From Other to Brother: The Transformation of Otherness in the LDS Missionary Experience
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ost people have at least peripheral knowledge of missionaries from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church).In almost every country around the world, they are seen travelling (often by bicycle) two by two, young men or young women dressed in modest, businesslike clothing, with bright smiles and black name tags announcing them as Elder or Sister so-and-so from the Church.The missionary program of the LDS Church began early in its history and has become more formalized and expansive over the years.Initially, there were no restrictions for service related to age or circumstances.Early LDS Church apostles commonly served missions overseas for several years despite leaving wives and children behind in what were often trying situations.Some were middle-aged; others were very young.Joseph F. Smith, who was later to become the fifth successor to the Church's founder -his uncle and namesake, Joseph Smith, Jr. -famously served a mission to Hawai'i at the age of fifteen.Nowadays, middle-aged men and younger teenaged boys would not be allowed to serve the Church in this capacity.Today's typical LDS missionary is an unmarried man aged eighteen to twenty-five or an unmarried woman aged nineteen or more.He or she undergoes interviews to assess personal character, moral worthiness, and basic doctrinal understanding, and submits a written application to the Church to become a full-time missionary for a period of eighteen to twenty-four months on a fully volunteer basis (missionaries or their parents, or sometimes other Church members, provide a monthly fee to maintain them with a basic home and necessities).Missionaries wait for a written notice of acceptance from the Church, which also then discloses the country and language in which they will serve.Note especially this last point: missionaries do not choose the nations or languages in which they serve.For the vast majority, such service will take them far from home -it is intentional in the program to do so -regardless of their former experience or education.For example, in 1985 I was sent from Toronto to the Japan Sendai Mission, which then covered all of the Tohoku region of Japan.Yet so ignorant was I of the world at the time this call was received that I announced to my friends and family, "I got called to Shanghai, Japan!"Such ignorance prior to serving a mission might not be entirely common, but it is not unheard of.More typical, however, is the transformative experience that happens to the missionary during the mission, and the manner in which what once was "other," strange, and unknown becomes familiar and foundational.1 Michael H. Clifton served as a full-time missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the Tohoku region of Japan from 1985 to 1987.He currently serves in pastoral leadership of a "young, single adult" congregation of the Church in Kitchener, Ontario, and as director of public affairs for the Kitchener Ontario Stake of the Church.He is a founding partner in the law firm Clifton Kok LLP and currently serves on the Steering Committees of both Interfaith Grand River and Christians Together Waterloo Region.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".