August 2003

Robots and Spies

There is a well-observed phenomenon in this mission: the “apostate”, or rebellious, missionaries tend to baptize at least as many, or more, as the “righteous” missionaries. I formulated two theories as to why this may be true.

First, that the “apostate” missionaries struggle a lot more on mission, and if they never had any baptisms, they’d probably just go home and feel like a failure. Hence, the Lord gives them “golden contacts” liberally, in order to give them incentive to stay on mission. The “righteous” missionaries, on the other hand, are here because they want to be, and they need no such encouragement. In fact, they’ll grow more spiritually if they must continually struggle to baptize even a few individuals—and so the Lord withholds, in order to provide them with the most growth.

My second theory is that the “righteous” missionaries are, in fact, for the most part, hypocrites. They are perfunctory in their actions, and treat missionary work like insurance sales: win the customer’s trust, be charming and smile a lot, and the sales will roll in. As such, the Spirit cannot testify properly, and the people they teach are not swayed. On the other hand, the so-called “apostate” missionaries are more free with themselves, make more genuine friends, and the people whom they teach feel their sincerety and are moved by it.

It is no mystery to most missionaries that such hypocritical “righteous” missionaries do in fact exist. Mission is replete with them. “We have learned from sad experience” is the well-worn expression. And just as often, these hypocritical missionaries tend to be the ones to rise to leadership positions, ripe for unrighteous dominion. The reason for this lies in the two-fold view that the mission president has of missionaries: interviews and statistics.

In personal interviews, the topic tends towards the missionary’s particular infringements of mission rules. Nobody’s perfect, so there’s always plenty of fodder to keep an interview going in negative terms for hours. Clever missionaries devise ways to divert the topic from themselves, sparing themselves from such torture. I refused to play the game and became labeled a “rogue” missionary for my oft-discussed wanton disobedience, but others are more successful. One companion of mine would ask the president “deep doctrine” questions in order to distract his attention from the usual theme. Other missionaries spend their time informing the president about all the infractions of the missionaries they serve around. As in any political system, such missionaries inevitably become very popular with the mission president, since they are his sole and only source for information about violations of mission rules. Not only do they avoid the scrutinizing glare of the president’s questions themselves, but they also demonstrate “leadership potential” in the only way the president knows how to measure.

Statistics are even more abominable. To paraphrase Churchhill, “For measuring a missionary’s progress, mission statistics are the absolute worst system—except for all the rest.” Statistics are a pathetic system for measuring what a missionary is doing—but unfortunately, I can’t think of any better alternative. But let me give a few examples of how miserably statistics fare as a reliable measure of work accomplished.

The first and most widely used statistic on mission is “total hours worked”. Apart from complete fabrication, even an honest tabulation of total hours worked does not tell us anything about the quality of those hours. Say, hypothetically speaking, there’s not much to do in a particular area during the early afternoon hours. (Those who have actually been on mission will recognize this is not much of a hypothetical.) Missionary A takes a half-hour lunch every day and leaves the boarding at half past noon. For the next three hours, he walks to various investigator’s houses, but finds nobody home in each case. Missionary B, on the other hand, doesn’t leave the boarding until half past three unless he has previously scheduled an appointment before then. The same amount of missionary work was accomplished, but Missionary A will report an extra 18 hours of missionary work at the end of the week. Perhaps, to exaggerate the case even further, Missionary A spends the rest of his evening hours watching television and chatting at “perpetual investigator” or members’ houses. Missionary B visits a dozen different people, seeing how he can best help their spiritual progress. When the president looks at his statistic sheets, he sees Missionary A with an average of 67 hours a week, and Missionary B with an average in the low fifties. Guess which will get the leadership calling?

The second most widely used statistic is “discussions taught”. Again, even an honest figure does not tell us much. To use an example, there was a time when one could approach a stranger on the street, take five minutes of his time explaining about Joseph Smith, give him a Book of Mormon (or a few photocopied pages), and count that as a discussion. Since it was “expected” to get a certain number of discussions in a week, many missionaries would simply use this tactic to increase their number of discussions.

Now, when the guidelines for statistics changed, these were no longer counted as “discussions”—and missionaries promptly stopped doing them. This gives us two possibilities: either these discussions were minimally productive and missionaries did them only to improve their statistics, or else they were quite productive, but because they weren’t recognized as statistics (i.e. not visible to the president), they were abandoned in favor of more “visible” activities. Obviously, neither is what we want statistics to accomplish.

But on the whole, I would estimate from personal experience that the vast majority of statistics are “fudged”—perhaps 90% of companionships’ statistics are inaccurate, half deliberately and half out of apathy (most really don’t care enough to keep accurate statistics). I would also wager that at least a tenth of all statistics are just complete nonsense. Again, a few personal examples.

With my first several companions, I felt statistics were very important. After all, it showed the president what sort of things were effective and what were not. But companion after companion began to refuse to allow me to do statistics because I was too meticulous. If we left the boarding at 9:45 am, and arrived in the evening at 9:15 pm, that was an additional half hour subtracted. (My companions all insisted that I round up both sides to the nearest half hour.) If we were in the area and took a break for a milkshake, I deducted the time spent there. On the whole, I would net five to ten hours less than my companion, calculating the same week’s statistics.

With another companion I had, we worked perhaps five to ten total hours a week. Yes, that’s right—five to ten total hours a week, and zero discussions. He did the statistics, however—and do you think that’s what he reported? After he left me, he was promoted to Zone Leader, and he was even considered as a possible assistant to the president. The president thought highly of him, to be sure.

In other companionships, particularly the ones in which we’ve gotten along fabulously, we tended to report the statistics honestly. Ironically, these are the companionships in which I got into the most trouble with the missionary leadership—because I failed to “pad” my stats. When I had companions who lied through their teeth, the president thought we were great! Many missionaries discover this trend quite early, and have no qualms about padding their stats in order to avoid trouble with the hierarchy.

To use a less volatile example, in one companionship we examined our statistics and decided on a goal for 60 hours for the week. At this time, the mission standard was 65 hours and 15 discussions, and the orthodox practice was to submit goals of 65 hours and 15 discussions week after week. We thought that was ridiculous, since we were in a rather difficult area and were averaging hours in the low fifties and discussions more near five. Why submit goals we had no hope of achieving? So we decided to work slowly upwards, and have a goal of 60 hours.

“Why only 60 hours?” came the immediate suspicious reply from our Zone Leader. We explained briefly and he seemed satisfied. But not for long—bump, bump, bump, back from the APs. “The APs want to know why you only put 60 hours for a goal.” We explained that we had been averaging in the fifties, and that sixty hours seemed like a lot to be asking in and of itself. Ironically enough, our Zone Leader had been a previous companion of mine, and while I was with him I also averaged in the fifties. I happily pointed this out to him, but now the shoe was on the other foot. “60 hours is not acceptable,” came back the eventual answer. “You’ll have to change it.” Out of mere stubborness, we decided to change it to “62.48621” or some other ridiculous number, explaining that we had calculated the standard deviation mean of the average of the cosine tangent variable, or some other such nonsense. I think eventually 62 was written down, but the word quickly spread: “Don’t worry—we’ll separate those two at transfers. They’re definitely trouble together.” All because of some honest statistics.

With another companion, I ended up having a week full of administrative details. We moved boardings, and we helped other missionaries move boardings, and various other minutia. We ended up having less than thirty hours of total hours of missionary work that week. Again, that was unacceptable to the APs (although a totally different regime by this time). They ordered us to count various managerial tasks as total hours until we had pushed above the sixty hour mark. Below that, apparently, was unacceptable for a Zone Leader—no matter whether it was actually accomplished or not.

In summary, it seems as if honest reporters of statistics are penalized—the more brutally honest, the more brutally penalized. It matters not whether the amount and quality of missionary work done in those hours meets or exceeds that done by others in the requisite 65 or 60—no amount of explaining will lessen the blow. Furthermore, if even you report 67 hours or 10 baptisms that week, the APs will inevitable query, “Why only 10 baptisms? Do you think you can get 15 next week?” Forever pushing, and never satisfied.

So it is primarily, if not solely, through these two dark glasses which the president sees the work of individual missionaries. Doing well in interviews or in statistics means promotion to leadership positions. It is from this that I draw my title. A former missionary, now home and married for nearly a year, took the saying, “Death to all robots and spies.” The first refers to missionaries who perform the all the rote motions of mission, perfunctorily obtaining excellent statistics, fulfilling the letter of the law but failing utterly the spirit. The latter refers to missionaries who spend the majority of their time snooping around other missionaries, looking for each little indiscretion with which they can then run to the APs or to the president himself. The aforementioned missionary even found himself being followed around by paranoid leaders, anxious to find any trivial breach of protocol to report.

I close with that injunction. Obey the mission rules if you feel they are just, but never in a perfunctory or pharisaical manner. Remember Paul’s declaration that “the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life.” Keep in mind the Saviour’s rebuke of the scribes and Pharisees: “[Ye] have omitted the weighter matters of the law ... these ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other undone.” On the other hand, do not attempt to get others to break a rule which they have set for themselves. “For one believeth that he may eat all things: another, who is weak, eateth herbs. Let not him that eateth despise him that eateth not; and let not him which eateth not judge him that eateth: for God hath received him. ... Hast thou faith? have it to thyself before God. Happy is he that condemneth not himself in that thing which he alloweth.” Do not encourage missionaries who not only seem obsessed with others’ faults, but also in sharing these faults with mission leaders. At first it might seem tempting to encourage informants, but I promise you that this will only engender gossip and incite rumor. Fill leadership positions with strong leaders, not sly managers who merely do well on the spurious exams of statistics and interviews.

And death to all robots and spies.