Buenas tardes, hermanos y hermanas—good afternoon, brothers and sisters. For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Bethylene, and I just returned from the Pennsylvania Philadelphia Mission, where I taught the gospel in both English and Spanish. Today I would like to talk to you about the lost sheep: who they are, why they should be found, and who is responsible for bringing them back to the fold.
The first prophet in the Book of Mormon, Lehi, had a dream in which he saw the tree of life—representing the love of God manifested in His Son, Jesus Christ—laden with sweet, white fruit that was “desirable above all other fruit” (1 Nephi 8:12). The fruit represented eternal life. As the people of the earth journeyed through the darkness of sin, only a part of them held fast to the word of God and arrived at the tree of life. However even eating the fruit of the tree of life, which “filled [Lehi’s] soul with exceedingly great joy” (1 Nephi 8:12) was not enough to prevent some from giving in to worldly pressures. Lehi described their fall thus:
And after they had partaken of the fruit of the tree they did cast their eyes about as if they were ashamed. And I also cast my eyes round about, and behold, on the other side of the river of water, a great and spacious building; and it stood as it were in the air, high above the earth. And it was filled with people, both old and young, both male and female; and their manner of dress was exceedingly fine; and they were in the attitude of mocking and pointing their fingers towards those who had come at and were partaking of the fruit. And after they had tasted of the fruit they were ashamed, because of those that were scoffing at them; and they fell away into forbidden paths and were lost.
1 Nephi 8:25–28
The people who tasted the love of God ad were then lost have always fascinated me. These lost partakers of eternal life are some of the lost sheep of which Jesus asks, “What man of you, having an hundred sheep, if he lose one of them, doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost, until he find it?” Rather than condemning the lost sheep for leaving the Church, Christ answers their weakness with a greater outpouring of love. “And when he hath found it, he layeth it on his shoulders, rejoicing. And when he cometh home, he calleth together his neighbours, saying unto them, Rejoice with me; for I have found my sheep which was lost. I say unto you, that likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance” (Luke 15:4–7).
We can easily identify the lost sheep in this parable, but who are the shepherds? Of course, Christ Himself is the greatest—the Good Shepherd with a capital g and a capital s, but in the last general conference, Elder L. Tom Perry affirmed that, additionally, “member missionaries—both you and I—are the shepherds” (Ensign, May 2009, 109). Sisters and brothers, my experiences on my mission have taught me more about these lost sheep—and the members’ vital role as the shepherds who can bring lost souls back into the light of the gospel—than anything else.
As directed by the Church mission department, the full-time missionaries in my mission were to aid our units in reactivating up to five families whom the bishop had prayerfully chosen in addition to our normal proselytizing activities. However, we knew that regular visits from full-time missionaries were unlikely to permanently reactivate a less-active member. So, in the PPM, as we called our mission, when we taught less-active members and new converts, we could only report the visit to our leaders as a lesson if we had brought another member—usually the person’s home or visiting teacher—to the lesson with us. Since we needed to teach at least twenty total lessons a week to members and nonmember, getting active members to our lesson with less-active members was really important.
Fellow members are much more suited to long-term fellowshipping, since they aren’t transferred out of the area every few months. More important is the fact that members are more likely to identify with the less-active members’ lives and struggles. For example, a twenty-one-year-old woman with no spouse, no children, and no job is unlikely to have much in common with a fifty-year-old man with a wife, four children, and recession anxiety. But a fifty-something member with a wife, kids, and recession anxiety will have a lot to talk about with the less-active member.
Now I’d like to talk for a minute about a family that I will call the Joneses. Pennsylvania natives Brother and Sister Jones and their three children all joined the Church in the 1970s, back when they had to drive over an hour to Sunday School in the morning, eat lunch at the house of a member who lived closer to the chapel, and then return to the chapel for sacrament meeting in the afternoon before making the long journey back home. Later, Sister Jones told us, a branch was formed nearer to their home; it met in an old firehouse and later in a Seventh-day Adventist meetinghouse. Now, two wards meet in a chapel just half an hour from the Joneses, but for years they never visited it.
Brother Jones was excommunicated in the 1980s—I never found out why—and the whole family stopped coming to church. As she told us, Sister Jones was mad at God, so she started smoking and drinking coffee again just to bug God. But when the bishop asked the missionaries to visit the Jones family in 2008, Sister Jones received them with open arms. I remember that on my first day in the field, my trainer, Sister Nielson, gushed about Sister Jones as our car flew west through the Pennsylvania countryside. Brother Jones was pleasantly gruff in that old-man way, and Sister Jones was even shorter than my mom—probably about 4′10″—and loved the missionaries.
We started visiting Brother and Sister Jones every couple weeks. They were both reading their scriptures daily and praying, but Sister Jones struggled with the Word of Wisdom, and they wouldn’t come to church. Every time we visited, Sister Jones would give us some fruit or some chocolate, told us she loved “her missionaries”, and she’d say she might be there on Sunday, but she wasn’t. Then we started bringing the new members with us. Very few of the original members whom the Joneses had known all those years ago were still alive and living in the area, so we brought members over to meet them. When Brother and Sister Jones finally came to church one Sunday, several people welcomed them with hugs and smiles. The members we brought to their lessons bore their testimonies of repentance, of tithing, of prayer, and of forgiveness. The Joneses started to come to church more often, and I know it was because the members had loved them back into activity. I saw Brother and Sister Jones right before I came home, and Brother Jones is preparing for rebaptism. Sister Jones’s smile took up her whole face as she greeted me.
Another story involves the West Chester Spanish twig that I grew so attached to because I worked with it for almost a year. Most of the members of the twig—a group of forty Spanish-speakers in an English-speaking ward—had joined the Church within the last two years, so they had few examples of what it meant to be a Mormon. If one family skipped a Sunday, everyone else decided to skip the next Sunday. One particularly bad Sunday last June, only five people attended the Spanish sacrament meeting—and two of them were our investigators! The coordinator of the group had to go into the English sacrament meeting to find a few men who had served Spanish-speaking missions to bless the sacrament.
Fortunately, a missionary who later became my companion named Sister Maldonado—an Argentine hairstylist—started to effect some changes in the twig. A year ago, the West Chester twig never had activities separate from the ward. Only three of its members spoke English well, so most of the twig did not attend the ward activities. They only saw each other once a week for three hours. Sister Maldonado started family home evenings, first with one new convert and his home teacher, then with a few more members, then a few more. Finally the bishop called two members of the twig to arrange the weekly family home evenings, and the get-togethers became even more elaborate with the addition of wonderful Mexican food. Because they knew each other better and had shared experiences with each other, the members started to get really excited about this whole church thing. When we were made companions, Sister Maldonado and I planned a Christmas dinner for the twig; it was de traje, a potluck, and it was a smashing success. By the time the coordinator of the twig asked me to give a talk based on Elder Eduardo Gavarret’s talk from the October 2008 conference in January, attendance in the Spanish sacrament meeting was steady at about fifteen a week.
Later that week, my companion and I visited Sister Frias.—a vegetarian feminist grandmother who didn’t drive—joined the Church before the twig even existed. She had come to church every Sunday just to sit in the back with headphones on, listening to a translation of sacrament meeting, Sunday School, and Relief Society. She started bringing one of her sons and two of her grandchildren with her, and they were baptized too. Later, one of her daughters joined the Church while studying abroad in Madrid. She had seen every one of the other members of the twig come into the Church, and she had seen many of them fall away. She asked my companion to help her dye her hair, and while the filler was setting, Sister Frias asked us for the phone number of everyone in the twig that she could think of, just so she could call and invite them to church. I carefully handwrote a list with the addresses and phone numbers of the twig members—few had computers, so they couldn’t access the online ward list, and most of the Spanish-speakers’ addresses on the official ward list were wrong, anyway—and I made copies.
In my talk, I recounted Elder Gavarret’s account of the great effort in Peru to invite the less-active members and many nonmembers in part-member families to return home to the Church. He announced that the less-active members “accepted the invitation made by priesthood leaders, full-time missionaries, and others who took upon themselves the responsibility to help them return to Church and come unto Christ. To each one of them, we say, ‘Welcome. Welcome home!’” (Ensign, November 2008, 98). The truth is that it is the truly our responsibility, as lovers of Christ, to seek the lost sheep. Peter learned this when Jesus asked him three times, “Lovest thou me?” When Peter answered yes, the Lord commanded him, “Feed my sheep” (John 21:15–17). So also the Lord commands us to feed His sheep.
For this end, we in our days do what Moroni wrote about new converts to the Church of Christ in Nephite times: “And after they had been received unto baptism, and were wrought upon and cleansed by the power of the Holy Ghost, they were numbered among the people of the church of Christ; and their names were taken, that they might be remembered and nourished by the good word of God, to keep them in the right way, to keep them continually watchful unto prayer, relying alone upon the merits of Christ” (Moroni 6:4). The names of members are not taken to fill the Church rolls, but so “that they might be remembered and nourished by the good word of God.”
That said, after the sacrament meeting where I gave this talk, I distributed the lists to the members who were there and encouraged them to give some of the missing people a call. What happened next demonstrates the faith, hope, and charity typical of these humble members of a little twig in rural Pennsylvania. With the list in hand, Sister Frias planned a farewell party for Sister Maldonado, who was finishing her mission, and called every single person on the list to invite them.
Another member, Ricardo, a young, single ranchhand who had a car and a computer took his responsibility to new heights. He took the new convert whom he was fellowshipping, an incredibly shy man named Rodimiro who loved old cowboy movies, with him to visit the people on the list whom he didn’t know. The twig covered more than a whole county—almost eight hundred square miles—yet Ricardo would pick up Rodimiro, who lived twelve miles from him, and then drive hundreds more miles to visit less-active members in out-of-the-way mushroom farms. He’d also give a ride to church or family home evening to anyone who asked—even if they lived as far south of the chapel as he lived north of it, even if it took him an hour to get to their house. Other members focused on bringing the daughter and son-in-law of another member, Sister García, to the waters of baptism. One Sunday before I left, I counted twenty-seven members and investigators over the age of eight in the Spanish sacrament meeting. The members made the difference—their pure love for one another brought other members back to church and was a great example for the investigators I taught.
Brothers and sisters, the answer to Cain’s question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” (Genesis 4:9) is simply, yes! The sin is ours if we don’t care for our sisters and brothers, as the Lord said to the pastors of ancient Israel through the prophet Ezekiel: “Woe be to the shepherds of Israel that do feed themselves! should not the shepherds feed the flocks? . . . The diseased have ye not strengthened, neither have ye healed that which was sick, neither have ye bound up that which was broken, neither have ye brought again that which was driven away, neither have ye sought that which was lost” (Ezekiel 34:2, 4). The prophet John Taylor warned, “If you do not magnify your callings, God will hold you responsible for those whom you might have saved had you done your duty” (qtd. in Monson, Ensign, November 2008, 62).
Brothers and sisters, I know that you home teach or visit teach less-active members. Some of you have a home or visiting teaching companion who is less-active. Give them a call. Invite them to dinner at your house. Invite them to church. I understand that sometimes they’re not ready—believe me, I met many angry, and even more indifferent, less-active members on my mission—but the Lord will bless you for trying. Believe in Christ’s promises; He will help you say the right thing and give the right hug at the right time. He wants His children to come home to Him.
To conclude, I would like to bear my testimony in Spanish:
Sé que Dios existe, y que Él es mi amoroso Padre Celestial—eso yo lo sé porque se lo pregunté a Dios, y Él me contestó con una paz y un amor innegables. Testifico que el segundo miembro de la Trinidad es mi Salvador y Redentor Jesucristo porque he sentido la mano de Él levantándome cuando yo estaba en tinieblas. Las cosas de Dios y del Espíritu no son cosas abstractas de la imaginación, sino cosas reales—cosas tangibles, visibles y audibles. El Libro de Mormón fue escrito para nosotros en nuestros días; he oído las voces que claman desde el polvo. Las otras Escrituras y los profetas vivientes también nos revelan la mente de Dios. José Smith es un profeta. Thomas S. Monson es un profeta. Por medio de la oración nos comunicamos con nuestro Padre Celestial. Estas cosas las digo en el nombre de Jesucristo, amén.
