We were very grateful to have Lincoln, Rachel, and Connor join us in Knoxville for both Thanksgiving and Christmas. We’ve never lived apart as a family, and we’ve taken for granted that we could gather together anytime we wanted. Now that we live 1,800 miles apart, it was a special time to be back together.
Thanksgiving
Lincoln came into Knoxville the week before Thanksgiving, and Connor and Rachel joined us the week after Thanksgiving, which meant we were all together for one day…Thanksgiving Day. We packed a lot into that week:
Tennessee/Georgia football game and Neyland Stadium
Top Golf in a downpour
Visit to Dollywood
Thanksgiving!
Visit to the Giving Machines in Turkey Creek
Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga
Tennessee/Vanderbilt football game
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We were very grateful to have a visit from our neighbors in Utah, Jay and Amy Despain. They planned a fun trip to Nashville and were so kind to make the 2.5 hour drive to Farragut to go to lunch together. It was fun to spend time with these great friends.
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Christmas
We had everyone back together for the week of Christmas, with more fun that included:
Another trip to Dollywood (and more Cinnamon Bread…if you don’t know, look it up)
University of Tennessee men’s basketball game
Dolly Parton Christmas Stampede in Pigeon Forge
Buccee’s (again…if you don’t know…look it up) for brisket sandwiches, Beaver Nuggets, and Texas Cheesesteak Burritos
Kimberly’s new favorite restaurant…Chili’s (not sure how that happened)
Two zone conferences with the entire family
A family Christmas tradition: It’s a Wonderful Life
Our zone conferences in December turned out incredibly well, especially the hour that was dedicated to our Christmas program. It is always a powerful experience to gather groups of missionaries together to nourish our faith, build our skills, and strengthen our unity in the mission.
Our focus at this zone conference was to become “Master Planners”. Each week, missionaries spend 2 hours in weekly planning and 30 minutes each morning in daily planning. In these planning sessions, they plan to meet the needs of their friends they are teaching, how they can find more people to teach, and how they can unite with the leaders and members of their local congregations. We follow a specific process from Preach My Gospel of setting goals and making plans to reach those goals.
As these missionaries learn to set goals, make plans to accomplish them, and diligently carry out those plans, they begin to understand how a proactive mindset will bless them throughout the rest of their lives. These planning skills will help them to make and keep covenants with God, serve faithfully in the church, pursue education, grow in their employment, and build a strong family.
We also had a wonderful Christmas program to wrap up each zone conference. We read scriptures about the Christmas story, sang hymns, and enjoyed some incredible musical numbers as many missionaries shared their musical talents.
Cumberland and Knoxville Zones
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Chattanooga, Cleveland, and Cookeville Zones
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Asheville and Kingsport Zones
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The missionaries in the Tennessee Knoxville Mission love Sister Barlow! She has shared the most memorable messages in our zone conferences. In our last zone conference she talked about getting more gritty and “get gritty” has become somewhat of a slogan in the mission. In this conference she talked about the definition of a successful missionary, and steps they can take whenever they face discouragement in life.
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We prepared three gifts to give the missionaries. The first was a laminated daily schedule to remind them of our commitment to follow this schedule with exactness.
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The second was a special flip book of The Living Christ. Sister Barlow invited our mission to memorize The Living Christ by Valentine’s Day, and promised that memorizing this statement would help us to grow closer to Jesus Christ and draw the power of Jesus Christ into our lives.
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A new version of Preach My Gospel was released in June of this year. Our missionaries have been studying their digital copies while making it very clear that they prefer the paper copy to study. Our print copies have been on order since July, and everyone has been patiently waiting for the books to come in.
Just a few days before zone conference, we received our shipment of Preach My Gospel books, and we decided to surprise the missionaries with the books at zone conference.
Likely, only missionaries will understand their reactions:
Surprise gifts!
Christmas with copies of PMG
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We love these missionaries. Zone conferences are a highlight of each transfer and we are so grateful for every opportunity we have to gather together with them.
At the mid-point of their first transfer, we bring new missionaries and their trainers back to Knoxville for a day of training called “New Missionary Follow Up”. With 23 new missionaries and 23 trainers this last transfer, this meeting was the size of one of our zone conferences.
Of all the topics we could choose, we’ve felt that one of the most important skills these new missionaries can have is finding new people to teach. This is because Preach My Gospel teaches us that “Nothing happens in missionary work until you find someone to teach.”
But this is a challenging skill to learn. It requires overcoming fear and replacing it with the faith to find. It’s not natural for these missionaries to open their mouth and have the courage to talk with everyone. They are asked to initiate conversations with strangers, which isn’t a skill they typically start their mission with, so we focus all of New Missionary Follow Up on building the faith to find.
How do we do that? We take skills taught in Preach My Gospel and role play those skills over and over again. For example, skills like sharing our missionary purpose, asking inspired questions, using the Book of Mormon to answer questions, and inviting friends to learn more.
Role playing is another skill that usually has to be learned. In the beginning, missionaries are usually uncomfortable in role playing these skills. We remind them there is no growth in the comfort zone! We build skills through practice and repetition, and that practice for us as missionaries is role playing. This gives them the opportunity to practice themselves and hear the language others use that they can adopt.
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All morning is spent doing these role plays. After lunch, we take a couple of hours on learning how to find people through technology. Investing a day with these new missionaries helps them to learn these important skills, which leads to them feeling more confident in doing the things they are asked to do.
This is a really great group of missionaries and we are excited to spend the next 18 and 24 months with them.
Christmas is an amazing time to be a missionary. While it is common for missionaries to be missing home and thinking about family traditions that make Christmas special to them, it is remarkable to be a representative of Jesus Christ at a time when everyone is celebrating His birth.
To celebrate Christmas as a mission, we invited each zone to plan their own Christmas party. Zone leadership did a lot of work to get everything prepared. Every party was different yet a ton of fun as missionaries gathered together to celebrate in these smaller groups.
What did the missionaries do? Here are a few highlights:
Devotional that included Sister Barlow reading a Christmas story and sharing our family’s Christmas traditions.
A great devotional where we watched “The Christ Child” and missionaries shared thoughts on the perspective of Mary, Joseph, the angels, and the shepherds. The impressions missionaries shared were really powerful.
Dinners that ranged from pizza parties to a Mexican fiesta to a traditional Christmas ham. The homemade tortillas some friends made for the fiesta were especially good. And shout out to the Kingsport Relief Society for offering to prepare the meal for the Kingsport Zone.
Decorating gingerbread houses, but often with a twist. While some did gingerbread houses others recreated stories from the scriptures.
A Christmas piñata.
A visit from Santa Clause.
A corn hole tournament.
A pickle ball tournament, included a huge bracket to track the winners.
White elephant gifts.
A game from Elder Jentzsch called “A Dog. A Cat.”
An egg nog chugging contest.
Ugly sweater contests.
Basketball, spikeball, and volleyball.
Lots of other music and games.
We also had the opportunity to attend the Nativity that was put on by the Chattanooga Stake. It was absolutely incredible! For three days they completely transformed the stake center into a walk through experience of the nativity, beautiful displays of art, and so many talented stake members who provided music. We are already looking forward to attending it again next year.
At the beginning of each month we meet with the Mission Leadership Council. The mission is divided into “zones”, or geographical areas of missionaries, and each zone has four leaders: two sisters who are “sister training leaders” and two elders who are “zone leaders”.
These leaders spend time with the missionaries in their zone doing training, most of which is being side-by-side with them while doing missionary work. They set goals for zone and work with all of the missionaries to achieve those goals. They work hard to inspire their fellow missionaries and build their skills.
These leaders make up a council…the Mission Leadership Council…that leads the mission.
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As we meet each month with the Mission Leadership Council…or MLC…they set the goals for the mission, determine the training needed most, and are responsible for the culture of the mission.
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As we are closing in on six months here in the Tennessee Knoxville Mission, we decided to check in on key strengths and opportunities that the MLC sees in our mission culture.
We did this when we first arrived in the mission in July by using the question, “In the Tennessee Knoxville Mission we ___________.” Missionaries were invited to fill in the blank to help identify key attributes of our culture. Here is how the MLC completed that sentence in December 2023.
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We also gathered input on other questions like, “What do you see as the strengths in our culture in the TKM?”
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We counseled together about the biggest opportunities in our mission and decided that the most important opportunity we could focus on was planning. Preach My Gospel has an entire chapter on planning titled “Accomplish the Work Through Goals and Plans” that helps missionaries follow a process in setting goals, making plans, acting on those plans, and following up.
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In this chapter, missionaries learn key principles like:
Goal setting and planning are acts of faith. Goals reflect the desires of your heart and your vision for helping yourself and others come to the Savior. Carefully considered goals and plans will give you clear direction. Make your goal setting and planning an inspired experience. Pray earnestly, exercise faith, counsel with your companion, and follow the promptings of the Spirit. As you plan this way, you will feel the Lord working through you to bless others.
After reviewing these principles, we made plans on how we could train missionaries and build greater skills with planning in December. Our goal is for every missionary in the TKM to become a “Master Planner”.
I look back on my experience as a missionary and recognize it was the first place I began to learn important leadership skills that would help me for the rest of my life.
It was on my mission where I learned leadership principles like, “Assume people are doing the best they can, and if they are going to improve, it is up to me to help them to do it.” And “You can’t ask someone to do something you aren’t willing to do yourself.” And how to use principles like repetition and high love, high expectations in leading others.
These are leadership principles I’ve used throughout my life that I first learned as a missionary where I was assigned to lead others. And now these missionaries are learning many of those same lessons, and we hope these lessons will help them for the rest of their lives.
On November 30th, we welcomed 23 new missionaries to the Tennessee Knoxville Mission.
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These missionaries were greeted by the welcome posters created by the departing missionaries who had returned home the previous day.
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On their very first day, we teach these new missionaries skills around finding people to teach and then take them to the campus of the University of Tennessee to put these new skills to work. And these missionaries were amazing!
We shared with them that with the last group of new missionaries who arrived in October, when they visited the campus on their first day they found a man who was then taught by the missionaries and was baptized just the week prior to this new group’s arrival.
We said goodbye to another incredible group of missionaries on November 30th. This group has made a tremendous difference in the Tennessee Knoxville Mission: We’ve spent more time with each group who goes home now, so it continues to get more difficult to see them leave.
It was a very competitive 4th TKM Olympics with four events:
1) Corn hole 2) Bocce 3) Kub 4) Poster decoration
The poster decoration was a new event, but will likely stick because of the impact. These returning missionaries were asked to create welcome posters for the new missionaries who would arrive Thursday afternoon after this group had left Thursday morning. It was a beautiful day and we had a lot of fun.
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The poster decoration was very competitive. We were impressed how much effort these missionaries put into the assignment to welcome these new missionaries who they would not meet. It actually was really powerful.
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After all events were completed, Elder Putt and Elder Johnson were awarded the medals for their 1st place finish in the 4th TKM Family Olympics. It would have been more appropriate to get their picture taken while they still were wearing their Tennessee checkerboard overalls…but missionary attire will have to do.
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Before heading to the hotel, this group recorded one last “Tender Mercy” video to send our to their fellow missionaries in the TKM.
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We love these missionaries and wonder how we will be able to continue on without them. They are outstanding missionaries and have served incredibly well, and we know there are great things that lie ahead for them.
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.
Picture of the mission leaders in the North America Southeast Area who started in July 2023: Cluffs (Florida Fort Lauderdale Mission), Schmuins (Louisiana Baton Rouge Mission),
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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:
Build the faith that every area can baptize every month.
Ensure our testifying contacts are leading to new people being taught.
Double the number of lessons with members participating.
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.
I wanted to send you an email about the experience I had with the Book of Mormon Challenge you gave me. Even though I know that I already talked to you and thanked you at zone conference and shared a little bit about my experience I wanted to share a little more about the lessons you were able to teach me through this experience.
That challenge you gave me July 27th to read the whole Book of Mormon and to mark every referance to Jesus Christ was everything to me. That Book of Mormon you handed me my first day in the TKM has become my most prized possesion. I carry it with me always. In it you invited me to mark every single refferance to Jesus Christ, I also added and marked every verse I though would be a good “shareable” verse (this quickly turned into marking two consecutive scriptures to share for the finding flow). The lessons I’ve learned from this challengenge… I couldn’t even begin to list them all but I wanted to share a couple.
The first lesson I learned was that Christ is everywhere. As I earnestly looked for him in the Book of Mormon I found myself findng him not just in the verses in the Book of Mormon but in every aspect of my life. On every hard day I could find him (even on the days it was really hard), mainly what I’m trying to say right now is thank you for teaching me how to look for Jesus Christ in ever aspect of my life.
The second lesson I learned changed the outlook I had on my mission. The first few weeks of my mission I was questioning ALL my life decisions. The mission was nothing like I ever expected and I felt absolutly completely unprepared and I have never seriously considered throwing in the towel, but that frist week the reality that I would be doing this for the next 18 months really hit me (and not in a good way).
But because I had taken your challenge I was reading in 1 Nephi 3 and I’ve always loved verse 7 but thats not the verse that stood out to me this time. This time it was verse 15 which says, “As the Lord liveth, and as we live, we will not go down unto our father in the wilderness until we have accomplished the things which the Lord hath commanded us.” and this scripture kept me on my mission. I know that God has commanded me to be here that he has commanded me to serve here and as the Lord liveth I will not go home until I have accomplished the mission that the Lord has prepared for me.
As you were talking about grit in zone conference this scripture came into my mind again and I believe that this is the Grit that you and God has asked us to have. To keep trying to stay, to keep trying over and over again every day no matter what the “Labans” of the mission throw at us. To not go home (to our apartments or our families,) until we have finsihed the work that he has for us to do.
So thank you for this challenge and thank you for setting me up for succes for the rest of my mission and my life. I don’t think there will ever be a point where I can thank you enough.
Love, Sister Hall
Side note: if you want to know how many references to Christ there are I couldn’t tell you but I can tell you that I used up my whole green pen and had to get a new one around the book of Ether haha.
On October 19th, we welcome 20 new missionaries to the TKM. We couldn’t be more excited about every one of them and know they will love Tennessee and the wonderful people here.
By the time they arrive in Tennessee, these missionaries have had a really long day. They typically got very little sleep there last night at the MTC. We take them from the airport to the mission home, feed them a good meal, and get them to bed to get rested before their orientation day.
The next morning, we share what they can expect in the Tennessee Knoxville Mission, provide orientation about finances, health care, vehicles, and the places they will live, take them to the University of Tennessee campus to do some finding, and snap a picture with each of them.
Following the morning of orientation, we announce the area they will start in and who their trainers will be, and by 1pm they head out and get to work.
Over the last three transfers, we had 18 missionaries arrive in July, 21 in September, and 20 in October. That is 59 new missionaries since we arrived, which is 1/3 of our mission. We currently have 41 missionaries in training, with 41 trainers, which is just under half of our mission. We’ve seen some amazing missionaries return home, but they continue to be replaced by these remarkable men and women who are ready to serve.
Barlows in TKM 