Mission Stories - Preach My Gospel

The title page of my copy of Preach My Gospel, where I've added stuff that I found in the scriptures that use the phrase "preach my gospel".



Preach My Gospel is the title of the full-time missionary handbook. It is put together by the General Authorities (so basically the prophet and apostles, which in turn basically means by God/Jesus) and outlines how this Church wants its missionary work done. This makes it a really cool book.

Missionaries are obviously strongly recommended to read this book, to us missionaries in Sweden the rule was at least 15 minutes in Personal Study every day. It is also used in Companion Study, District Meetings and Zone Conferences and everything. So you get to know it pretty intensely. At one point the entire mission even had a rule that whenever you talked to other missionaries on the phone, you had to end the call with a PMG-related trivia question. It was pretty fun, akshully.

I loved reading PMG and I worked on it and with it a lot. I made notes and highlightings and I even added some missionary-related pictures to it that I found in magazines or such. :P I'm rather proud of it. And that's why I want to show you it, la:

The front and back covers. I managed to take good enough care of my book that the front cover didn't fall off (most people's does - nowadays the trend is to laminate it, but that sounded like a whole ton of hassle). The back cover is a picture [Viking] shared in the Junk-forum (<forum:Junk>) before I left. <3 The inside of the front cover has space to record details of your mission: areas, companions, people you taught and baptised, etc... I also taped that important two-sided piece of paper to the cover, it was the new PMG study curriculum. Quotes about missionary work that I added. If you leave that much empty space in a book, I will use it myself >_> Also, I think all the markings in the First Presidency Message is translation to Swedish. Whole ton of markings on the first page of the first chapter. And the picture of the missionaries harvesting I found somewhere and added it there myself. The empty space at the end of the chapter was found and used - a graph to illustrate how elements like water, blood and spirit are always there with our birth to this earth (from God) and with our death (return to God), and how it works both literally (esp. since the Finnish word for Spirit also means breath (like it does in Biblical languages) as well as life). Some of the heaviestly (totally a word) marked places in my PMG are in chapter 3, which contains the things we teach. Here the first page of the first lesson, the Restoration (aka Our unique message to the world). At one point I went through the entire book and highlighted in yellow everything that the book says we "must" do or "have to" do or "is our duty to do" etc... The section about teaching with the Spirit had a lot of yellow. Because there is no other way to teach for a missionary. You either teach by the Spirit, or it's not teaching. I also did the thing of 'going through the whole book highlighting' with the words "love" and "charity" and their different forms (with pink) and "atonements" (in green) because they too are crucially important to the Church and to missionary work. In addition to markings and notes there is a doodle of a bridge. Which I did in the MTC, before I had ever seen the Höga kusten bron. o.O It's destiny, people. Me and that bridge are mint to be. Before I left on my mission, my Stake President told me to study chapter 6 of PMG, that it is the most important chapter that there is. It is the chapter about Christlike Attributes. Because what matters more than what you do or what you say is who you are. A Christlike missionary is just overall going to do better and feel better - even after the mission is long over. Because essentially isn't that was all Christianity is all about, "what would Jesus do?" During my mission I added an extra Christlike attribute to my PMG: reverence. Ah, the most used page in PMG: the steps to conducting weekly planning! And the most marked chapter is chapter 10, Teaching Skills. This is what we studied and practiced pretty much without ceasing. The importance of asking questions and listening was emphasised so much because it is the most effective way for anyone to learn (through questions that make them think; it's called the Socratic Method and the Saviour, the Master Teacher did this all the time) - and helps you understand what the learner understands and doesn't understand. But it is really hard to shut up when you want to tell people stuff :P The emphasis for missionaries really is "we don't teach lessons, we teach people."