Momentum Building in the TKM!

Mission Leader Seminar

In October, we were invited to the Mission Leader Seminar in Orlando, Florida where we had the opportunity to meet the mission leaders of the 15 other missions in the North America Southeast Area. This meeting is hosted by the area presidency (Elder Stanfill, Elder Bowen, Elder Bassett, and Elder Corbitt) where they provide training and instruction to the mission leaders in the area. It was incredibly helpful and we left feeling very uplifted.

As part of the week, we took a short break and went to “Wild Florida” where we were introduced to airboats, alligators, and many other animals in the park.

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The highlight of the trip for us was the afternoon we were able to go to the Orlando Florida Temple. As we don’t have a temple in our mission, we don’t get to attend the temple as often as we’d like, so this was something we were looking forward to and really appreciated.

Mission Leadership Council

While at the temple, we felt some strong impressions about direction to bring back to our missionaries, which included:

1. Build the faith that every area can baptize every month.
2. Ensure our testifying contacts are leading to new people being taught.
3. Double the number of lessons with members participating.
4. Be bolder with the invitation to be baptized and confirmed.

We brought these themes back and shared them with our Mission Leadership Council on Halloween. We’ve recently made a lot of changes with MLC where many leaders have moved to training, and new leaders were brought onto the MLC. We love this group! They have so much faith and do a great job of serving the missionaries in their zones. With their feedback, we created the training plan for zone conferences in November.

New Missionary Follow Up

But before we got to zone conferences, we had our mid-transfer follow up with our new missionaries and their trainers. This is a really great group of missionaries. We spend a morning together doing training and role plays focused on building our finding skills. This often is the biggest challenge for new missionaries. The don’t typically come with much experience of stopping strangers and engaging them in a conversation about the restored gospel of Jesus Christ, so those are skills we have to practice and work to improve. This group is doing it!

Zone Conferences

We felt these zone conferences may end up being some of the most memorable we will have in the Tennessee Knoxville Mission. The missionaries were very engaged and willing to act on the four impressions we felt at the temple. Sister Barlow shared a message about the need to have more grit that will be remembered. We made a change for these zone conferences with our training and role plays. In the past we’ve has the Assistants and our lead Sister Training Leaders join us at zone conferences to facilitate the training, but we changed to having the zone leadership teams do all of the training and role plays, and they did an amazing job with training on the invitation to be baptized and confirmed and ensuring our testifying contacts are focused on getting return appointments.

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There is something special happening in the Tennessee Knoxville Mission. Spiritual momentum is a real thing, and you can feel it with these missionaries. They are working extremely hard to implement everything they are asked to do. They have so much faith and are so willing to do anything that will help more people come unto Christ. Their efforts are starting to pay off in how they help others, but we feel more than anything, it is helping them become lifelong disciples of Jesus Christ. They are amazing!

One of the great blessings of this service is the opportunity for us to serve side-by-side with them. We love them and feel so inspired by them every day.