Mission Statement
The mission of ZionsArmy.com
is to do all we can to help members of the Church reach out to their Not Yet Member
friends and invite them to learn more about us.
There are some of you who will want to
know about our Mission Statement before you decide to Join Us! That is perfectly all
right. What follows are the reasons behind the launching of this site.
We are not an army in the strict sense of the word. Sorry to
disappoint some of you. For the rest, we chose the name because it is from my
favorite hymn, and because we really are the Hope of Israel…Zion’s Army,
children of the Latter-day.
I am a convert of the Church of about
25 years now. When I joined the Church, President Spencer W. Kimball was the
prophet. Almost the first thing I heard as a member was “Do It!” and
“lengthen your stride.” I didn’t know there was any other way of
working in the Kingdom! In retrospect, many have said that President Kimball was not
supposed to be a prophet very long, just kind of a caretaker, because of the enormous
health problems he had in his life, many thought he wouldn’t last long.
Interestingly enough, no one told President Kimball that. He was around
as our Prophet for about a
dozen years and during that time stirred our hearts and souls with his vision of the
future of the Church. He was small of stature but contained within his breast the
heart of a giant! He was intelligent and the Lord was on his side because of his
faith and works. We loved following him and it set the pattern for our lives in the
Church.
He hadn’t been the prophet very long when he met with all the
General Authorities and Regional Representatives of the Twelve and outlined for them how
the Gospel was to spread throughout the world. This was just a few months before my
wife and I were baptized. The plan was shocking in its scope. As I understand
it, the essence of what he said was that the Church could no longer be a North American
church, and we no longer had the capacity to provide leadership and missionaries for the
entire Church around the world. If we wanted to move boldly forward in a major way,
we would have to train members of the Church in other nations how to rely on themselves to
fill the ranks of the leadership positions and missions in their own countries. They
must bloom where they were planted and it was President Kimball’s charge to help make
that happen.
He looked at Asia and encouraged us to learn Mandarin Chinese.
Because of the sheer numbers of people, Asia will dominate many facets of our lives
throughout the next century. I just read somewhere today that the Middle Class in
Asia will soon number a half a billion people, if it doesn’t already. I think
that is a larger number than the populations of the U.S. and Europe put together. We
must prepare diligently to go to Asia and preach the Gospel, because that is where the
action is going to be for a long time.
He looked at Africa and pled with the Lord to open the ranks of
the Priesthood to the blacks and all other worthy male members of the Church. The
Lord answered him with a resounding Yes! The Church in Africa will grow mightily.
But to help them grow, for the time being they will still have to
rely on the tremendous prosperity and good fortune of those of us who live in the United
States. Our economic boom is building temples at a pace unheard of just a few years
ago. We still have by far the most impressive economic juggernaut the world has seen
and while we prosper we need to find those who will join us so they can help, too.
So, my early days in the Church set my pace and it was modeled
after the prophet, Spencer W. Kimball. Lengthen your stride and Do It!
As for
a Mission Statement, in the simplest of terms, the mission of
ZionsArmy.com is to do all we can to help members of the Church reach out to their Not Yet
Member friends and invite them to learn more about us.
What has been lacking as far as I have seen, is an effort to unite Member Missionaries in
a way that supports them in what they are doing. Through the Internet, you can find
out tons of information, and you can meet lots of nice people, but no one has thought to
put those two things together into one place and tie it into a HEROIC Goal!
That’s what we are doing at ZionsArmy.com.
Can you imagine deciding to embark on a quest to find
15,000
members of the Church who will adopt our Standard of Performance? Let
alone getting them to work together on the common goal of inviting
Not
Yet Members of the Church to come to a Church function and find out more about us?
With 15,000 people having a SETADATE within the next 60 days to refer
someone to the missionaries, the number of baptisms will rise
accordingly. I worked the numbers and I believe that if we
can get 15,000 people to invite one NYM a week, we can end up baptizing
double what we did last year in the U.S. and Canada! Because our economy is so good right now, this kind of
increase in baptism numbers would support a huge increase in the effort here
and in other parts of the
world.
I looked at the fact that we have been baptizing
about the same number of converts, 300,000, every year since 1987. Also, one out ten
people the missionaries are working with have been referred by members. One out of
ten! The other NINE we leave up to the missionaries to find. That’s a sad
state of affairs that we just have to reverse. And we can! We can! All we
have to do is set a Standard of Performance that is simple and straightforward enough to help us make
that happen and work together to Do It! ZionsArmy.com has coordinated the effort
hoping others will join in the work.
While I was in the Youth Guides as a Director we experimented with
all kinds of ways to get this kind of job done. What we ended up with was no less
miraculous because it was so simple.
All we did was ask those we were working with to join with us in
keeping a Standard of Performance and have in that Standard the things that will help make
us all successful. Work hard at the Standard and pray for the Lord to open the
hearts of the people you work with and whom you meet in your daily life and it will create
miracles in the lives of those who use it. We also learned that you
have to report on your standards, and that is part of what GUIDElines
2000 will be all about.
This site is not the most professional you will find, or the best
laid out, or backed by the largest funds…but it is very good (Thanx! to
Tim and Kathy Penrod), and has all you will
need to help President Hinckley in his quest to double the number of convert baptisms in
the Church. Our charge, yours and mine, is to spread the good news about
ZionsArmy.com to the entire Church world so that anyone who really wants to be a
successful member missionary can be one.
I hope and pray that you will find it in your heart to try it out.
I know that if you do, your efforts and success at missionary work will be
dramatically changed for the better.
May the Lord bless you in your decision.
Bro. P. |
