Full-Time Missionaries Serving in Prescott Valley Stake

Bishoprics (and by extension, ward councils) have been invited to try to learn something, even if it is something small, about every single household in their wards.  You can be a big part of this effort.  You can target five or so names every week to help leadership learn about every household in the ward.  Bishops keep track of every household in the ward using a special ward list that they can print for you.  Seek out any household for which there is a blank next to the household's name and try to find out, first if the family still lives at the listed address.  Next, try to find out information about the family.  Where do they work?  What do they like to do for fun?  What are their hobbies and pastimes?  Then add this information to what the ward leadership knows about the household.  Good revelation is based on good information.  As the entire ward becomes a known entity to the ward's leadership, leaders will be inspired to know which families to target for invitations back to activity in the Church.  

The ward list is constantly in flux.  The never ending question marks that emerge from the ward list cause ward leaders many sleepless nights.  You can really help in this regard.  Each month you can work with the Ward Clerk to receive a print out of the households listed as "new move-ins" that month.  Go and visit them.  Try to find something out about them and add it to the ward master list. 

Full-time missionaries truly are the Swiss Army knives of the ward.  However, often they could be better at returning and reporting on their efforts.  As mentioned above, ward leaders, especially ward mission leaders, have been tasked with getting to know something about every household in the ward.  In order to do that, when you track down a household that is unknown to the ward and you learn something about that particular household, make sure you then complete the most important part; return and report to the ward mission leader about the information that you discovered about the family.  The ward mission leader will add this vital information to the ward master list.  Revelation based on the good information that you provide will then come to the ward leaders about how best to help the family to return to the covenant path.  

Active families in our stake need to be around the full-time missionaries in order to be inspired in their missionary efforts.  As you visit active families, they will feel confidence in you and will share their friends, neighbors, and family members with you to teach.  There are many ways that you can make these visits effective.  Perhaps you can role-play with the members ways to INVITE friends in a normal and natural way to learn about the Church.  You can visit members and invite them to come with you to attend a missionary lesson.  Or you can challenge them to invite one of the households in your teaching pool to come to their house for dinner.  Inviting members to be more involved in missionary work through short 20 minute visits in their homes, perhaps is the best way to expand missionary work in your areas.   

When visiting members, especially when having dinner, you can easily help them share the gospel before leaving the home.  First, share a video of general interest, such as this one.  Then ask, "Is there anyone who is not a member of the Church with whom you could share this video on social media?"  Then help them to share it with that person.  Don't forget to come back and follow up to see how the sharing went.  As members actually share the gospel (not just talk about sharing the gospel), they will learn how easy it is to share what they know in a natural and normal way with their friends.    

The goal of the Prescott Valley Stake is to Love Share and Invite.  Besides our testimonies of the gospel, we have many resources to SHARE with our community.  Remind members to share testimony but to also share the temporal blessings of the Church with others.  We have compiled a list of resources to share with our community here.  Remind members to share these resources with their friends.  Also, in the spirit of Love Share and Invite, we have put together a Love Share Invite website in which we share local digital content that is easily shared on social media so that our friends can know what we are all about.  

All of our inviting efforts should lead to many baptisms while you are here serving in our stake.  However, these baptisms only remain active when the power of the whole ward is employed to keep our new converts active.  Train members, ward leaders, and the new converts themselves to use the "My Covenant Path" program of study in the Gospel Library app.  When someone is baptized, act as quickly as you can to make sure that their record shows up in the ward.  So much of our convert retention efforts are based on having new member's records in the ward.  Don't even let two days pass after baptism and confirmation before the record appears on the ward list.  This is crucial!  After a baptism, work with ward leaders to follow these steps to ensure that converts continue to progress.  Also, as you work on assigned tasks and as you work with new members, make sure to inform ward mission leaders about how you fulfilled tasks that were assigned to you from the ward.  Also, the "Covenant Path Progress" record is a powerful tool, but it's only as effective insomuch as it is kept up-to-date!  If you keep it updated, leaders of the Prescott Valley Stake will use it to help you do your important work.     

It's sad to say, but in the past, we have had difficulty getting our full-time missionaries to attend our Missionary Coordination Meetings (or Missionary Coordination Huddles).  These are vital meetings and they are short.  They should be "assignment based" in which you are regularly given assignments to visit unknown families in the ward and new move-ins, and in which you are able to give assignments for members to go with you when you teach lessons to new members and friends.  These meetings are absolutely essential to the work of salvation.  Also, as often as possible, attend Ward Council where you can also plead for help with your teaching appointments in the following week.  Ward leadership has been trained that all ward council meetings are meant to focus on people that we can help to travel further down the covenant path.  Sometimes though, we members lose track of that goal.  When you are present in these meetings you can help to re-direct off-topic conversations back to our divine purpose - the work of salvation in the lives of our friends.  Sacrament meeting is also an extremely important time to connect with members and ask for help, follow up with members about their friends, and/or challenge members to invite their friends.  

Our stake strives to be aligned with the initiatives of the Phoenix Mission and your mission president.  As you come into our stake, please strive to find out from your ward mission leaders and other leaders what the stake initiatives are regarding missionary work and incorporate them into your daily mission life, especially as you interact with members.  This will make your work with members more effective and energized.  Help the stake create a buzz around missionary work and you will create a culture of missionary work and a culture of Loving Sharing and Inviting in the Prescott Valley Stake.  As you do, you will see missionary work "go viral" in our stake.  Currently, you could share the videos, podcasts, blog posts, memes, and other curated media on our Love Share Invite website.  ALSO, currently, in our stake, as members INVITE their friends to interact with them in significant ways, they wear different colored wrist bands!  These bands mean that members have invited their friends.  Follow up with members who are wearing LSI wristbands and ask them about the friends that are connected to them.