Facebook

 I haven't talked about this while posting on this BLOG, but missionary work has changed because we are not allowed to talk to people on the streets like missionaries used to do.  It is against COVID-19 restrictions.  So, we have switched to using Facebook as our missionary contacting tool.  As senior missionaries, it is not our job to find people to teach any more than any other member of the church, but the young missionaries ARE tasked with finding people.  In our new, isolated World, they spend their days posting on Facebook about things that they enjoy.  When people respond to their posts, they make friends, and when their new friends ask about why they are here in a foreign land, they explain about their calling as missionaries and this leads to gospel discussions.  It is less intrusive than stopping people on the streets, and we have found it to be much, much more effective.  In this time of massive unemployment and forced isolation, people are online more and are open to exploring things.  Elder Uchtdorf instructed us to be "normal and natural" in this work, and as we make friends.  He feels that we will never go back to the kind of tracting and street-contacting we used to do.  

   At the start of it, one companionship of young missionaries were tasked with creating a Facebook page for the Adriatic North Mission, with content about the gospel and the church.  Then, there was a page for each of the five countries in the mission, and finally a page for each major city in each country.  While we've been narrowing our focus to the cities, we have also found quite a few people who are outside our boundaries, because Facebook doesn't recognize or work with boundaries.  Our missionaries are teaching people all over the World, even while trying to find people here.  Today, the Mission President announced that we are going to be spreading out our view into the rural areas, so that we are not just focusing on the cities.

   We are using Zoom and WhatsApp video for teaching in a lot of cases, although face-to-face teaching is still best and we do it when we can.  In the beginning of using Facebook, it was assumed that the young missionaries would be technologically savvy and able to do the work in novel ways.  That was mostly correct, but some of them were like me - techie, but not a fan of Facebook.  They worked at it and have gotten better and better.  More recently, the Area has assigned a Facebook expert and a marketing expert to give us weekly lessons on how to be effective missionaries and use Facebook even better.  Their presentations have been fascinating.  This doesn't affect what we are teaching or how we make connections with people, but it seriously affects how good we are at making our initial contacts with them.  More people are being taught than we even dreamed of before we turned to Facebook.

    There are other social networking tools that we could be using, but we have focused on Facebook  so that we can all learn together and can help each other.  In the future, we may use the other programs, but meanwhile the missionaries have become so good with it they are teaching about as many people as they possibly can.  One of our current worries is that we are making so many new contacts that we might loose track of some of them that are already interested in learning more about the gospel.

   We love the missionaries assigned to work with us here.  They are wonderful, and inventive, and interesting, and enthusiastic.  What a marvelous thing we have been allowed to do by coming here to SLOVENIA.