by In the book, The Highly Effective Missionary, the author admits that you can’t do missionary work only through the member referrals, you need to also fill the hours by meeting new people and contacting.
If you want to have lots of success as a missionary, first, work through the members, strengthening them and doing the member referral game and then when you have free time, which you always will, contact in the best way possible, which is by approaching everyone and contacting with the spirit.
Start walking and start talking to everyone. But in doing contacting, you have to be realistic. Always get the member’s opinions and advice in knowing where to contact. I remember in Yaoundé, we spent a lot of time contacting in this one area. Then our branch mission leader told us that missionaries had already done a lot of contacting in this area and that the people weren’t receptive and he told us we should try contacting in another neighborhood that was more receptive. Imagine if we had asked for this advice earlier how much that could have helped us? So get the members advice because they know more than we do.
With contacting, don’t just do the same things all the time. Try new things everyday, in our mission we did this thing called “les idees creatives” where we thought of new ideas everyday and put them into action in our sectors. We thought of new ideas of who to contact. One idea that we had was to contact all the nice-looking houses. We would go up to all the nice houses made of cement and talk to the people there. It worked and we had many good lessons with prepared people in those houses that we usually overlooked.
I can testify that if you are being obedient and if you are studying the scriptures, new ideas that will help the sector will enter into your mind.
Something that I have learned from experience is that you cannot guess who is going to be prepared. In his book, The Power of Everyday Missionaries, one of Clayton Christensen’s main points in the book is that we cannot predict who is ready or who is prepared. We might even tell ourselves that this person will not appreciate the gospel or that he is not ready. I have also done this on my mission and then those people turn out to be the people who are the most ready to receive the gospel and they amaze me.
For example we were walking to a members house and I saw a guy with long rasta-style hair. I felt prompted to talk to the guy but decided not to because of his hair style so we walked by. While we were in the member’s, the same guy walked into the yard and my companion said hi to him and we started talking. He said that he really wanted to talk to us but that he felt a little scared and he was really excited to talk to us.
We taught the guy and it turns out he was one of the best amis I ever taught on the mission and he even started inviting his friends over to help us teach them what we had just taught him. He could teach the missionary lessons better than we could and even memorized all the brochures we gave him.
So we cannot judge people, we should just extend the gospel message to everyone.
Talk to the people who want to learn more
Sometimes, we focus on the people who just listen but when we meet someone who shows real interest, we ignore them. Make an effort to teach the people who are really interested. We taught a man named Fr Mabonzo. He was interested in our message but after our first lesson, we didn’t teach him for a month. Later, we started teaching him again and he turned out to be super golden and was baptized about a month later.
There was a man named Fr Pavel who would see the missionaries walking by and would wave at them. A few weeks later, the missionaries stopped and talked to him. He was someone who already knew about the Church and was waiting for the missionaries to stop and talk to him.
When someone is looking at you or is waving at you, it is probably a sign that they want to speak to you.
Success flows to the missionary who works hard and who is obedient. That is it. There was this one sector in Douala called “Village” that was known as being the hardest sector in the mission. It was hard, but there was this one missionary named Elder Reeve who served there. He was super hard working, the difficulty of Village didn’t bother him, he was obedient and he worked and during his 3 months there, he baptized someone. He didn’t actually find the person, as we say it happens, “the person fell from heaven” it was a referral named Fr Daniel who was super ready to receive the gospel and he was baptized. Likewise, when I served in that sector, I worked super hard and was obedient, but I didn’t baptize any of the people that I found, instead, the person that I baptized was a young adult that came to church with her family and we baptized her. I didn’t have to invite her to church; she came to Church by herself. Thus through my obedience and hard work, even though I didn’t find this particular person by myself, things came together and we had success.
