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Remembering “missionary bootcamp”

Remembering “missionary bootcamp”

Last updated on: March 1, 2023 at 6:42 pm by Dan Peterson

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Remembering “missionary bootcamp” 2023-03-01T18:42:06-07:00 Dan Peterson

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Sidney Rigdon (1793-1876)
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I had an enjoyable time this afternoon interviewing Tom Alexander on camera for our new “Six Days in August” film project. I’ve already interviewed Jim Allen for the effort, so we’ve now got some solid material “in the can,” as we, umm, cinéastes like to put it. It’s good to be getting underway!

If you would like to support the project, we would welcome your help. Please go to the donation area of the Interpreter website and be sure (if it’s actually your intention) to indicate that your contribution should go to the “Six Days in August” undertaking. Or, alternatively, please contact me directly.

In other Interpreter Foundation news: As he regularly does, Jonn Claybaugh has put up a short set of notes for families, students, and teachers of the “Come, Follow Me” curriculum:

Come, Follow Me — New Testament Study and Teaching Helps: Lesson 11, March 6 — 12: Matthew 9-10; Mark 5; Luke 9 — “These Twelve Jesus Sent Forth”

Also now available is this contribution from the Interpreter Radio Show:

The New Testament in Context Lesson 11: “These Twelve Jesus Sent Forth”

For the 12 February 2023 Come, Follow Me segment of the Interpreter Radio Show, Terry Hutchinson, John Gee, and Kevin Christensen discussed New Testament lesson 11, “These Twelve Jesus Sent Forth,” covering Matthew 9–10, Mark 5, and Luke 9. The other segments of the January 8 radio show can be accessed at https://interpreterfoundation.org/interpreter-radio-show-february-12-2023.

The Interpreter Radio Show can be heard live on Sunday evenings between 7 PM and 9 PM (MDT), on K-TALK, AM 1640. You can also listen live on the Internet at ktalkmedia.com.

This painting, by Casey Childs, used to hang in the foyer of the St. George Utah Temple, which is currently undergoing major renovation. It depicts President Brigham Young (left), late in his life, going over the records of the ordinances performed thus far in the temple with Elder Wilford Woodruff of the Council of the Twelve, who was the first president of the St. George Utah Temple and who would eventually serve as the fourth president and prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The modern work of redeeming the dead really got underway in the St. George Temple. (I found the painting on Pinterest, and hope that I’m committing no major offense against copyright by posting it here. If so, I apologize and will happily take it down.)

Are you aware of the upcoming Wilford Woodruff Papers Foundation Conference? It’s coming up this Saturday. Online registration closes tonight, but registration will also be possible on Saturday at the conference venue.

I’m going to be there for at least a portion of the day and perhaps all day. Which is hard for me, because I’m also really, really interested in RootsTech 2023, which commences on Thursday and runs through Saturday. The “spirit of Elijah” of which Latter-day Saints speak — the driving, urgent push to do family history — has been working on me for the last year or two, and I’ve never been able to be involved in RootsTech before.

Anyway, there are some great things coming up later this week. Too many, in a way! But that’s a good problem.

Amanda Knight Hall in the evening. This image comes from the Amanda Knight Hall webpage, so I hope they’ll permit my borrowing it. In my defense, I believe that Sister Knight is a relative of mine — admittedly, a rather distant one.

You might find this interesting, from the BBC: “Inside the UK’s Mormon missionary bootcamp”

The English sister missionary featured in the documentary was disappointed by her “domestic” mission call. She had hoped for something exotic, foreign, rather than her own native Britain.

Which got me to thinking: My call was to the Switzerland Zürich Mission, exactly where I had wanted to serve. (More on that later, perhaps.) I still remember well my own experiences in the old Language Training Mission (LTM) in Provo. Missionaries assigned to German-speaking nations were housed in Amanda Knight Hall, which was already old but which still stands there today on the corner of Eighth North and University Avenue. It wasn’t much inside, but I still really like its exterior and I worry that, someday, somebody will knock it down in order to build some nondescript modern box in its place. (Many years later, as low-priority University space, it was given over for a time in the nineties to house the then-still-minimal offices of the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies.)

I remember the first full day in the LTM: I thought that I would go mad. I’m a studious sort, but we had something like eleven and a half or twelve hours of classroom instruction, which consisted almost entirely of extremely repetitive verb conjugations and pronoun drills. It was mind-numbingly boring; the time passed like a winter glacier during an ice age. I remember looking out the window, where I could see ordinary people, non-missionaries, civilians, who were walking along the sidewalk to and from classes on campus up above on the hill. I remember fantasizing about jumping through that window and running down the street toward freedom. But those repetitious drills were extraordinarily effective. The verb conjugations became automatic, and within a remarkably short time I actually found myself dreaming in German.

By not too many days into my roughly two-month stay in the LTM, I had more or less adapted to the routine and it wasn’t nearly so oppressive. Still, I was eager to get out. I remember being told once by my district leader, who was no “older” in the LTM than I was, that, if I couldn’t stand the Language Training Mission, I would be totally unable to endure being actually out in the field.

An aside: My district leader didn’t regard me as a very good missionary. He didn’t think I was serious enough. (He told me so.) Weeks later, a couple of us were summoned to walk over to the Knight-Mangum Hall office of the LTM president, Terrence Hansen. The German-language zone leader was headed out into the field, so it was presumed that the missionary that I walked over with would be called to replace him and that I was simply his temporary companion for the walk over and back. Upon our return, my district leader walked up to the other missionary and congratulated him on his call as zone leader. He shook his head in the negative and pointed to me. Elder District Leader — I still remember his name but I won’t reveal it; he’s become a prominent non-General-Authority Church leader in his area and is undoubtedly a good guy — turned to me with an incredulous look on his face and said “You?” I shouldn’t have, but I must admit that I took real and quite unrighteous pleasure in that reaction.

Anyway, I knew that I would like being out in the field much better than being cooped up in the Language Training Mission, superb linguistic experience that it was. And I was right.

(I’ll probably revisit my time in the Language Training Mission sometime in the relatively near future.)

The Hale Centre Theatre, in Sandy, Utah, is (as I’ve often said before) a local, state, and regional treasure. (Photo from the Hale Centre Theatre website)

A group of seven of us went out last night for dinner and then to the Hale Centre Theatre, where we watched a performance of See How They Run. I am not, I must confess, a big fan of Olive Garden, but I do really enjoy their salad and soup entree. (There. Since I’ve mentioned a dinner of soup and salad, my admirers over at the Peterson Obsession Board can now mark this blog entry down as one that focused on food. My only other recurring theme here, of course, is dishonest personal smears of people who don’t share my religious views.) And I enjoy going out with friends — not least because of the sheer astonishing fact that, wicked as the POB holds me to be, I even have any.

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies