Responding to the Call of a Prophet: More Missionaries Serving, More People Joining the Church

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By Mary Richards, Church News

The number of missionaries serving in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has reached a high mark of around 80,000.

Why a missionary serves is contained in the missionary purpose: to invite others to come unto Christ by helping them receive the restored gospel through faith in Jesus Christ and His Atonement, repentance, baptism and receiving the Holy Ghost.

“When it gets into a person’s heart, it changes what they do and how they look at other people, that every individual out there in the world is a child of God, and we can bring them back home through making covenants,” said Elder W. Mark Bassett, a General Authority Seventy and executive director of the Church’s Missionary Department.

And people are responding to that invitation, said David N. Weidman, managing director of the Missionary Department.

“Every region of the world is seeing an acceleration in the growth of convert baptisms,” Weidman said.

Elder Bassett said that people are not only accepting the invitation to enter into the covenant of baptism but also continuing to progress along the covenant path.

This good news comes at a time when people may feel like they only see bad news — particularly on social media.

“But the reality is more people are coming to the Church of Jesus Christ than we’ve seen in decades,” Elder Bassett said.

New Missionary Preparation Course

Elder Bassett and Weidman joined the Church News podcast on December 3 to discuss missionary work — including announcing new resources.

A new Churchwide missionary preparation course, based on “Preach My Gospel,” will be available in January 2025 for parents, wards, stakes, seminaries, institutes and others to help young men and women prepare to serve missions.

“This course helps teachers teach in an engaging way and will allow the young people to participate. And we really feel great about it and think it’ll be a great resource for our teachers that are in these classes,” Elder Bassett said.

The course can also be done as a self-study program with modules, visual content, go-and-do activities and more.

“The better prepared a missionary is, the faster they can jump in and feel like they’re really being a blessing to others,” Elder Bassett said. “And it helps them to understand, when they go to the missionary training center, what the experience will be like and what they’ll be focusing on.”

Changes to Missionary Work

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Recently, the First Presidency announced that single senior men can now serve full-time missions. And last year, service missionaries were integrated into teaching missions.

This has changed the service missionaries, the teaching missionaries and the culture of the mission overall, Weidman said.

Missionaries used to knock on doors and be invited into homes to teach. Now, they are much more successful in inviting people to church on Sunday.

Elder Bassett said the quicker individuals go to a sacrament meeting, the more engaged they will be in learning. Members are there to welcome them, and they find friends who are their neighbors.

Weidman said when people come to sacrament meeting, the Spirit can convert them and change their hearts.

“We found tremendous, tremendous change in people’s lives just by attending one meeting in the church,” Weidman said.

Activity Sharing

Church members are a key part of the work of love, share, invite, Weidman said, and it doesn’t have to be complicated; it is about sharing beliefs and faith in normal and natural ways.

A new tool announced in the leadership meeting of the October 2024 general conference is called “activity sharing.” When a ward council has an activity, sacrament meeting, or anything already happening, they can put it into their Church calendar, which will then be populated on a website. It makes inviting simple, Elder Bassett said.

For example, a ward in Texas posted a Halloween trunk-or-treat activity that was then shared on social media. Neighbors found the activity and attended. The response was so great that the ward ran out of food. Then, several of those families came to church on Sunday.

Weidman said that in North America, in particular, well over 50% of those who are baptized into the Church come through the use of technology of one type or another, such as social media posts or digital ads in their feeds.

A Remarkable Season

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Elder Bassett said Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ fully engage in the work.

“Recent converts are staying. More people are being baptized, more missionaries are serving, and that’s why we had to create 36 new missions. And now we have more missionaries than we had estimated, and that will likely continue as more people respond to the call of a Prophet. It’s just a blessing to witness.”

Weidman said it is a remarkable season in the history of the Church. ”I think all of us feel, in many ways, that we’re witnessing miracles on a day-in-and-day-out basis.”

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