21 Weeks Remaining -November 3, 2013

大家好, 

 So this week was pretty cool. We had Mission Leadership Council. At the beginning of every month, all of the zone leaders, sister leaders, APs, office elders, and the mission president and his wife get together for a 7 hour meeting to talk about our mission vision, problems, goals, etc. First we had some trainings by the mission president's wife, the APs, and the sisters who are in charge of temple square. Then we went to the mission home and had taco salad. It was so good to get some American food finally.(It's funny he calls "tacos"- American food, and it is funny because he would have never eaten that before he left!! haha)  Then after that we had accountability. Each of the zone leaders had to get up and report about our zone baptismal number from last month - why it was high or low and what our plan for the upcoming month is. Our zone had 3 baptisms last month and our mission had 30 baptisms. Our mission president felt like we could do a lot better than that and so he came up with some really cool things that we are going to do as a mission. I love our mission president! This guy is super inspired and comes up with the coolest ideas. Here are a few things he shared with us:

1. White Christmas - We set a mission goal of having 99 baptisms in December and baptizing people on Christmas Day.

2. Missionary Typhoon - Right now on the east coast, there is only a district there but its pretty close to becoming a stake. There just isn't enough members yet. So last week he sent like 20 missionaries down there who only tracted and street contacted people all day for 5 days. They ended giving out a couple hundred Book of Mormons and getting like 140 new investigators for the missionaries down there to start teaching. That was super cool.

3. New Stakes - Right now a lot of the wards have enough members for new stakes to be made but there are sooooooo many are less active that there is not enough Melchizidek Priesthood holders to allow them to make the new stakes. So our mission president broke down the numbers and told us how many more active MP holders each of our wards needs in order for a new stake to be made and then challenged us to get that many by March 1. He thinks 10 new stakes can be made by then (5 in our mission, 5 in the Taizhong mission). If that happens, he said there is a possibility a new temple could be made here.

Love,

 Elder Chatman

This is a leadership council meeting at the mission home of President and Sister Daye.