APO AE 09213-1315
August 2, 1994
Editor
Church News
30 East 1st So.
Salt Lake City, UT 84111
Sir:
As Counselor to John Morrey, President of the Romania-Bucharest Mission, I had recent occasion to attend an Arrival/Departure Testimony Dinner for 10 departing and 12 arriving missionaries. Needless to say it was an spiritual affair, with the departing elders and sisters (six sisters) bearing their testimonies and passing on words of counsel to their replacements -- and the arriving elders and sisters (again, six) saying how much they had been looking forward to their mission calls and how grateful they were for the privilege of having been called to serve in a land just emerging from the darkness of communist rule and where the Church has now been established for only two and a half years. The young folks were impressive: sharp minds, nicely dressed, well-spoken. Highly representative of the Lord and his Church.
The number of participants being 22, put me in mind of an earlier life experience which took place just forty years ago and which readers of the Church News might find of interest.
I had recently completed my own mission (to Scotland), where by coincidence the number of elders and sister missionaries happened to be 22, and had just passed the examination for entry into the U.S. Foreign Service, perhaps the most selectively elite group in United States government service. Each year over thirty thousand individuals, among the brightest and best educated in the country, take the Foreign Service written examination. Among the some two thousand who pass the written exam, about two hundred survive the oral examination process. And of these, working from the top of the list down, between seventy and a hundred (depending on the State Department budget and attrition among serving FSOs) are offered appointment. My own class, which entered the Service in July 1955, of exactly 22 individuals -- by pure coincidence the same number of missionaries I'd recently been serving with in Scotland (and the same number at the Arrival/Departure dinner here in Bucharest).
As my wife and I, entertaining back and forth, got to know our new Foreign Service colleagues, graduates of Princeton, Harvard, Swarthmore and West Point, (and the University of Utah), the thought struck us how fortunate we were to be associating with such a select group of young Americans (only two women in my class). Bright, well-educated, well-spoken, and well turned out, it was the best group the American State Department had been able to identify to represent the people of the United States abroad after extensive examination and testing. The thought early presented itself that the group they most reminded me of, bright, dedicated, clean minded (not a cuss word heard in our three months training program together at the Foreign Service Institute in Washington, D.C.), was the group of LDS Missionaries I'd been associating with only a few months earlier in Scotland.
I had the same impression the other evening dining with the group of Romanian missionaries, which stimulated me to write this short article for the Church News. The Lord seems to find diplomats to represent Him to the world by calling young men and women (be it noted the Church appears to be three times as representative in calling young women than the State Department), from Lewiston, Idaho; Phoenix, Arizona; Layton, Utah; Pasadena, California; or Calgary, Alberta -- though the Lord's examination process depends far more on moral worthiness than academic brilliance.
Some readers may question how the Church's missionaries stack up in some of these other aspects compared to the State Department's rigorous selection process. Well, at my last post, Beijing, China, where, because of the stress of living and professional demands, the Foreign Service looks for only the best of its already elite service, there were twelve members of the LDS Church assigned to the Embassy, including the Minister Counselor for Commercial Affairs (called to serve while still Embassy Minister Counselor as President of the Taijung, Taiwan Mission) -- by far the largest number I'd encountered at any one post in nearly forty years of service.
I've been impressed for years that the Lord's calls, made through inspiration, are equivalent, or superior, to the nation's selections through intensive examination. And after forty years observation, it can be said with confidence that the dedication, devotion, and allegiance to the work being performed by LDS missionaries are also equivalent, or superior, to that of America's corps of professional diplomats. And, need one add, that the stature, wisdom, and success of LDS Mission Presidents in achieving their goals, is certainly equivalent to that of America's professional ambassadors who have risen to the top as the elite of the elite. I've often reflected that The Twelve -- several of whom I know well -- could at the wave of a wand, readily substitute in terms of wisdom, judgment and experience for the Board of Directors of the best-managed corporation in the world (and taking into account recent shenanigans in some top corporations, I'm sure many stockholders, if they knew The Twelve, would be delighted to see such translation take place). And the Seventy and any number of Bishops and Stake Presidents could without doubt take over management of almost any well--run company with little time lost mastering the learning curve.
With the product the we have to "sell", the Restoration of the Lord's Church and His Plan of Salvation, is it any wonder that the Church is the fastest growing organization of comparable size anywhere in the world?
David Brighton Timmins
U.S. Foreign Service Officer (ret.)
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