“How LDS missionaries are using social media to reach an evolving audience”

We’ve been somewhat slow, as a people, to take up the social media for spreading the Gospel, but this is the future of the missionary effort:

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865625627/How-LDS-missionaries-are-using-social-media-to-reach-an-evolving-audience.html?pg=all

I’m very excited about it.

I was worried, even as a young missionary years ago in tiny Switzerland, that, given our small numbers, our attention was necessarily confined to middling-to-large towns.  We simply didn’t have enough elders and sisters to visit, even once and in passing, all of the small towns and rural farmsteads and isolated mountain chalets — where, for all we knew, potentially golden converts were waiting, untouched.  In fact, we missed most towns and suburbs of even fairly respectable size.

The social media change all that.  We can reach just about everybody, just about everywhere, at little or no cost.

And ordinary members — even those who, like me, are living in heavily Mormon areas where non-LDS people are rare (and perhaps sometimes feeling a bit besieged) — can be deeply and easily involved in efforts that can readily affect interested non-members in rural western Australia, the Shetland Islands, small Japanese towns, and, yes, high in the Swiss Alps.

I commend to your attention a devotional address given by Bruce L. Olsen at Brigham Young University’s campus in Rexburg, Idaho, back in 2004:

http://www2.byui.edu/Presentations/transcripts/devotionals/2004_03_02_olsen.htm

And the tools now available to all of us are far simpler, more accessible, and more powerful than they were eleven years ago.

There will be no change, ultimately, in the basic missionary technique of teaching people directly, one by one and face to face.  (The scene in the 1856 painting above is still repeated thousands of times each day around the world.)  But tracting is an extraordinary inefficient means of locating people with potential interest, and we can use our full-time missionaries much more effectively than sending them out to get doors closed in their faces and to knock on doors where nobody’s at home.  And ordinary members can help.

There were few alternatives in past generations, but new technologies and means of communication offer enormously better ways of finding those who want to hear the message of the Gospel.