Missionaries try to find people who would like to hear about the gospel of Jesus Christ. When I served in Argentina in the late 70’s we found people by going house to house. We would stand outside the yard by the gate and clap our hands as loudly as we could. If we were noticed, someone would come outside and talk to us. This was one of our best finding opportunities. We also worked with members to identify and teach their friends.
This morning I talked to our Gdańsk Elders Wicker and Pavlik on the topic of finding. They told me they have never gone house to house clapping (or even door knocking) in Gdańsk. They find people with their smartphones using Facebook. Here’s how it works: the Poland Warsaw Mission has prepared around 12 ads for posting on Facebook about finding more peace and joy in life. The ads may offer free lessons to learn of Jesus Christ. One ad offers a free Book of Mormon. Another offers a lesson on baptism. Of course the ads are filmed in both Polish and Ukrainian. They are sent to individuals on Facebook. If someone clicks on the ad and fills out their contact information Facebook notifies the church that someone is interested in the ad. The church is able to send the location to the exact missionaries serving right there. The technology is call geo-fencing and is pretty high tech. In the last 3 months they’ve perfected it so referrals from Facebook are coming to the right elders. Of course, the missionaries are really good at forwarding referrals too if the person is located closer to a different set of elders. All of this is more complicated than you might guess because of the languages spoken here. For example, Elder Wicker is one of only 4 elders in our mission that speak Ukrainian. His area to receive Ukrainian referrals covers an immense area in Poland.
Elders Wicker and Pavlik (and our sister missionaries too) try to contact the referrals immediately! It is almost a sin to allow an interested person to wait 4 hours before contacting them. The mission is perfecting the best ways to respond to these referrals. (Should we text them before we call? When should we call a referral you received in the middle of the night?) The referrals show up on a map as a yellow colored dot (aka a “golden” dot). Yesterday the elders received three golden dots. Two of them scheduled future face-to-face discussions and the third they were able to give a discussion to over the phone. All of them wanted to learn more! On the average our city receives 3 golden dots per day and lately 50% of them yield teaching opportunities. About three weeks ago the elders received something like 40 golden dots. It took a full day to just call them! That day the elders jokingly named themselves the “call center”. Most of the teaching is done using the smartphone as well. It is not uncommon to have both our sisters and elders occupying different rooms in our church and doing nothing but talking on their cell phones for hours setting up appointments and teaching discussions. Polish apartments are so small that it is very rare to teach them in their home.
Anyone want to return to the finding methods of the ’70’s, walking dusty streets or would you rather check your smartphone? Then Elder (now President) Nelson was instrumental in getting smartphones into our missionary’s hands. At first there was a large amount of pushback from the missions because the missionaries would sometimes abuse them.
How would Jay have made it through Covid lockdowns without a smartphone?
Who could have foreseen the days of golden dots and doing efficient missionary work using smartphones? All this has come to fruition here in Poland during the last three months and promises to change the face of missionary work here forever.
The photo below is Elder Grant Dearden as a young missionary in 1979. Below that is a 1978 photo of a typical house in the outskirts of cities/towns in Argentina.
