Just doing a lot of Home Teaching? Part I

When we received our call to serve in the COCS mission, it said we were to provide “member and leadership support.” We weren’t exactly sure what that meant, but we suspected we would be involved in reactivating less-active members. Someone suggested it meant we would just be doing a lot of Home Teaching.

When we got to the MTC in Provo, they told us that “member and leadership support” is a new way of describing the work of couples who were assigned to proselyte.

Now that we’ve been here in Garden City Kansas (GCK) for four months, it’s probably time to describe more accurately what we are assigned to do. As of mid-May 2011 we have been assigned to do a lot of things, and we are going to describe eight types of work that we are doing.

In order to describe our work and give a little report on it we will break it up into several postings. In the end you will be able to answer the question, “Are we just doing a lot of Home Teaching?”

1. Visiting Less-active members with the purpose of helping them return to activity.

When we had our first Ward-Missionary-Council meeting, the Bishop gave us six membership lists. One was a list of all of the ward members. Another two were the home-teaching assignments for the High Priests and the Elders. The other three included a list of members who were to be contacted each year, a list of those to be contacted each quarter (3 months), and a list of members with “Special Needs.” All three of these lists were further marked with a few “C”’s which stood for “Couple” = us. These were the ones we were to start with. There were several on each of the three lists marked with “C”.

Here is a view of our front door in Garden City Kansas. Notice the pictures of Jesus Christ. This signifies that it is a missionaries' apartment.


We weren’t sure what “Special Needs” meant, but it sounded special, so we made plans to visit with them first. Later we learned that when they were creating the lists, the first members put on this list were handicapped individuals who were to be found in nursing homes, hospitals, hospice centers, etc. As the lists evolved there were some put on the list who live in their own homes, but need special attention. We have continued to work quite extensively with people on this list, and we have grown to love many of them very much.


Here are two great sisters we have been working with. Michelle, on the left, is from our "Special Needs" list, and Delia, on the right, was recently baptized. Michelle has been a member for about a year now and is coming back to church again. We have been working with Delia since before she was baptized.


We had to get busy with a city map to try to figure out where to go to find the members on our lists.

At right is a picture of our city map which is posted on our wall. We are constantly refering to it.

We also had our GPS navigation aid with us to help find our way around. (We had a GPS or “Navi” built into our car in Germany, and we found it so useful that we made it a point to buy our own when we got back home. As long as we have a valid address, it will guide us to the right area.)


This is a photo of our GPS that we also use very often.

GCK has not always had an LDS Bishop as a city planner, so instead of “growing up” in a logical way it sort of just happened. Even after being here four months, we still find the organization of the city confusing. (“Center Street” is on the East side of town, and doesn’t even go through the old town. To get on Highway 40 to go south you must follow the signs to "North 40". Luckily, You can take Main Street to go through the whole town from the South end to the North, but there are bigger streets going those directions. Some of the streets are named with numbers, but the numbers of the streets only correspond with the house numbers in two or three locations, and that appears to be accidental.) We can now go lots of places without aid, but the GPS and several maps are always in the car ready for use.



But we could have done it in another way. While in Germany we got Google Maps installed on our computer, and we could have used that to find locations. In fact we did find a few people’s homes that way. These are pictures from that program showing our apartment and the irrigation circles created by the crop watering system that rotates around the center point so that from the air there is a distinct difference between the part that is watered and that that remains dry.

For contrast, look at the same kind of picture from another part of Kansas where they don't use the same kind of irrigation system. The fields all show square corners there. Google Maps is a helpful program, and it is educational and fun too -- and free. Home schoolers take note!

Our job is to find and visit the people on our lists if possible, and that effort will go on for a long time yet – probably for our whole mission. We got to all of those marked with “C” within the first six weeks, and have moved on to the others on the lists.

The purpose of our visits is to strengthen them and get them to come back to church if possible. Of course, the method is to re-teach the missionary discussions, to bring them back to Christ. Sometimes there is a need for a lesson targeting a unique problem, but we find that the missionary discussions can be adapted to most all needs.