Mission Improbable

By Pria Anand
Faith and Globalization Contest 2009

In St. George, Utah, Randen Syphus’ hometown, it hardly ever rains. But one Saturday night in July, Syphus is far from home, and as the blue Dodge Caravan he rides in sidles up to the curb, he steps out of the passenger seat to a New Haven sky heavy with rain clouds. In black suits, collared white shirts, nametags, and ties, Syphus and Chris Eyres, his companion, are strangely formal, out of place amidst the abandoned, broken-windowed industrial buildings northwest of the Yale Divinity School.

Just 21 years old, Syphus and Eyres make for unlikely religious shepherds, but for the past two years, this has been their job. Both left their homes in Utah to serve two-year, full-time mission trips for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints that eventually brought them to the Elm City. In 2006, they numbered among the over 80 percent of 19-year-old boys from Mormon families who undertake such trips.

During his first weeks in New Haven, a passerby stopped Syphus on this street and warned him not to return at night unless he wanted to risk being shot. Now, he’s walked it an uncountable number of times, and he confidently ushers Eyres across the wide parking lot of the Sheffield Oaks apartment complex.

The downpour hasn’t yet started when the two enter the first-floor vestibule. Syphus punches in the access code and they climb to the second floor, where a woman named Beulah lives. When they reach her door, Syphus is the one who knocks—one long, four shorts, two longs. They wait. Beulah has no phone, but Syphus has visited her apartment for their thrice-weekly standing date enough times to know: “She’s not here. If she was, she’d have yelled for us by now.”

They descend the back stairway a little more slowly than they ascended it, looking for a place to sit down. When they stop at a wooden porch by a dumpster in the parking lot, the sky finally breaks open, and they sprint for the van. “We just can’t catch a break,” they groan over their shoulders.

The seclusion and asceticism the Mormon Church demands of missionaries like Syphus and Eyres is a far cry from the hedonism of college. Yet the Church manages to deploy over fifty thousand full-time Mormon missionaries across the globe, the vast majority of whom are men and women in their early 20s. Although their methods vary, they are all geared toward a common goal: to recruit converts to the Mormon Church. And while they’ve all faced countless rejections in their quest to share their faith, these young missionaries’ efforts have undoubtedly helped make Mormonism one the fastest-growing religions in the world.


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On a Sunday morning in May, Syphus sat in the middle row of an assembly room in a modest brick building on Trumbull Street. The blue folding chairs were filled with the entire New Haven ward of the Mormon Church, congregants of every demographic. In the back row, a young blond man repeated the sermon in quiet Spanish into a black headset; roughly a fifth of the congregants listened to his translation through receivers and headphones they grabbed from an over-full bin by the door. The church has no shortage of Spanish translators, Ward Bishop Mike Turner explained, because of the number of former missionaries who learned the language in order to serve trips in Spanish-speaking countries.

The Mormon Church is known for its painstaking missionary reach not just into Spanish-speaking areas, but into almost every corner of the world, an approach that has successfully turned a once-persecuted religion into a global faith. There are 344 “missions”—geographic regions to which missionaries may be assigned—across the globe, and almost the entire populated world falls within one of these sets of boundaries. Syphus and Eyres serve in the Connecticut Hartford Mission, which means that they may be reassigned at a moment’s notice to any of a number of sites in Connecticut, Rhode Island, or Massachusetts.

In New Haven, the pair splits their time between “tracting”—choosing a neighborhood and knocking on every door—“street contacting,” or stopping passersby on the sidewalk, and arranging meetings with “investigators” like Beulah who have already expressed an interest in their message. Although they’ve found the last tactic to be the most effective, they often run the risk of being stood up, or, in missionary lexicon, “boached.” “Lately,” says Syphus dryly, “our boach rate has been higher than desirable.”

To compensate for such incidences, New Haven missionaries often take a more scattershot approach, starting conversations on city buses about sports teams and the weather and waiting for the inevitable question about their clothes, or the black-and-white nametags emblazoned with their title and surname—“Elder Syphus,” “Elder Eyres.”

Before he completed his mission in June, Eyres’s predecessor Justin Smith resorted to even more unconventional tactics to reach out in New Haven. To draw students, he and Syphus set up an afternoon study room on the fourth floor of 84 Trumbull Street, advertising free Internet access and a limited library. He e-mailed a Yale Divinity School professor in the hopes of lecturing his class on Mormonism—“that didn’t really work out.” Once, he stood on a box in Elm Street, opened his arms, and started preaching his gospel to passersby, and another time, he invited a trumpet player panhandling outside the British Art Center to accompany his preaching with a rendition of “When the Saints Go Marching In.” On Wednesdays, he and Syphus played pickup football at the park, fielding the inevitable questions about their faith by offering a copy of the Book of Mormon and tutoring sessions on the scriptures.

Missionaries are expected to rise each morning at 6:30 to study the scriptures as well as to plan lessons for the day, exercise, and eat. The hours from 10 a.m. until 9 p.m. are set aside for missionary work—proselytizing and service—and missionaries are expected to be in bed by 10:30 p.m. They are allowed one “preparation day” per week, for buying groceries, doing laundry, cleaning, and letter-writing—for Syphus and Smith, it was pickup football Wednesdays—and they attend Sacrament meetings on Sundays.

But in spite of the thousands of hours spent knocking on doors and distributing pamphlets, the Church relies on its quantity of missionaries, rather than their rate of conversion, to spread the faith: Church statistics estimate that an average of just 4.7 new converts join the Church for each year one missionary spends on the job.

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All missionaries attend one of 17 Missionary Training Centers (MTCs) worldwide before embarking on their trips. Most are sent to the MTC in Provo, Utah, where they spend between three weeks—if they will be proselytizing in English—and three months studying the scriptures and learning the intricacies of both teaching their gospel and speaking the language they will adopt for the next two years. Before embarking on his trip to the Poland-Warsaw mission in 1998, Turner attended two four- to five-hour Polish language classes and an evening session on the gospel every day for nine weeks at the MTC.

Yet, when he arrived in Poland, a country that is 89 percent Catholic, Turner was faced with a challenge that no number of classes could have prepared him for. “People say that you’re not a Pole if you’re not Catholic,” he says. “The people who joined the Mormon Church in Poland sacrificed a lot to join and were denounced by their families.” While he was there, the one hundred missionaries throughout the country saw just sixty baptisms each year.

The numbers are daunting, but Turner says that he never used them to measure his success as a missionary. “Success is really anytime you help to convey to someone that God lives,” he says. “It doesn’t mean that they join the church.”

Yale junior Sebastian Swett, for his part, judged his success as much by what he learned as by what he taught during his trip to Italy. His experience with one family whom he met during the second year of his mission particularly affected him. He visited their house two or three times a week over the course of seven months. “They really opened their home to me,” he says. “It was the closest I have ever felt to being in a family other than my own.” Both parents and all three daughters were baptized, which he describes as the prototypical mission success, but “that wasn’t what mattered” for Swett.
 What did matter was that he felt a degree of responsibility toward the family. They had made drastic changes in their lives in order to join the Church, giving up coffee and wine and paying tithes.

What also mattered was a feeling Swett experienced one day in their kitchen before their baptisms. He found himself humbled by this family, humbled at the thought of teaching them about religion. “As a family, they already embodied the love and goodness that God wants,” he says. “Who was I to be teaching them?”