It seems that Elder Teal has a new role, Branch barber !
"Hey! It's been yet another good week! Little bit slower than last week without international flights, but still good! I did go up to Nicosia to bring Elders Dastrup and Kitsell back to Larnaca for an exchange, so that was fun. We also had two members bring friends to church on Sunday which was fantastic!
This afternoon (P-Day) I gave Panayiotis a haircut which was fun,"
Hair cutting pays well .....
"A highlight was that we received a member referral this week, and then called the guy to invite him to church. He came, and we had a lesson whilst we were there which went really well, and we set a baptismal date for August 29th!
I've also really started to see that our success/failure in terms of numbers largely isn't down to us at all. It's the Lord that is hastening His work, not us, and it's just down to us to keep up! As we work hard and learn how to be better missionaries, He puts opportunities in our path as he knows we're ready to use them!"
We emailed Elder Teal to tell him we had driven to Scotland to be at his Trainers home coming talk
"That's great that you went up to see Brother Lyttel's (haha that's weird) homecoming talk! I'm glad you enjoyed it, he was always a good speaker whilst he was here as well. And I'm glad you got to hear some of the stories from our transfer together firsthand, it still stands as the transfer of my mission with the most weird and funny things that happened!"
"Sisters Huby and East have left Nicosia and gone to Athens to be with Sister Bakewell, who's companion Sister Birch goes home today. Also with Sisters McKenna and Deeley having left from Limassol, Elders Burton and Velasquez are now covering both Paphos and Limassol, for a total of 3 proselyting areas! Today Elder Murphy has been moved to Athens as well to be with Elders Deighton and Peel, so we now have only 8 missionaries in the whole of Cyprus! I have two companionship's in my district, and the other two districts are single companionship's!"
Panayiotis has been busy with the missionaries this week and taking sneaky videos too..
"Haha I never realise when he's doing a video, I always think it's just a picture until I see him chuckling away to himself as he holds the camera!"
Finally I shared in my email some thoughts on the relationship and roles of members and missionaries, asking for his thoughts
"Of course missionaries have a responsibility to find too, but it probably shouldn't be the focus. Our "Key Indicators" don;t even count missionary contacts (eg people the missionaries have met and gott contact information for) but do count referrals (from members, investigators, or even people in the street). Elsewhere in PMG it tells us that if a proselyting activity doesn't contribute to our key indicators, we should question whether or not we will continue with it. If it takes working with the members, building relationships, and helping them to talk to their friends for let's say 10 hours in a week in order to get even one referral in that week, the chance of that one person being baptised are probably still higher than for any one of the sum of the people you would find with 10 hours of street contacting or door knocking.
We have to be out finding and door knocking as many times that's the only way that someone the Lord has prepared for the Gospel will be able to hear about it, but like you said, I think the question should definitely be how can the missionaries help the members, and not only how can the members help the missionaries.
