by In the book, The Highly Effective Missionary, the author admits that you can’t do missionary work only through the members, you need to also fill the hours by meeting new people and contacting.
I have learned from experience that the best way to do contacting is by having the Spirit and by contacting everyone everywhere.
Something that I have learned from experience is that you cannot guess who is going to be ready. 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.
So we cannot judge people, we should just extend the gospel message to everyone.
If you want to be a success missionary first, work through the members, then when you have free time, which you always will, contact in the best way possible, which is approaching everyone and contacting with the spirit as taught in this talk.
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 baptize about a month later.
What if someone walked up to you and expressed interest or mentioned something about the church and then you walked away and ignored it? Instead, talk to the person.
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 you see someone wave at you, will you talk to them or will you keep walking?
When someone is looking at you or is waving at you, it is probably a sign that they want to speak to you.
In doing contacting, you have to be realistic. You shouldn’t contact somewhere that is super far away. 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.
In some areas like Brazzaville you can contact every house in a street and meet awesome prepared people that way. In places like Cameroon where the sectors are so big it’s maybe better to try more creative ways of contacting. Contacting with the spirit is a must in hard places. You can do rote contacting, contacting each house in a row and have tons of success that way in Congo though if you have the time. My comp and I would split off with the members and he would teach our lessons for the day while I would just co fact for 6 hours. One week we taught 21 new investigators and many of them came to church and progressed with us. In Congo, don’t leave a single house unturned. In my sector we would pass this one house all the time without thinking about, it was just another house on our way up to other rendez-vouses. After around 5 months in that sector, I finally approached the people in the house. The father of the house was super interested in the gospel. He loved the Book of Mormon and he came to church 3 times before I left.
In contacting, don’t just do the same things all the time. Try new things everyday, in our mission we did this thing 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!
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.
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 know as being the hardest sector in the mission. it was hard, but there was this one missionary named Elder Reeve who served their. 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.
