November 2, 2010

This week I was able to go over to Vancouver again for another leadership conference. It was great and I learned a lot. One of the rules we came up with there for the mission is that we never baptize a problem for a bishop. That crosses out so much of the gray area of many questions that come my way as to whether one is worthy to be baptized.

One thing I've noticed in the mission as I have been learning more is that there is a lot of filtering that goes on. I'll explain what I mean. For instance, there are these eight new lessons that have come out that teach us to be better teachers and that is largely the reason for all these conferences I've been going to...but with these new lessons the leadership of the mission was given copies of them and told to teach the other missionaries in their zones and districts about them. Well, around come interviews and President Greer finds out that few and far between is the missionary that knows the eight lessons, so he told us if he could do it differently he would have given every missionary in the mission their own copies of the lessons from the start. I don't know why, but for some reason when we relay something to others as missionaries we see the need to disguise it and present it in a clever way, but something straight from the Prophet (which this is) doesn't need disguising...it's fine the way he said it, but that is not to say that you shouldn't stress the points that those you are teaching need to learn. This is just an example of one thing...there are others, but this is the latest. The best way for a missionary to be most effective is to be well informed, among other things.

Well, last week our zone (4 companionships) had 15 people on date, which at the time was the most in the mission. As it is, 5 were baptized on Saturday. We are also the smallest zone in the mission so President Greer is sending in another companionship this coming transfer to cover one of the extra wards. So that will be exciting 'cause we will then have two teams of 5 to play basketball on p-day!

Love y'all,
Elder Schroeder
Reported by Mom