I understand that as a church, we love our missionaries. I love missionaries too – as individual sweet humans trying to do good in the world in the best way they know how. But the missionary program itself is feeling less inspired as a whole to me as I get older.

Today I was in a class at my gym. At the end two ladies were catching up as we cleaned and put away our barbells. One asked the other how her daughter was doing, who got back from a mission last year. The mom of the daughter rolled her eyes and said, “Well, she’s having a “faith crisis” I guess.”

Friend: “Oh, well… that’s okay. She has a strong testimony, she’ll get over it. She’s just got to figure it all out for herself.”

Mom, with irritation/frustration/hopelessness (not totally sure) in her voice: “I know. I think it’s just like, the popular thing to do these days.”

My thoughts:

1. She’s probably not going to “get over” a faith crisis. It’s usually a permanent change in belief. She may or may not choose to remain an active Latter-day Saint after processing this experience, but the mom should really be preparing herself for an adult daughter whose choices in life don’t mirror her own (and that’s okay!).

2. Why is this the only thing you tell people when they ask about your daughter? Is she going to school? Is she working somewhere interesting? Has she picked up a new hobby or made a new friend or gone somewhere fun? All are more interesting answers than what her particular beliefs in a religion that none of us actually know is the correct one either (otherwise we wouldn’t need faith in it!).

3. If the daughter just got home from a mission, that means she spent 18 months trying to instigate a “faith crisis” in every single person she met so they would drop their current beliefs and join her church instead. That daughter caused her investigators’ parents to feel upset, just like her own mother is feeling now. This feels like karma.

I wondered why the gym conversation snippet bothered me so much, and I think it’s because my own parents are both converts. My mom grew up Methodist in North Carolina, had a Mormon roommate in college (at a Methodist college, even), met the sister missionaries, joined the church and moved across the country to Utah to be near other members. Her family was devastated. It was probably embarrassing for them to have a daughter join such a weird religion, they believed they were losing her eternal soul to a cult, and moving so far away meant they would never be very involved in her life again.

And they weren’t! They didn’t come to her wedding in the Ogden Temple (why travel to Utah when they weren’t even allowed to attend the marriage, and my parents didn’t have a reception or celebration outside of the sealing ceremony). I actually wrote about this experience RIGHT HERE.

My sister and I only met my aunt, cousin and grandma on that side of the family a couple times growing up. I honestly barely know them. I liked their fun personalities when we did interact, but could always feel the barrier between us (they thought we were being raised in a weird Utah cult, and we thought they were sinners living empty lives because of the coffee pot in their kitchen). We spent slightly more time with my dad’s side of the family, but not much. We were the isolated Mormons in Utah, far away from them as well (they were in California).

My sister and I graduated from college, both got married in the temple and started our families. We’re happy, but it never occurred to us that we didn’t have extended family involved in our lives in any way. Sometimes I’d think, “It’s great! I don’t have to go to a million weddings and baby showers and buy all those gifts that people with huge Mormon families have to.” But maybe that would’ve been fun. I don’t know because those relationships literally don’t exist.

As a young person I always viewed the missionaries coming into my parents’ lives as a miraculous blessing, but as I’ve got older I can see the painful fragmented family relationships that never recovered on both sides. To be fair, my mom did have a tense relationship with her family before joining the LDS church. I think that’s part of the main appeal of baptism to her at that time – it was a way to stick it to her Methodist upbringing. That tense relationship might have healed though, but instead it was permanently destroyed when she moved to Utah.

Sitting in Sacrament Meeting over the years I’ve heard homecoming talks that made me very uncomfortable. Whenever a story is shared about an investigator who joined the church despite the adversary making it very difficult to do so, I imagine heartbroken parents, screaming fights, divorces, lost friends, and permanent changes to family relationships.

So when I heard the mother at the gym bemoaning her returned missionary daughter’s faith crisis, it sounded hypocritical. Why was she just fine with her own daughter trying to cause a faith crisis in everyone she met for a year and a half, but now that the daughter’s the one changing her own mind about her past beliefs it’s suddenly upsetting?

I think my own experience with my convert mother is coming into play here, because I’ve felt pain and hurt with her disappointment in my unorthodox religious behavior over the years. I was part of Ordain Women, I volunteer at Pride Festivals, and I wear tank tops to the gym. I am not the devout member she would prefer I be.

But why would I be? She was my example! She was raised in a faith system that didn’t work for her, so she took control of her activity and beliefs and radically changed them to fit her needs. I am only following in her footsteps.

Having experienced the intense strain on family relationships that a change in religious belief causes (both between my parents and their families, and myself and my parents), I can’t see missionary work as always a good thing.

If I were in charge of the missionary program, I would overhaul it completely. No more proselyting missions! I would take the hundreds of billions the church has and set up hospitals, care facilities for elderly people who can’t afford assistance, homeless shelters, soup kitchens, childcare facilities for working parents, etc, etc… and I would staff those with the full time missionaries. They would spend their time serving others and nothing else. Then *if* someone requested to learn more about the church, they could take the missionary discussions – from the ward missionaries of the ward they’d be baptized into.

I honestly think this would be great for the young missionaries, who could focus on just helping others and not numbers or statistics or how many people made it to a baptismal font. Parents would feel great about what their kids were doing. It would be fantastic PR for the church as a whole, and instead of actively avoiding missionaries (like most members of the general public do) they would begin to love seeing those kids out in their community. They’d know they were there only to serve and wouldn’t try to preach to them anything unless they asked for it. (In fact, saying “Called to Serve” would finally be an accurate statement – right now it is more accurately described as “Called to Proselyte” – with some service on the side.) Family members of new converts would be less likely to feel upset about them joining a new church because they would see its public face in the community providing huge quantities of charitable service.

Passing the actual missionary discussions on to the ward missionaries would also mean the new converts get a chance to meet people in the ward and make friends before getting baptized and attending meetings with them. They wouldn’t feel alone or abandoned when their missionaries transferred to their next assignment.

When we talk about the missionary program and the successful baptisms, we have to acknowledge that in addition to great stories for homecoming talks, we are creating difficulty and pain for the families our converts are coming from. Some (like mine) will never recover, and family relationships will be lost permanently. The sister missionaries who baptized my mom probably talked about their “golden convert” when they got home, unaware that the trauma of that baptism would reverberate through generations of her family.

If we aren’t going to acknowledge that very real pain our missionaries cause other families throughout the world as we proselytize to their doorsteps, we need to stop complaining about our own sadness when someone we love has a faith crisis and leaves the LDS church. It’s either okay for people to change their beliefs to match their own circumstances and desires in life, or everyone needs to stick with the religious system they were born into. We can’t have it both ways.