Berger's kind of Missionary

March 13 Berger
Control is one of the major questions of human experience. Most crime is committed in the name of a person wanting control over someone or something else. Politics, so some extent, is the same as crime, only legalized. Bad religion, like the brain-washing cultists and money-digging televangelists, seems to simply be the arena of the savvy, smart criminals. They can do the same things as the common criminals (steal, lie, commit sexual crimes, even kill), but they do not have to force anyone to do it. Rather, they coercion to convince their victims to freely give it. Good religion, those that are known by their “good fruits,” does not employ coercive tactics; but control is still at the center of the issue. Good religion tries to turn control over to responsible individuals who will act in a moral way. Human beings seem to have a propensity to be in control.
Berger sees this, and seemingly quite clearly. He sees our propensity to construct order out of chaos; to remove ourselves from the construction of our reality. And this element of sociological commentary seems to explain LDS full-time missionary work. Missionaries leave to serve with a degree of expectancy to see a lot of “success.” They may have the idea in their mind that their sacrifice of time, their parents’ money, and their lost opportunities for girlfriends, school, work, or athletics puts them in a position of being owed; as if they now deserve to find, teach, and baptize a lot of people. Some enter this world thinking that they’ve done the work they need to do and made the decisions they need to make, and now the world of missionary work is constructed in such a way to absolve them from the burden of creation. There is seemingly a world already created for them. They have done their part, now all they have to do is go participate.
Now only talking about the missionary who mistakenly feels entitled, he starts to see discrepancy between what they expected would happen and reality. He may start to blame his companion for their lack of investigators. He may blame the members for their lack of referrals. He may even turn against God by reminding Him of the missionary’s grand sacrifices and blessings that have already been promised to the missionary. He will likely give God an ultimatum not unlike “If I talk to ten families a day for a month, then You will send me a family to baptize;” or “If I wake up an hour early every day to exercise then You will give me the gift of tongues.” This will lead the missionary to be more discouraged and confused because they were so set on their pre-conceived notion of what it means to be “successful.”
Very few of this typification of missionary will go home early. (Even as I write about Berger’s theory I feel the need to routinize my analysis.) Most will stay, but they will sink or swim. Those who sink live from P-Day to P-Day, checking them off until the time they can go home. But they do not strive to construct order out of the chaos. The missionaries who swim feel the need to come up with a routine. “But I can’t come up with a routine myself. This is not my time,” he says to himself and to God. “This time belongs to the Lord. I have to do it His way.” The Lord’s way, when serving a mission, is obedience. These missionaries find security in that obedience: it is their reality; the construct that they feel compelled to follow. They search the scriptures for elements of construction that God has already established. The rules and commandments that they are to follow are external to their own world.
However, serving a mission, like just about anything else, is what the individual makes it. As the missionary follows the rules, and in so doing finds the answers that eluded him at his pretentious beginning, he makes those rules his own. They have meaning only inasmuch as the missionary gives them. And if the rules are important enough to the missionary, he naturally finds his will aligning with God’s will, and realizes from then on that it was the missionary’s construct the whole time. And God helped it along.