First, let me say your presentation was TERRIFIC! It was a great idea to bring in your missionary “reinforcements.” All of you did an outstanding job!
As to your question, I felt you explained very well as to how the Self-Reliance Initiative can work into our ministering efforts. The ongoing survey results are also extremely compelling.
One of the draw backs you’re facing is that everyone is trying to tie their program or initiative into ministering right now. For instance, at the request of the mission president, we conducted a special meeting inJune with all Ward Council members, full-time missionaries and the mission president in trying to emphasize the importance of engaging the full-time missionaries in our ministering (you’d think it would be a natural thing to use these “set apart ministers,” but they’re often overlooked). Furthermore, we tried to encourage EQ and RS presidents to assume more leadership for the ward missionary work in conjunction with the Ward Mission Leader.
The feedback from the meeting was, in short, it’s too much! "We’re still trying to get our arms around this and you’re already placing more layers onto the ministering program.”
So you’re definitely on the right track, but candidly you’re competing with a lot of other similar voices.
I wasn’t going to say anything to you until we’ve tried it, but we’re still VERY committed to Self-Reliance in our stake, even though our numbers after the first round have not been impressive. We’re rolling out a variation of the Self-Reliance Initiative next month with an emphasis to ask every adult in our stake to take the Personal Finances course.
The two documents attached will give you an overview of what we hope to do. We, of course, don’t know if it’ll work (hence I didn’t want to tell you about it until we’ve tried), but our hope is that more members in our stake will participate and catch the vision of how Self-Reliance can make a difference.
The statistics you’ve shared with us are so compelling, like you said in our meeting, there’s absolutely nothing we’re doing in the Church right now that has generated this kind of change in the lives of people. So we’re "going for broke" to see if we can change the attitude about Self-Reliance in our stake. We hope it’s not wrong to vary the program a little (i.e. replace the devotional with a 3rd hour meeting for all adults in every ward).
We’ve already announced to bishops and ward leaders that we plan to take their 3rd hour on Sept. 16 in a special combined meeting for all adults and to please plan accordingly.
We’d appreciate you not sharing this with others until we’ve tested it.
We appreciate so much your ongoing support. We’ll keep you posted on how it plays out. And, of course, we welcome your counsel if you have any concerns.
Gratefully,
Crismon
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