Just doing a lot of Home Teaching ? Part III

3. Another part of our work is to help the ward missionaries teach the “New Member Lessons” to the new members.

The New Member Lessons are from Lesson 5 in Chapter 3 of Preach My Gospel. When we arrived in GCK there were two ward missionary sisters, and they were able to work with the newly baptized sisters and couples.
These Sisters weren’t able to work alone with newly-baptized men, however, so we were occasionally asked to go with the Ward Missionaries to teach them.

These are two of the missionaries in the Garden City Ward. They are Elders Pass and Buck. Their presentations are a little wooden.



Below is another view of a cemetary memorial to those who died in war. This panel is just one of four. This one lists the local residents who died in the earlier wars up to and including WWI.


Now one of the ward missionaries has been released and called as the Young-Women’s President. We have also had some single men baptized. As a result, over the last six weeks we have become much more involved with the teaching of the New Member Lessons. We first became responsible to teach all of the men, and then we began assisting the remaining ward missionary sister in teaching the women and the families.

The New-Member Lessons begin with a review of the three major lessons that were taught before baptism, and also the various laws of the Gospel. In the MTC, and here under the direction of the zone leaders, we received a lot of instruction about how the lessons are to be taught. They do not ask us to memorize the lesson presentations, but the reality is that most of the missionaries have almost done that. Most of the training meetings are focused on fine-tuning the wording used.
As we do not memorize the lessons at all, we are quite unique in our way of teaching. This is good, because it doesn’t sound repetitious when we re-teach the lessons. In fact, we very often use some PowerPoint presentations that we created while we were in Germany to teach the Restoration and the Plan of Salvation.
We originally created them for an African family we home taught. The family spoke English, so we created them in English and they are still usable here in Kansas. The English used was pretty simple, and that helps here too. When we started using them here, they were combined into one presentation, and we took the time to split it into two. We also added a lot of pictures where they were useful, and that made them more interesting to the less literate level of education that is common here.

After the basic reviews, there are additional lessons about the kinds of service that the new members should be ready to become involved in. One of these is temple work.

4. Because of our experience in Family History work, we have had several opportunities to work with people in that area.

Our involvement in Genealogy really started when we began discussing the family of a member who was in the hospital section of the care center where she lives. She started giving us names, dates, and locations for some of her relatives, and so we started writing them down. By the end of the evening we had a pretty complete three-generation record.


Picture showing Elder Howlett explaining the results of entering this sister's family data into PAF.

A little later the ward planned a trip to the temple so that the new members could do baptisms for the dead. We were asked to visit many new members and try to get them interested in going. In our effort to help them prepare, we helped several of them do some genealogy work to identify family members for whom they could be baptized.

Photo of the LDS Chapel in Dodge City about 40 miles to the East of Garden City. It is a beautiful building housing an English ward and a Spanish Branch.

Below is the Family History Center next door to the Chapel in Dodge. It is the only FHC in this area, and it is only open by appointment.

Unfortunately, the trip wasn’t planned far enough ahead for many people to be able to prepare to go, so the trip was cancelled for lack of participation, but one of those who now had some family names to do work for wanted to go anyway. She found that some of the youth in another ward in the stake were going to go, so she made the arrangement to go with them. She got the work done.

This has become an interesting part of our work. Our ward is now planning for a trip in June or July, and we have some members anxious to go and do work for their family members. The ward has a genealogy specialist to help people, but he is currently in Denver in the hospital. He has been happy that we could help. And we have enjoyed it.