The annual Beloit College Freshman Attitudes list just came out again last week. This is the list of attributes that incoming college freshmen supposedly share, and we as faculty are supposed to read the list and marvel at how different the attitudes of typical college freshmen are from our own. Usually, the list is at least moderately successful in accomplishing said goal of astonishing college professors, and the older the professor, the more astonishment there is to go around.
This got me thinking: we ought to have a similar list for Mormon missionaries. Technology and remarkable changes in both the church and the world at large have led to remarkable changes in the attitudes of young missionaries who enter the MTC this fall. Most of these changes are reflective of the miraculous growth that the church has seen all across the world in recent years.
What first got me thinking along these lines was a missionary who asked me, while I was on an exchange, whether my father spoke Russian because he served his mission there. What was astonishing to me about his remark has nothing to do with ignorance of recent church history or world events, but rather how important it is to describe to the rising generations the miraculous opening of the nations to the preaching of the restored gospel. Prophecies have been fulfilled in a remarkable way over my lifetime, and the miraculous nature of these needs to be emphasized.
So here is my list, in no particular order:
1) Missionaries have been sending e-mails home for as long as they can remember
2) Church membership has been in the double-digit millions for as long as they can remember, and maybe if they think hard, they can faintly remember a time when native English-speakers actually outnumbered non-English speakers in church membership.
3) Missionaries have always been sent forth to preach the Gospel to the nations of Eastern Europe.
4) Iron what?
5) A temple in Kiev does not seem any more remarkable than a temple in Stockholm, which definitely does not seem all that remarkable.
6) They cannot remember a time when the church did not have a web page.
7) There has always been an MTC, and it has always taught languages in the scores.
8) Missionaries with mandatory bike helmets and cell phones do not seem unusual.
9) mormon.org is a website that, under mission rules, they must spend some time on every week.
10) Of course there are thousands of members of the church in Mongolia; why wouldn't there be?
11) What are Targeteers?
12) Give said the who?
13) Sundays have always meant one single trip to church.
14) A Mormon Senate Majority Leader is not unusual.
15) Two Mormon presidential candidates is not unusual.
16) What's a flannel board?
17) They have always been as the armies of Helaman.
18) Of course missionaries can text people.
19) Smaller temples have existed ever since they can remember.
20) General Conference from the Tabernacle is a faint memory, eclipsed by many more memories of the Conference Center.
There are probably many more that could be added to this list (I think the Beloit list always has a 75 attributes). What are yours?
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