This week was BUSY. I’m beginning to think I’ll be saying that about every week though… so maybe it was just normal!
Monday & Tuesday we prepared for our first zone conferences. We have 6 zones in our mission, so we split them up into 3 groups of 2 zones each and held the conferences on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday this week. Zone Conferences are held once every 6 weeks - or once a transfer. Preparing for them this week reminded me of the “State of the Company” meetings I would have quarterly while working at Ortho Development, which were always stressful and busy to prepare. But now, I have to do them twice as often! In these meetings, we train and instruct the missionaries on a variety of things - I’ll outline our agenda below.
Agenda for Zone Conference:
We started at 10am by singing a hymn, saying a prayer and reciting our missionary purpose together. Monica spoke first with the help of a translator about our missionary purpose and the temple. She focused on how helping people go to the temple really is the end goal of missionary work. After baptism, recent converts can go to the temple to perform baptisms vicariously for individuals that have passed away without being baptized. After a year, they can then choose to make more covenants with God through the endowment and sealing ordinances (to read more about temple ordinances, click this link).
Next, we watched a video from Sister Amy Wright’s address at our mission leader seminar from June (Sister Wright is a member of the Primary General Presidency). She taught similar things to Monica about inviting and helping others come closer to Christ through making covenants in the temple. We also clarified our temple attendance policy with the missionaries - They have permission to attend the temple once every 3 months. We are blessed to have the Santiago temple very close to us in our mission, but we noticed that many had not been taking advantage of the opportunity to go, so we emphasized the importance of attending the temple and how it will help them be a more effective missionary.
Then, we invited 2 missionaries, one from each zone in attendance, who were recent converts to share their personal experience of joining the church. Some of them have been members for just over a year, and others for a little longer. They all shared powerful testimonies and experiences with us about how they came to know the church and believe in the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Next, we transitioned with a short Kahoot quiz titled “How well do you know Preach My Gospel.” They had to answer 13 questions that came from the manual for missionary work, Preach My Gospel, and they got points for getting the right answer and being the quickest to answer. We learned quickly that missionaries love being entertained by these short, fun, and competitive quizzes!
Elder and Sister Wright, our senior couple assigned to a member-leader support (MLS) role here in the mission, took the next segment. Their primary responsibility in Chile is to work with the local church leaders to help people come back to church, but they also get the chance to go out and teach with the younger missionaries on occasion. Recently they have observed that as missionaries are teaching people about prayer, they often forget that we pray in a different way than other religions, so many may be nervous or unfamiliar with our prayers at the beginning. They discussed ways to simplify our teaching and gave the missionaries time to practice with each other.
Then they got a snack break, where they had time to relax and mingle. We then took some group photos with each zone.
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| Zone: San Miguel |
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| Zone: Los Aviadores |
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| Zone: San Bernardo |
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| Zone: La Cisterna |
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| Zone: Los Alerces |
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| Zone: Buin |
Next up, we talked about how to keep their apartments clean & well maintained. We have a Chilean couple here that oversees the repairs of our missionaries’ apartments - Hermana Paz, the wife, has a very big, fun personality and she gave an excellent presentation about how to take better care of their apartments. Previously they were told to deep clean their apartments once every 6 weeks, but we helped them understand that there are things they should do every day, every week and every month to keep a clean house.
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| Hermana Bartholomew & Hermana Paz |
Our APs then taught about inviting people to attend our church meetings. One of the main things I’ve been trying to emphasize since arriving here is that we shouldn’t just ask people to come to church, but rather focus on how coming to church will allow them to worship Jesus Christ. The main reason we go to church is to partake of the sacrament and worship Christ together. So again, they had the opportunity to practice extending an invitation for someone to come to church with a greater emphasis on Christ.
I was the last speaker of the day, and decided to focus my presentation on the culture of our mission. In our short time here, we’ve seen that the culture is good overall, but we can make it great and more powerful. We talked about 4 pillars or areas of focus that can help us strengthen and uplift our mission culture:
1. Live our missionary purpose
2. Having faith to baptize
3. Expect miracles
4. Work with diligence
We ended with lunch catered by a group of members that own a catering company that specializes in southern, US style BBQ. It was delicious, and a big hit with the missionaries.
I think this was easily my favorite week of the mission so far. Just being with all our missionaries and getting to learn and grow together is an opportunity we will always cherish.
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| Elder & Sister Clark (center) celebrated their anniversary with us during zone conferences. All the love from the missionaries! |
One quick funny story… on Wednesday during our zone conference, as the APs were teaching, I heard some commotion coming from outside the church building. As I walked down to see what was going on, through the window I saw a woman who had undressed completely and was making a lot of noise to try to get attention. I walked around the back to see what was going on, and by the time I got over there the caterers had already chatted with her and convinced her to put her clothes back on. She was high on drugs, and shared with us a little bit about her difficult life and background. We were able to give her some food and water, and call a friend to come pick her up. It was quite the shocking experience, but we tried to minister to her as the Savior would in that moment.
This week we had the chance to go to dinner with Elder Joaquin Costa and his wife Renee from Argentina. He serves as the area president over the south america south area of the church which includes the countries of Chile, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay. They both speak fluent English, and were so incredibly kind. They gave us some great advice, and especially encouraged us to not stress about the language, so that was comforting to hear for both Monica and I.
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| Dinner with Elder & Sister Costa |
Friday evening, we had the chance to go to the temple again with 6 of our elders that will be finishing their mission this upcoming transfer (in about 2 weeks). It was great being with them and our amazing senior missionaries too.
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| Hermana Bensfield, Hermana & Elder Clark, Elder Iverson, E. Hoch, E. Ditto, Hermana & President Bartholomew, E. Nelson, E. Juad, E. Hawley, Hermana & Elder Wright |
I was very worn out by the end of the week. Ever since we arrived in Chile we have been going non-stop with so many new things thrown our way each day. We’ve been so busy that most days, I don’t go to sleep until 1 or 2am, so I’ve been averaging about 4-5 hours of sleep per night. Well, as you can imagine, it all finally caught up to me and I was grateful to have Saturday to catch up on some much needed rest. We’ve been so blessed each day to have enough energy to get through what we’ve had on our plates, and we’re hoping as we continue to get into a rhythm here, things will feel more manageable.
On Sunday we attended a ward conference in San Bernardo for the Portales 2 ward. There was a sweet 8 year old boy in that ward that led the music. His dream is to be the chorister for the Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square someday. Seeing his joy over his assignment to help lead the music was infectious!
Excited to see what next week brings!
