Door by door: Making the sale to save souls

Posted on May 16, 2015 by Riley Manning in Lifestyle, Religion

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Sasha Vilanova, of Tupelo, greets Sister Crandall and Sister Gibbs, of the Mormon Church, at her door Thursday in Tupelo.

By Riley Manning

Daily Journal

Maybe you know how it is.

It’s a middle-of-the-week night and one of your children needs help with their homework, perhaps another is crying. You or your spouse is trying to whip up something to eat while the other is trying to get another child dressed for a little league game that starts in 10 minutes.

Then comes a knock at the door, someone asking, “Do you have a moment to talk about our Lord Jesus Christ?” Or, “Do you know where you’ll spend eternity?”

“Timing is a big part of it,” said sister Abby Gibbs, a Mormon and Utah native. “If people are busy, we ask to come back later.”

Gibbs is serving her customary, but not required, two-year mission, and has been in Tupelo since the middle of January. Door-to-door ministry is a hallmark of evangelical denominations, but with other cultures filtering into the area, along with a changing landscape of faith at large, evangelists never know what they’re going to get when they knock.

Going off script

Elders Austin Turley, originally from Las Vegas, and AJ Yergensen, from Utah, are another pair of Mormon missionaries serving in Tupelo.

“The first door of the day is always the hardest,” Yergensen said. “After that, it gets easier. You get into a rhythm.”

“Once I knocked and someone inside said, ‘Come in,’ and when I did, they were in the middle of doing some drugs,” Turley said. “They were friendly, which is maybe natural under those circumstances. But it’s hard for the spirit to work under conditions like that.”

The crux of mission work, Turley said, is discernment and trust. Missionaries don’t have a quota of houses they have to hit in an allotted time, but they try to visit as many as possible. Each day, he said, he and his partner missionary pray about which neighborhood to start with.

“We try to feel out the person to know about what to talk about,” said Sister Jessica Crandall, another Mormon missionary in Tupelo, but originally from Washington state. “If we see they have lots of kids, we ask, ‘Have you ever wondered if you’ll be with your family in the afterlife?’ If they say they are people of no certain faith, we might ask them if there are any questions they have. Sometimes we might start with a statement of purpose, you know, who we are and what we do.”

Tim Alexander, minister of education at Harrisburg Baptist Church, heads the church’s door-to-door ministry. Each Tuesday, between 30 and 50 Harrisburg members spend a few hours spreading the good news. Ministers go through a 12-session training program, eight of which take place in a classroom, while the other four are practice runs; ministering under various situations enacted by other Harrisburg members.

“It’s a good opportunity to meet people where they’re at,” Alexander said. “Sometimes it’s not even people in houses, it’s folks standing on the corner. As Baptists, we believe in divine appointments, God putting us in the right place at the right time.”

Their general outline hits the high points of forgiveness, being saved, and heaven, and uses a few go-to scripture verses.

“But we don’t fire into that right off,” said Harrisburg member Kathryn Walden. “It’s far more important to create a relationship, a bond, with who we’re talking to. It’s more about having a regular conversation than having something memorized.”

The Mormons agreed.

“The biggest thing we can do is show people we’re not robots,” Turley said. “We had lives before our mission, and by sharing our own experiences, we can relate with others.

While those they visit may not be familiar with the finer points of Mormonism, most of them are somewhat familiar with the process of a two-year mission.

“Most people know we’ve sacrificed a lot,” Gibbs said. “There are people we’ve met, and we came away knowing we were supposed to meet. That’s what we pray for every day, knowing who to talk to and what to talk about.”

Measuring success

When selling a product, cars, for instance, effectiveness can usually be reduced to a numbers game. A salesman who closes the deal eight out of 10 times, for instance, may regard himself as successful.

But salvation works a little differently. It’s not just the few years’ investment in a car at stake, but eternity.

John Simmons, a Harrisburg layman, said, though, that God works in mysterious ways. An encounter that might not seem to have gone well may be a seed that comes to beautiful fruition in a span of years if not decades.

“When we visit someone, we don’t know exactly what we’ve accomplished this side of heaven,” he said. “Door-to-door ministering is how we obey the great commission in the Bible, to go out and spread the word about eternity. It’s also important to understand, the results of what we do are not something we’re responsible for. God gets that credit.”

Crandall also said that a missionary’s job is simply to present and inform people on the gospel. The terms of what “success” means can be a little fuzzier than the ratio of souls lost and souls saved.

“Sometimes people get heated about it, but we’re here to teach, not argue. If there’s contention, there is no spirit,” Crandall said. “There’s a saying, ‘A man convinced against his will, is of the same opinion still.’”

At the end of the day, Turley said, much of the responsibility lies with the person to whom they’re talking.

“Of course you worry you’re bothering people, until you realize nothing is more important in their lives than getting to know Christ,” he said. “We have confidence in what we’re doing, otherwise we wouldn’t leave our families. Hopefully, people see that and say, ‘What do you have that I don’t?’ But people have their own decisions to make. For us, our task is to make sure they know the offer of salvation is always on the table.”

riley.manning@journalinc.com