Brother Clayton Christensen of the Harvard Business School urged students, faculty, and staff at a devotional on April 19, 2011, to “follow God’s ways, and not our own, as we wield our sickles with our might.” Brother Christensen recounted some of his personal experiences with missionary work and gave some tips for sharing the gospel more effectively.
His first suggestion was to encourage potential investigators to learn about the Church by addressing their specific questions. Brother Christensen shared an experience he had with a friend named Stephen. “Rather than trying to convince him that he needed our church, I asked instead, ‘Do you have any questions about religious issues that you’ve been wondering about, and which you’ve not been able to get good answers to?’ Turns out that he had some very good questions.” Brother Christensen then invited Stephen to write his questions down and meet with the missionaries, who were able to teach him to search and pray about answers to his questions using the Book of Mormon. Stephen was later baptized. “If good, robust questions is our metric of those who are interested in religion, we are surrounded by deeply religious people whose minds are open. They have questions.”
Brother Christensen’s second suggestion for effective missionary work was to invite investigators to lose themselves for the Savior’s sake. “…we have few converts among the prosperous because we typically try to convince them that they will find themselves if they join our church. We need to give them, instead, the chance to lose their lives for the sake of the gospel – because this will save it.” He then recounted the touching conversion of Phillip Strong, a man his father used to home teach. “Phil had been baptized as a boy, but he never went to church, and he hated the Church. Every month, my faithful father would take me or one of my brothers as his home teaching companion. We would knock on Phillip’s door. Phillip would come out on the porch and command my dad to get off his property…every month my dad would knock on the door, only to be told off. One year…a storm came in through Salt Lake and rain, driven by the wind, blew off a chunk of the roof of Welfare Square.” His father gathered plenty of volunteers to fix the roof, but felt that he should ask Phillip to supervise the job. “To my dad’s surprise, Phillip Strong came.” Though the conditions were far from ideal, Christensen stated, “…when they walked off, Phillip Strong put an arm around my dad’s shoulder and he said, ‘I haven’t felt this good in 20 years.’ And two weeks later Phillip Strong showed up to church. That was the beginning of his reactivation.”
Brother Christensen recalled another experience about a time in his life when the Spirit was not as evident as it had been at other times. He recounts, “I was serving as a counselor [in a bishopric], and was spending a lot of time and energy to magnify that assignment. I was praying and studying the scriptures regularly – and yet despite my doing all these ‘right’ things, I just felt that the Sprit was not with me as much as I had felt it before.” After a move to Washington, the Christensens found “many more opportunities to discuss the gospel with [their] new friends. … With our move to Washington, I had begun again to do my part in spreading forth the Kingdom of Heaven abroad. And what I inherited as a result, were the visions and blessings and glories of God. I had begun feeling the spirit again on a daily basis.”
Brother Christensen closed with his vision of missionary work. “I called myself on a mission. God has not yet released me, and I have not asked to be released. I love my life as a missionary, keeping myself on the front lines. The image in my mind is that God, my General, stands at the door when I go out every morning; and knowing what the war is like, day after day he gave to me His most powerful weapon, His Spirit.”
Follow the links to read or watch Brother Christensen’s devotional.
Photos courtesy of Mei Yin and lds.org