Coordinadoras and change

Are you ready for the latest report for the Chile Rancagua Mission?  Here we go:

        This was a busy week here as it always is when missionaries are going and coming.  This week, eleven left and seven came which is a real switch from our recent schedule.  It was also the week for transfers, which obviously affects many of our missionaries.  It affected us more previously as we, well, mostly President Warne and the assistants, plan out who will move where.

            On Friday we held a sister leader training meeting.  I have a hard time saying that since we call them coordinadoras.  This meeting is always wonderful.  This time several of the sisters had been assigned topics to present as training.  We have several new coordinadoras but it is amazing to see the experienced sisters share their knowledge and insights.  How did missions get along without these missionaries?  They understand the challenges that sister missionaries face, but they also are very good at teaching others how to be good missionaries and also representatives of Jesus Christ in behavior, dress, and spirituality.  They all agreed that as they teach and serve with the sisters in their sectors they receive more in return.  They also learn to love them.

            Our picture this week shows a companionship and the friendship and love that grows between the sisters as they serve each other, the people in Chile and the Savior.  Even though it is hard work to train a new missionary, the trainer is always remembered, often as an example.  In this picture, the Latin sister (in the red) trained the American one.  The other two sisters were companions with the American.  The two on either side of the American sister both went home last week and they are both incredible missionaries.  Each told us that they will continue to be an influence for good in their family and community.  We hear the same from others returning home and we believe it.  We don’t like to see them go but that is how mission life works—constant change. 

            We’d like to wish everyone reading this post a Happy Thanksgiving no matter where you live.  We are grateful for our many blessings, especially for the chance to serve here in Chile.

Primary program in Viluco

                               Here is the chapel in Viluco

                When the blog post is late, it makes for a short week.  Fortunately our days here in Chile are action-packed so we never have trouble coming up with a subject.  As the Latin missionaries would say to that: jejeje.  It means hahaha, naturally.

                Anyway, I would like to tell of an experience we had today.  As we have mentioned before we go to a different branch meeting each Sunday.  As soon as we visit all 20 branches, we will start over.  It takes longer than just going straight through 20 weeks due to stake, general and district conferences.

                Today we went to the Viluco branch.  The building is a house in a neighborhood so we wouldn't have found it without the missionaries to guide us.  There is a church sign outside, but you have to be right in front of the house to see it.  The inside is a typical branch setup with a main room with folding chairs and a small stand and podium.

                Since today is election day in Chile, only sacrament meeting was held.  It was the primary program which is the first we have seen here.  There were eight to ten kids depending on which ones ran back to their moms, but they did such a good job!  Each child had a talk to give; only one lost his nerve.  As usual, they sang between each talk.  The accompaniment was recorded but the children did a great job of singing all the verses each time and the last duet was especially well done: boys on one verse and girls on the other. 

                Only the primary president sat with them, but they were mostly reverent and gave their talks without assistance.  It was a moving experience to feel that this is our real purpose in Chile:  to make sure these children have a strong church in which to grow up and to eventually be leaders.  Real growth means keeping families like these in the Church and adding others as the missionaries are led to them by the Spirit.  Thanks for sharing our mission with us and have a great week.

Entrevistas

It is spring in Chile!

      Hello to all those who follow our blog.  You may know that we have had a few challenges over the last few weeks so thanks for sticking with us and sorry this post is a few days late.  

      We are glad to be back in Chile although it was very hard to leave the family a second time.  We missed the missionaries so much while we were gone that it is like saying hello to family as we see each one again.

      Thanks to our absence, President Warne has had to adjust the monthly schedule, resulting in some very long days for he and the assistants.  The assistants are training and facilitating while President interviews every missionary in our mission in about one week.  With around 280 missionaries, it is no wonder he is tired at night!

      Interviews or entrevistas as we say in Espanol are held every third month.  The missionaries really look forward to this one on one time with the president.  He also enjoys the opportunity to meet individually instead of the usual group which is at least zone size—20 to 40.  The usual interview is 15 minutes but the timing is flexible in case someone needs a little extra care or counsel.

      President wanted to finish all the interviews before transfers next week which explains the abbreviated schedule.  I am continually reminded that everything in the mission world is constantly changing, so along with transfers we have those going home on Monday and new arrivals on Tuesday.  One of the assistants goes out to train before he goes home and so we have a new assistant in this week to learn the ropes. 

      We very much appreciate your prayers and concern in our behalf.  We feel blessed to be able to serve in the Chile Rancagua mission and hope to have no more interruptions!

The Mission Office Elders

The Misión Chile Rancagua is organized such that the missionaries can focus their maximum efforts on spreading the gospel to the wonderful Chilean people.  In previous blogs we have written about the Zone Leaders, District Leaders and Sister Coordinators who have been assigned leadership responsibilities in the mission to help guide the overall work of the other Elders and Sisters. They each have their own proselyting areas in addition to these other duties.

In addition to the day to day missionary work there is a substantial amount of administrative work to be done in the mission.  It is comprised of finances, historical/records, medical, and English language training and safety which are largely done by senior missionaries who are serving as couples here in Rancagua.   In addition, we have senior missionary couples who serve in different communities who provide support and training to the local members and leaders.  We will write about both of these groups later.

Additional administrative and leadership support for the mission is provided by these six Elders in this photo.  Note the same colored ties they wore for this picture as a measure of their unity which we spoke of in a previous blog! 

Two of them serve as Secretaries in the mission.  They work on visas, the permanent ID cards that we all must have that are called carnets, handle all correspondence with Salt Lake and in South America, doctor appointments, all arrangements for arriving and departing missionaries, and many other duties.  Two others are called Commissaries.  They handle all the management of all of the apartments that we have (which now total almost 90) including finding, renting, dealing with landlords, repairs, remodeling (in Chile when you rent an apartment or house it is usually in an "as-is" condition meaning any repairs like putting in hot water fall to the renter), distribution of printed materials, management of our storeroom of supplies and other duties.  Listing the duties of the Secretaries and the Commissaries doesn´t seem to do justice to all that they do to support the mission because they do so much.  The Secretaries can be either Latin or American but the Commissaries are always Latin due to the need for native speaking skills to deal with the rental contracts which are, of course, all in Spanish.  In many missions there is only one Secretary and one Commissary and they are companions.  However, due to the recent growth in the number of missionaries we found that often the Secretary would have to go to Santiago to deal with a visa problem and the Commissary had to go to Talca to deal with a property problem and it just didn´t work having them as companions.  Thus, in order to keep the rule of always having a companion for each missionary wherever they go we added one more Secretary and one more Commissary to meet that need.

In addition, the two missionaries in the center of the picture are the Assistants to the President or more commonly referred to as the Assistants.  They are two senior missionaries who are close to the end of their mission who provide invaluable support to the whole mission.  They do training, work with the six week transfers, work with individual missionaries and with the zone leaders and district leaders, manage the performance indicators for the mission, work with local church leaders, solve problems, and do hundreds of other things in support of us.  They can be either Latin or American and we typically have one of each. 

In addition to their administrative duties each companionship has a sector or area where they do normal proselyting in the evenings and on the weekends.  They all serve from four to six months in these positions and then leave to return and do normal missionary work.  Typically we overlap their terms of service so that someone is always being trained by the more experienced of the two. 

We could not lead this mission nor could the other 272 missionaries do their work without these six fine missionaries.  They are wonderful young men with responsibilities that far exceed what you would expect of a 20 year old and yet they fill these duties with great maturity, reliability and faithfulness.  We are grateful for their worthy service and all that they do.

Weekly Missionary Letters to President Warne

Every week each missionary writes a letter to President Warne to report on the work in their sector, how their investigators are progressing, how things are going in their area of responsibility if they are a district leader, zone leader or a sister coordinator, how they are doing with their companion and anything else they want to share.  The lettes vary in length from a short paragraph to about a page.  It is sent in via the Internet using a system designed specifically for this purpose which is called IMOS. Monday is preparation day and is when the missionaries go to the local Internet cafe and send in their letters.  President Warne reads every letter  and gives a personal response to about a third each week.  His responses usually contain words of encouragement, answers to questions or clarifications about how to go about the missionary work.

The letters are full of faith, inspiration and testimony.  Our missionaries love the Savior and this love comes through in how hard they work, the feelings that they express and their obedience.  We thought it might be interesting to share some of the stories of faith from a few of these letters this week.  We have removed any reference that might violate privacy standards for those involved but they are copied and pasted here just as they were written to President Warne with only those changes.

#1-The other day, I prayed that we could find a family. But not just any family, one that we could baptize and that could be members all their lives and send kids on a mission and everything. Then I asked God if He could show me the family in a dream so I would recognize them when I saw them. That very night I had a dream and saw the family. Their faces weren´t too clear but other features like their hair were, and they had a stroller. I´ve never had a dream like that before. That very day, we found them. We were actually trying to visit someone else but they weren´t there, then we visited the backup plan even though we only had 5 minutes before our next appointment. I wrote the address down wrong and we contacted the neighbor, but it was totally inspired by God. Right then, they arrived home from work. It was a Dad and his little son. He looked kind of like the man in my dream but I wasn´t sure. We taught him the first lesson and it went so well!!! Then his wife called him in the middle and I saw her picture on his phone. She is totally the woman in my dream!!!!!! 

#2-We had a really great experience this week. We were trying to get to lunch, without realizing that there are two poblaciones (neighborhoods) called El Manzano. We went to the wrong one. However, at the first house we asked for directions, lived a less active member and her family who aren´t baptized. Her father recently passed away and she has had a hard time getting over his loss. We have a meeting with them this next week. Honestly, there is no way we would have found them were we not utterly lost. God works in mysterious ways, and truly leads us to the people who need our message!

#3-Well i do have a really cool story about this week that i want to share with you.  We had a lesson with a part member family, the two teenage daughters are less active members and the mom is not a member, and well we were talking about the power of the Holy Ghost and how to recognize it and I bore testimony of it and the mom started to cry and she told me that she has had numerous missionaries over and she has listened to countless lessons but when I testified of the Holy Ghost it was the first time shes ever felt it and she thanked us and said now she knows and understands what everyone was talking about. It was such a cool moment for me

#4-Well, yesterday while we were walking, little things would happen where my companion and I could see the hand of God directing our path. Here is one of the experiences we had. We were contacting in a neighborhood but no one was home. We had done everything to try and find new investigators. We had contacted the references we had received, looked up where the inactive members lived, etc. Nada. Then I remembered an inactive member who we had met 2 months earlier at her daughters house. She had told us we could visit her and that she lived in the neighborhood where we were at. The only problem was, her address was in my other planner at the house. 

Well as I was looking at my planner trying to figure out what to do, I looked up and who did I see walking a few yards in front of us? The inactive member and her boyfriend. We walked up to them and they were so happy to see us! Filomena invited us over and we taught her, her boyfriend Hugo and her daughter. Her son is also a member and was visiting for the weekend. Hugo said he wants to read The Book of Mormon. It was a wonderful tender mercy from our Heavenly Father. 

This is just a sampling of what the missionaries are experiencing each week.  They are wonderful examples of what representatives of Jesus Christ should be.  We have included a couple of pictures of missionaries but they are not directly related to the stories here.

Have a great week.

Hermana Coordinadoras

Another amazing week in the Misión Chile Rancagua.  We are so grateful to be serving here with so many amazing missionaries and working with the wonderful Chilean people.  Every day we count it a blessing and privilege to be here and serve the Lord.  The work is progressing and we are seeing many baptisms and many who were not active in the church returning in large numbers having been invited to do so by the missionaries.  Many of these returning members have felt the Spirit in their lives and the invitation to return from the missionaries comes at precisely the right moment for them.

We now have 104 Sister missionaries in our mission.  A year ago there were only 24 so we are very blessed to have so many of these delightful young women to assist in the work.  We find that some people are more inclined to work well with the Elders and others with the Sisters.  They are full of energy and the Spirit and they touch many lives each week. 

In the mission organization we have District Leaders and Zone Leaders who help manage the work and who do training for the Elders.  Unfortunately, for years we have not had a means to train the Sisters in the same way since the Elders cannot go and train the Sisters one on one.  Earlier this year the leaders of the church established a role that we call Hermana Coorinadora which is a position that is assigned to our experienced Sister missionaries and they handle the training of the other Sisters.  The goal is to have two per zone but we are not quite there yet given the relative newness of our Sister missionaries.  These Coordinadoras meet with the Zone Leaders in our Mission Leadership Council but we also have regular meetings with them by themselves to talk about issues that are specific to the Sisters.  We cannot say enough about how wonderful they are.  These Coordinadoras are an inspired addition to the missionary process and we do not know what we would do without them.  They are mature and so inspired in how they help the other Sisters.  They are such a blessing to us.  This picture is of our Coordinadoras at our recent meeting.  Did we say they are amazing?  In addition to this responsibility many also serve by assignment as counselors in the Primary, Relief Society and Young Womens organization as needed in their respective branches.  They are certainly being prepared for future service in the church. 

This last picture is of one of the Coordinadoras that is going home this week.  She has been a wonderful and faithful missionary.  When we send a missionary home it is like sending a son or daughter away.  The love we have for them is incredible. 

Have a wonderful week.

 

Zone Conferences and Companionship Unity

Another wonderful week in the Misión Chile Rancagua.  Every week is full of activity. We are often gone by 8 AM and return late in the day and have the goal to retire by 11.  Normally the calls end by 11 which is when the missionaries are supposed to be in bed. Today included a final interview of a young man in Peralillo who is preparing to go on a mission and attendance at the branch in Peumo.  The countryside is magnificent and there is an abundance of agricultural activity everywhere. 

We did training for our new missionaries this week and also started our zone conferences.  Each conference includes two to three zones so there are from 30-52 missionaries at each one. We go over training topics to help the missionaries improve their techniques and their knowledge of the gospel.  In many of our meetings we have the missionaries do practical exercises to apply the things that they learn.  This round of conferences included topics on the Book of Mormon, how to teach repentance, dress standards for the summer (yes it is starting to be summer here!!!!), health, language study, working with less active members and other current topics.

After the zone conference we always have a lunch since most are too far from their areas to go back and eat.  This time we had a game after lunch where they were challenged to show their knowledge of Preach My Gospel (our manual for how to do missionary work), the Missionary Handbook (the standards for missionaries and other important topics) and the scriptures. This picture above show the game in progress.

The Elders and Sisters always  go two by two and we emphasize the need for unity in the companionships.  Often the Elders will wear the same color tie to the meetings as a show of unity and sometimes the Sisters wear something the same as well.  Here is a picture of two of the companionships of our wonderful Sisters wearing matching clothing at one of our meetings this week.

We sent four missionaries home this week and had 28 more arrive so we continue to grow.  That puts us at 290 right now but it ends with this transfer as the goal is to get us down to 250 missionaries (which is the ideal maximum size for a mission) by sometime next year so our numbers will slowly decline.

We are focused on three groups of people in our missionary work-those who want to know about the church, those who recently joined and those who aren't currently active.  We are seeing wonderful blessings with increasing numbers in each group every week.  This is bringing strength to the branches and wards and more are receiving the blessings of the temple. More on these three groups later.

Have a wonderful week.  Thanks for your love and prayers.