Friday, May 15, 2015
Missionaries Withdawn from Burundi
Missionaries serving in the Democratic Republic of the Congo Lubumbashi Mission report that all young full-time missionaries have been removed from Burundi due to civil unrest and a coup. Plans have been made for the three branches in the country to have branch missionaries continue teaching and baptizing new converts.
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Send a few to The Gambia!
Very sad to hear about the latest unrest in Burundi. On a different note, just read with interest that the Jordan district was divided and the Beirut Lebanon District was created (and the Jerusalem District reorganized), not sure if I'd heard that before: http://m.deseretnews.com/article/865628658/Even-on-the-doorstep-of-war-you-are-not-forgotten.html
I was wondering if anybody had heard of a mission president denying ipads in the mission even though Salt Lake would be sending them. Here in the Raleigh mission, the missionaries told me today that the mission president sent the order back to Salt Lake.
The iPads are about to become VERY important. They will be used to feed contact and progress report data back to at the very least, to start with, the ward mission leader.
See this thread on LDS Tech as to what is going to be available soon to the Ward Mission Leader and at least parts of which eventually will be made available to many members of the ward council. Just found it before finding the above comments.
http://tech.lds.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=112&t=19404
I'm currently serving as a Ward Mission leader in my YSA Ward, and the missionaries here in St George Utah recently got iPad's. Now I can go to lds.org and access the progress report to see which investigators they have in my ward, and what they need help with. I can only see this tool becoming more useful going forward.
I have been reading that iPad formatted record for more than year. I used to copy and paste it to push to others but now I can't . I wish I still could.
The Gosford Australia stake was organised yesterday. It was a dividing of the Newcastle Australia stake with some help from the Baulkham Hills stake.
New Gosford stake includes the Gosford, Ourimbah, Toukley, Toronto, Tuggarah, Normanhurst, Dural wards.
The Newcastle stake now has the Newcatsle, Charlsetown, Cessnock, Maitland, Tamworth wards and the Salt Ash, Taree branches.
I believe the Baulkham Hills stake received a ward from Hebersham Stake to make 6 wards in that stake.
We will see another stake in Brisbane multi stake area in next 12 months. After a few stagnant years in Australian church growth in 2000-2008, its nice to see us getting somewhere.
A return missionary from Orlando Florida Mission was telling us today that her mission had ipads.
A lot of ward and stake leaders talk about how having LDS tools on ipads makes it super easy for missionaries to find member family homes (active, part member, etc) while walking down a street.
They also have a lot more teaching resources, videos clips, etc that are handy to show instantly than in the old leatherbound scripture bag.
Hopefully, the unrest in Burundi will soon settle down.
The iPads sound cool but is there any data that suggests that they increase the number of baptisms or the rate of retention?
There may be no direct correlation between the iPads and baptisms or retention, it's just new ways of doing the same teaching methods and record-keeping, and the record-keeping will be much easier as you know the drill about paper area books.
It also may take some time to fully realize the things that can be done using digital versions of things like area books and using the resources actually pre-loaded onto the iPads, not every missionary that will use the iPads will have had experience with them in the manner that he or she will be using them, so it is going to be up to mission leaders to train missionaries in the most effective use of the iPads and the resources on them.
For the ipads I have heard several anecdoctal stories where they help in reactivation for less actives and generate referrals within part member families.
Hopefully with the end of the coup missionaries can be returned very soon.
Hopefully the issue of ipad use will be addressed in new mission president training.
I can see why there is some hesitancy. However we need to trust missionaries to use these new resources to advance the work of the Lord. We can and should use them to be more effective.
I have to say the video resources and text resouces of an ipad are great. I remember carrying around 3 or 4 video cassetts at a time on my mission so we would have them to show people. We didn't even use DVDs yet. That was back in 2000-2002. Ipads do wonder for a missionaries back. In theory on a bike you can have just a few slim copies of the Book of Mormon and the ipad. Maybe 1 or 2 other items if you are following up on specific requests. Pass along cards in your pockets.
In 1990-91 in Chile we had the old fashioned cassette player and scroll film (forget the name). Each frame would beep to cue the switch. In bigger areas we had access to videos, and chilenos had VCR players at the rate of maybe half... Depended on the area. My second sector I think I got too dependent on videos, but who knows? I suppose I could have been more effective otherwise. Sometimes we would invite non-VCR owners to others' homes. Technology can help but sometimes hurts, just like all tools.
To be sure on the pass-along cards, I wear a four-pocket vest if casual, or a vest with my suit, even more pockets to put them in and sort by type.
Usually I have the business-card size in one pocket, Spanish cards in another, and one of the two bottom pockets of the four-pocket vest have the larger English cards and the other pocket has FamilySearch cards.
With a suit vest, you have two (sometimes three if the type seen in some Asian circles), and the suit coat. The larger FamilySearch cards usually go in the suit coat pockets there
That is fantastic. I wish we could all be better missionaries. And send more of all varieties! India is open yet we only have one (probably small) mission per 600 million people there. We are not ready for mainland China or the Middle East, in general.
In India, the government severely restricts the number of visas it will grant to our church. That is one of the things keeping down growth.
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