"Good Zone Goals? Pfft. Yeah We Don't Do That Here." (46, 47, & 48)

Holy I am so deeply sorry for being silent for 3 weeks now. I had written a large portion of this email but never finished it. But I'm here now so...

Hey! Hope its been well for everyone. Here in Jaecheon things have been going great! As always I'll jump right into it.

Zone Conference 

I was genuinely surprised to find out that zone conference was already happening. Usually when that hits it feels like I still have a lot of time left for the transfer. But this time it felt like just a normal Tuesday.

Anyway, this is what happened, the mission gave us these custom made PMG books that are side by side with Korean writing and English writing. They’re pretty cool but they are absolutely massive. I literally can’t carry it in my bag so it just sits on my study desk.

Next we had a training from the Tech Elders about an application here in Korea called "Carrot". Its pretty much Facebook Marketplace except you can make posts for events to then gain points to then gain traction for your event. Essentially when someone comes to our event, such as English Class, through the Carrot application there is a chance that someone will find our event on their feed and join English Class. So, all around pretty cool idea and they want us to start using it within our areas which isn't a bad idea.

Then the mission president gave us some counsel on how to work more effectively with members. Along with giving us some materials to help members "Love, Share, and Invite." I thought all of those were great and I really liked having new things and materials to use for our finding methods.

There was the AP and zone trainings. APs talked about how we need to become consecrated missionaries and how we should be more obedient and blah blah blah. Invited us to think of something to work on every week to become better. Pretty typical AP training. The Zone training started out pretty good. The ZL's came up and started talking about "Accountability & Good Planning" which I actually thought was a great topic to train about as this mission seems to struggle with that aspect of the job. The issue was the ZL's were horribly prepared and really had nothing to talk about after the first 7 minutes and kind of just asked a couple people to share their Weekly Planning Schedule and then asked if it was effective. They then ended their training abruptly, didnt give an invitation or really any new information on what we will do as a zone, then just passed it on to the STLs.

The STLs (sister training leaders) gave their whole "training" on Obedience and becoming a consecrated missionary. If you didn't already know, it feels like thats the only thing this mission constantly talks about. So it was typical to look around and see a couple of people dozing off during their training. These poor STLs think they are going to start something big in the zone when in reality they're just beating a dead horse. It was pretty discouraging to walk out of that training gaining 0 new information on how our zone was doing on our KI goals, baptisms, or even member work. It was just a 45 minute "Rah rah rah, be more obedient to the standards and rules and baptism’s will come."

All in all we didn’t set a single goal as a zone that will help us: Talk to people more, get members involved, set up appointments, etc. Instead the goal for the whole zone for the transfer was: "During P-study read the bible." 

So that leads me to what our district is doing.

Chungju District

As you know I have managed to become the DL wife again this transfer. But I am taking the fullest advantage of that. Because me and my companion are the same age in the mission. i've been a lot more involved with some of the goals and ideas for our district. My companion and I pitched this idea to our district to focus on KI goal accountability that we would all join a nightly call and talk about how our areas are doing and how our weekly goal is going. So far the accountability as a district is going great! As a district our KI goals are just barely reaching the point of improvement so hopefully we can see some numbers go up soon in the next week or 2.

The good news is we have 2 people on baptismal date as a district which is really good! We've averaged the whole transfer thus far with 0 and then in the past two weeks we got 3 people on date! 

The bad news is we had to remove our friend off baptismal date literally the day after we gave him a date for baptism. The way this had happened was, our teaching friend had to meet with our mission president to recieve a baptismal interview because he has super high functioning autism (probably). Hes super smart when it comes to memorizing things, playing instruments, languages, etc. But he is really easily influenced so we had to see if our mission president would allow him to be baptized. So, he received the interview and our friend passed with flying colors and he wanted to receive baptism the following week. Which was really early. Long story short he came to church for the 2nd time and our members for some reason didn't know how to be nice to our friend. As our branch president was claiming that he needed "medical records" in order to get baptized which is just not true. Our MCM leader was a little harsh when our friend was rethinking baptism. A member called him a J-dub. It was just a lot and it didn't sit right with our friend so he said he wants to wait a little longer before getting baptized. 

So Saturday we put him on date, then the next day he was off. But that’s okay, we’ll get him baptized at some point. We just gotta keep working with him. Keep him in your prayers and especially pray for the Jecheon branch as I don’t know what is going on with the members here.

Conclusion 

I've been enjoying this transfer a lot. Elder Bingham and I have gotten along so well and we are doing a lot of work. We've both come home some days from being so busy talking and meeting with so many friends that we just crash. Not only that but we have a lot of progressing friends who we are excited to hopefully get baptized in the next little bit.

We also had interviews this most recent week. We had to teach the 2nd lesson (The Plan of Salvation) in Korean, completely alone, to the mission president's wife, Sister Kwak. During the roleplay I only had about 3 minutes or else we were going to miss our bus back home so I just sort of threw every principle I could in Korean. She said I improved my Korean a lot since last time I met. 

Being in Korea is still amazing and its going to continue being amazing. I just hope our mission culture can change a little bit. But I am happy and I am glad to be out here.

Love y'all

-Elder Christensen