Hey y’all, I’m back from my June vacation. Lots of deep, deep thoughts to share, but they will have to wait for another day. In the meantime, I heard a rumor while I was on my vacation, and I was wondering if anybody else had heard it. The rumor is that the Church is beginning to ask all wards in the U.S. to house missionaries with members rather than continue to pay rent for the missionaries to live in apartments. Apparently, in one stake in Colorado this is already happening: during sacrament meeting, it was announced that the ward has to find a way to house the missionaries with the members. During High Priests, I was told confidently that this is a new Church-wide policy. I have no idea if this is true. Sorry if I’m bringing up a subject that has been discussed elsewhere. In the meantime, is this rumor true?
The Millennial Star
See http://mormanity.blogspot.com/2006/05/missionaries-living-with-members-pilot.html
“The rumor is that the Church is beginning to ask all wards in the U.S. to house missionaries with members rather than continue to pay rent for the missionaries to live in apartments.”
That just sounds like so bad an idea…
The opportunity for abuse is just ever present. Teenaged girls in the home? Bad news. TVs or video games in the home? Bad news.
Yeah ideally the members would keep the missionaries on the straight and narrow and missionaries wouldn’t be tempted beyond what they can bear. In practice though it’s hard enough keeping some missionaries out of trouble without them living with members.
If this goes through look for it to remain for a few years and quickly be brushed aside after a spout of excommunications…
I’m the ward mission leader … so far haven’t heard anything like this … I doubt that this kind of thing would be a churchwide worldwide policy. Too many potential problems.
Just the same, I’ll ask the elders if they’ve heard any rumors like this.
Well,
I live in Colorado. And yes, that is what’s going on here. It was the same way in my ward in Wyoming. But Colorado and Wyoming are part of the same region. So it might just be confined to one particular area of the world.
I know for a fact that it simply can’t be done in Japan. Houses are too small and most members live in two bedroom apartments.
So, based on the Mormanity link in #1 and the comments so far, I would think that the comment in High Priests in the ward I attended in Colorado was incorrect in that this is now a Church-wide policy. It’s not the policy in Miami as far as I know (although I’ve been away for a month, so who knows?). I would note that my wife lived with members sometimes when she was on a mission to Germany 12-plus years ago.
I would agree with Clark that this policy would have huge potential for abuse. It would seem to work in only limited circumstances — empty nesters, people with a separate apartment over the garage, people with extra room in their basements, etc. I can’t imagine it working in the average member’s home with teenage kids around and all of the other temptations of modern-day life (MTV!!!!!). But maybe it is working well in Colorado and Wyoming because the houses are generally bigger?? I don’t know. (btw, I would observe that the average home in Colorado is at least 50 percent bigger than the average home in Florida because they have basements and larger garages, which we don’t have in Florida).
This would have sucked on my mission. No more Friday night frat stuff, poker, molaroffs and everything else that makes a Francophone mission bearable.
Does the motive in Colorado seem to be to shift missionary housing costs onto the members or to give the missionaries some parents to go home to each night?
Remember, the Church usually field-tests most new policies somewhere (our stake is field-testing some new 1Q70 directives with home teaching with our ward being the stake’s guinea pig; our regional employment center has long been a testbed).
So, yes, Colorado could be implementing a new Church “policy” and the rest of us haven’t heard about it.
At any rate, the “candidates” to house the missionaries would be a very small subset of the stake — probably empty-nesters with the “right” environment. [We have a singles ward bishop in our stake married to the a stake RS prexy member; they have no children living at home and he is almost retired.]
I’m in Utah, and many of the apartments that the Church rents are owned by members. For those apts attached to the residence, there are at least a couple of strict rules about what’s an acceptable apt. There has to be a separate entrance and the missionaries have to have their own bathroom and kitchen.
The missionary apts I’ve seen personally around here were an apt over a garage that was detached from the house, and one-half of a duplex with a member family living on the other side of the wall. So they were completely separate living arrangements.
That would be weird to actually live in a room in someone’s house and share the bathroom and kitchen with them. Where on earth would the missionaries hang all their Mormonad posters and store their extra three crates of Books of Mormon?
I can’t help but believe that what may finally come down is having stakes pool together to find and pay for a suitable form of stable housing for missionaries in their area.
The rumor, could also be a precursor response to the still quiet rumblings of ways to form exclusive residential areas or whole communities that ban co-habitating adults (gays, singles living for economic necessity, and those engaged in common law marriages).
To fire up the followers of the anti-gay movement, a popular tactic currently talked of is how to get co-habitating registries place on ballots (there are a few cases going through the courts now over the legality of such residential areas and communities).
These registries are meant to track households with co-habitating adults. Non-married adults would need to register with every move. One could only imagine the paperwork glitches for mission/companion changes. The alternative to this of course is a married only household registry – but this option is thought to be not as effective in getting out the vote.
Down the road (because it is illegal today), these registries would be public information used as commonly as credit scores in hiring. Businesses could use them for hiring: hmmm…the married guy, the single but responsible guy, the woman that is married but working outside the home and why, or the gay guy. As soon as communities adopt such registries, final sales of homes owned by gay or co-habitating adults could immediately fall below fair market value.
It’s worth going to Republican strategy meetings to get this info and evaluate how it is in harmony or dis-harmony with our doctrine or how it might affect Latter-day Saints.
I was in that Republican strategy meeting. That was supposed to be top secret!
This already happened in our mission as well. The missionaries in our ward live with the Bishop and his wife. It seems as this was instituted around six months ago.
Well, since I’m the one renting the basement “room” and there are no walls separating my “room” from the rest of the basement, and my stepfather works in another state during the week, I feel extremely confident that no one will be asking my parents to take in the missionaries. As a YSA rep, though, I worry about the missionaries making the few houses that the YSA are generally welcome in, forbidden to (at a minimum) the female YSA. I’d think there’d be temptations as far as “oh, we have elders in the home, let’s have them do X, Y, and Z…” goes. I’m glad the church is trying it out before buying it, basically.
The way I see it, there are two types of members, those that let missionaries do anything they want, and those that don’t let missionaries do anything they want.
The letter that was read in Sacrament months ago did place stipulations on who could be a host–no children at home, etc. I also believe these people receive a little compensation.
Ten years ago as a missionary, I heard that missionaries, under the previous mission president in our Oklahoma mission, were moved out of apartments owned by members. The Elders were often very hard on apartments… especially carpets. I’m told it created some hard feelings on the part of some members that missionaries would treat their property so poorly.
I own a number of rental properties. Every time I’ve heard another owner complain about tenants being rough on property, it was someone who was clueless about normal wear and tear. Cleaning, hole patching, painting and some carpet and vinyl replacement is the norm between tenants. We even offer to clean/paint/replace carpets when a tenant re-ups. The tenants pay for it, what do I have to complain about?. I even had a friend you who carpeted his apartments’ kitchens and didn’t understand that the carpet would have to be replace between tenants virtually 100% of the time.
Did the missionaries who moved in with members just IGNORE the missionary white handbook’s DIRECT RULE AGAINST IT? There are strict rules for missionary housing- you have to have a seperate bathroom, a seperate entance, locked doors, seperate quaters, etc. Sounds like someone isn’t following the white bible!
This thing sounds like
a) people breaking the rules
b) someone twitty leader’s thriftiness gone amok!
Pleeze! Gimme a break! In Japan, Korea, Paris and London, I can see there being a problem with rent prices. In Colorado and the Midwest? What-ev-er!
Also- what about these problems-
-missionaries aren’t supposed to babysit
-they aren’t supposed to put kids on their lap
-sister missionaries would look polygamous
-living in an elderly nest might entail elder-care, wich not only brings a liability, but missionaries aren’t qualified for it, and unless they are humanitarian missionaries, they don’t have time for it.
-missionaries need quiet study hours
-missionaries are late teens who just came from giving their parents headaches trying to be independent. It seems counterproductive to put them in a subordinate family setting again instead of letting them be independent.
-Host families would be under the same scrutiny as PR arms of the church as the missionaries.
-What ward has a large pool of empty rooms to rent? This is a pretty small number – too shallow of a pool to jump into.
-AFS host families are screened very seriously. Missionaries won’t do this.
-This is just a half-baked idea!
I pray that our missionaries will instead be helped in following the missionary handbook and instructions from SLC instead of being put in dangerous, compromising, stressful and potentially catastrophic situations.
A few months before my mission to Argentina ended in 1987, the mission president told us in zone conference that something like this was coming. I don’t think it ever really happenned, though.
There were two places where we rented from members. One was a separate residence in the back. In the other case, we rented a room and shared the bathroom, kitchen, etc. It was close quarters, but worked agreeably. The nice thing about a situation like that was being able to live in a true Argentine setting.
Then there was the drunk we boarded with in Mar del Plata whose teenage son played loud rock music. And there was the apartment in Comodoro Rivadavia next to the dance hall where the music started around 10PM or so and ended around 5AM, allowing about an hour of sleep in the dawning morning. The play list seemed to repeat identically every Friday and Saturday, and all the music was lousy.
I don’t think I would feel comfortable sending my 19 year old to live with random people I know nothing about. And yes, I realize the alternative is that they live alone with other random 19 year olds I know nothing about, but the idea of having them in the home of strange adults who want 19 year old boys in their home makes me feel creepy.
I’ll just copy and paste from Jeff’s thread why I hated my experience living with members on my mission.
We did this in one of my areas in the Chicago suburbs. I hated it. The husband and wife were always arguing, and one day the wife took their baby and left him. We mentioned to our district leader that he might want to pass on up the chain of command that we were technically living with a single male at that point. A couple weeks later she moved back in, and when we mentioned it to our district leader he told us that he’d forgotten to pass it on.
My companion and I were double-transferred and elders were put into the area. I found out later that the living situation only lasted about another month before they got an apartment. Apparently the elders were very uncomfortable with the situation because it was only the wife home most of the time. In addition, they held district meeting at the house, and after about half an hour, the wife would come in and tell them that their meeting had gone on too long and they needed to leave.
So I’m not a big fan of the idea.
Oh, I should add one thing I did like about it:
They had a Nintendo, and I got very hooked on Super Mario Bros. I only played on p-day or a little in the evening after we came in, but obviously I really shouldn’t have. It was a lot of fun, though.
This is probably another reason why missionaries with members is a bad idea.
Actually,
My wife (former ward missionary in Wyoming) says that you can’t house missionaries if you’ve got “young women” in the house. It’s an official rule. So the possible “flings with teenage daughters” are out.
Furthermore, it’s not just the missionaries making arrangements with the members directly. The living arrangement has to be approved through a chain of authority that I believe involves the Bishop and Mission President (and probably other leaders).
Seth, you’re right. Like I said before, they have specifically asked for retirees, widows and empty nesters. They are not to have kids living at home and the home must be approved.
I don’t think this is that big s deal.
I want my nest empty. The last thing I want now is two 19 year olds moving back into my house. ain’t happenin’ here.
Another voice from Colorado saying it’s true. There are constant reminders in Sac. Mtg. all the time asking if anyone has a *qualifying* space.
I don’t know of anyone who has such a space.
But it doesn’t stop them from asking.
Do missionairies that live with members pay less per month?