum age from nineteen to eighteen for men and from twenty-one to nineteen for women was presented as an administrative adjustment; it nearly doubled the missionary force within a year, and the number of women serving rose several times over, because the old age of twenty-one had fallen in the middle of the years when Latter-day Saint women typically married. The consequence was a generation of women with mission experience entering congregational leadership, which is a structural change to the church that no doctrinal statement announced.

The practice has costs the church has acknowledged. Missionaries are young, far from home, working long hours under pressure to produce results, and the mental health of missionaries has been the subject of open discussion and of changes to policy on rest, on contact with home and on returning early without stigma.