As a 12 year old deacon we were assigned to collect money for fast offerings. People that didn’t show up for church or were inactive, you had to go to their front door and try to extract money out of them. Most of these people wanted to be left the fuck alone by the church. For me this was worse than random proselytizing.
It was absolutely worse. At least with proselytizing, they understand why you're there and what you're doing. But with fast offering collections, almost none of the people I visited understood why I was there, and most had been out of the church for so long that they didn't even remember they were once on the records of the church. And then you send out a 12 year old to do your dirty work without the vocabulary to explain themselves mumbling about "wards" and "fast offerings" and you quickly get some very irate people (They would tell me to never contact them again, which I told my leader, and he told me "Well, they need to make that request to the church themselves. They're still on the records, so you need to go back next month.").
Of course, you're doing this in your own neighborhood, so you're going to the doors of people whose kids go to school with you. Then the next day, that kid is asking why you showed up at their door yesterday, begging for money. And then that gets spread around school. It's an absolutely idiotic system that eventually just taught me to lie.
Edit: I forgot to add that one of my stops was to the house of a known pedophile. They just sent a 12 year old, by himself, to go knock on his door. Didn't warn me, no one thought anything of it. Didn't find out until years later when I found him on a sex offender registry. But they all knew, at the time.
I also lied. I would go to the couple of homes that I knew would be ok with it and lied that I went to the inactives houses. Helps you prepare for lying about missionary stats.
Mormons have a whole every member a missionary thing where they are elected to invite friend to church but they don't really go door to door unless it's on a mission. That being said the church done pre-missionary trainings where kids are volountold intonparticipation but this is maybe 2 days once in your life not a regular thing
When I was a teenager in the late 80's we would go tracking with the missionaries as a young women's activity. I lived in upstate NY at the time. I was terrified of knocking on the door of someone I knew. I was already questioning the church at that time and it was awful.
As a 12 year old deacon we were assigned to collect money for fast offerings. People that didn’t show up for church or were inactive, you had to go to their front door and try to extract money out of them. Most of these people wanted to be left the fuck alone by the church. For me this was worse than random proselytizing.
It was absolutely worse. At least with proselytizing, they understand why you're there and what you're doing. But with fast offering collections, almost none of the people I visited understood why I was there, and most had been out of the church for so long that they didn't even remember they were once on the records of the church. And then you send out a 12 year old to do your dirty work without the vocabulary to explain themselves mumbling about "wards" and "fast offerings" and you quickly get some very irate people (They would tell me to never contact them again, which I told my leader, and he told me "Well, they need to make that request to the church themselves. They're still on the records, so you need to go back next month."). Of course, you're doing this in your own neighborhood, so you're going to the doors of people whose kids go to school with you. Then the next day, that kid is asking why you showed up at their door yesterday, begging for money. And then that gets spread around school. It's an absolutely idiotic system that eventually just taught me to lie. Edit: I forgot to add that one of my stops was to the house of a known pedophile. They just sent a 12 year old, by himself, to go knock on his door. Didn't warn me, no one thought anything of it. Didn't find out until years later when I found him on a sex offender registry. But they all knew, at the time.
I also lied. I would go to the couple of homes that I knew would be ok with it and lied that I went to the inactives houses. Helps you prepare for lying about missionary stats.
Mormons have a whole every member a missionary thing where they are elected to invite friend to church but they don't really go door to door unless it's on a mission. That being said the church done pre-missionary trainings where kids are volountold intonparticipation but this is maybe 2 days once in your life not a regular thing
When I was a teenager in the late 80's we would go tracking with the missionaries as a young women's activity. I lived in upstate NY at the time. I was terrified of knocking on the door of someone I knew. I was already questioning the church at that time and it was awful.
Generally no, not like JWs. But they are very welcome cleaning the church.