Almost everything in life has deadlines: gas bills, phone bills, taxes, college applications, food expirations and so on. We create deadlines because without them most of us would never get around to finishing what we start.Member missionary efforts have never imposed deadlines. As a result, most of us are not engaged in finding people for full-time missionaries to teach. Most of us want to be goo ...

When people study the gospel with full-time missionaries, we ask them to do a lot of new things. We invite them to pray, to read the Book of Mormon, to come to church and so on.If your experiences are anything like ours, many of those you work with don’t do the things they said they would do. It is our experience that people’s failure to follow through does not always indicate a lack of intere ...

Be courageous and ask people directly, “How are you praying, and what are you saying in your prayers?”Cheerfully walk them through a prayer. Invite them to pray out loud, to express gratitude to God and to discuss with Him decisions they are considering. Encourage them to follow Amulek’s counsel and pray about everything that is important to them (see Alma 34:17-27).Consider praying out loud ...

In Preach My Gospel, missionaries are taught to start scripture study with questions so they can “liken all scriptures unto ” (1 Nephi 19:23-24). If it is good for missionaries to study this way, it is good for people learning the gospel to study this way.Start by asking your friends to come to lessons with a list of questions about religion to which they’ve not been able to find satisfactor ...

When we invite people to come to church with us, consider church attendance is one part of what we are really asking them to do.God’s commandment is to keep the Sabbath day holy.If we only invite people to church, they may not know how to keep the rest of the day holy. Before and after church services, they may engage in activities that are unholy, stunting their progress toward conversion.Long ...

Many of us have read stories of large groups of people joining the Church, whether from the early 1800s when members like Wilford Woodruff converted near entire townships, or, in later times, when pioneer members in Ghana brought thousands into the Church even before it was officially established there.Often the record of these events shows us what happened but offers less insight about how the wo ...

The Lord promised He would build the kingdom on the shoulders of the simple and weak:“The weak things of the world shall come forth and break down the mighty and strong ones … that mine everlasting covenant might be established; that the fulness of my gospel might be proclaimed by the weak and the simple unto the ends of the world, and before kings and rulers” (D&C 1:19-24).From 1991 to ...

President Gordon B. Hinckley counseled that new converts need friends, responsibility and nourishment in the good word of God.A milkman from Maine and his wife introduced the gospel to many families and neighbors. After teaching them the gospel, the milkman, who was the bishop of his ward, called the newly converted families to share the gospel with other families. He also called the newly convert ...

“If a man have an hundred sheep, and one of them be gone astray, doth he not leave the ninety and nine, and goeth into the mountains, and seeketh that which is gone astray?” (Matthew 18:12).A band of twelve members from Malden, Massachusetts gathered weekly after church to ask: “Who could have been here today that didn’t come?” As they brought new people in, the location of this after-ch ...

A young woman named Susan Fulcher said to herself, “missionary work is just loving people, and it's easy to love!”Meet new people, and be curious. When she moved into a new ward in Cambridge, she made loving the members of that ward a top priority. She arrived early at church to meet new people. She asked these new friends many curious questions to discover what they do and wh ...