My grandfather took a train to Toronto, Canada, to start his LDS mission in 1948. After a very brief stay at the mission home, he was off with his new companion to find converts. The Church was very small at the time in the area. Big cities like Toronto and Oshawa had branches, but most small towns lacked a single member and the missionaries were left to travel long distances, usually once every few weeks, to neighboring villages in order to gather with missionaries and have a makeshift sacrament service. When they entered towns that lacked any previous LDS presence, which wasn’t rare, they would first find the sheriff in order to get a permit to preach the gospel. There was very little oversight. Though they would write weekly letters to the mission president, they were infrequently visited by authorities and mostly left to their own decisions. They did have a missionary handbook that they were expected to learn—a common mission saying was “Be careful of page 27!,” a reference to the section in the book that cautioned against being alone with a member of the opposite sex—but most lessons were learned through trial and error. While there was some opposition to their message (missionaries didn’t dare to go to the Province of Quebec due to the story of previous elders being stoned), the general reaction was one of apathy. A majority of the missionaries were fortunate to witness one baptism per year.
Learning about missionary work in the late 1940s can seem foreign today—at least it did to me. Last summer, I sat down with my grandfather and had him explain the ins and outs of his mission, the type of day-to-day work they did, the opposition they witnessed, and the protocols they were expected to follow. As expected, it was all fascinating, and a reminder of how much change can happen over a half-century, post-correlation. But what really struck me was their method of, and resources for, teaching and learning.
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