Dear Family,
How are you? I am well--interviews with President this week were
particularly good; we spoke about 'vision,' especially the vision that
we need to have and promote about Leones. President noted that nearby
Marcos Juárez was previously just about the same as Leones -- now they
baptize every other week, have Relief Society activities and a full
Deacon's Quorum Presidency.
Thus, we had a meeting with Presidente Macris (Branch President) this
week in order to decide how to start working. The goal is to have a
sacrament meeting attendance of 50 at end-of-year -- this week we had
a record attendance of 26, helped in part by visiting families with
Pte Macris on Saturday. We'll be focusing on visits and family home
evenings to strengthen those who we already have and motivate them to
work as well. We want to make the branch in Leones the sort of place
that investigators will want to be in and that the Lord will trust us
with His children who are looking for the truth. I feel that there are
many people prepared to receive the gospel here in Leones, and expect
them to appear as we improve the way that we work and improve the
state of the branch.
In our weekly planning we spoke about levels of missionary work. Level
one is talking to people -- 'iniciativa propia' as we call it -- it's
a situation where the missionaries do all the work to find
investigators and teach them and fellowship them, etc. Level two is an
extension of the first, it's still 'iniciativa propia' but the members
become a resource for the missionaries from which investigators are
found, etc; the members help the missionaries -- in this situation the
missionaries are still the motivators. Level three is that the
missionaries help the members, or, for example, members find people
through their own initiative and we become the resource that the
members use in order to teach and baptize. In our analysis, we decided
that though level 3 work is most effective, the majority of our time
needs to be dedicated to level 1 work. Level 1 leads to the second,
and these motivate and train our members to do level 3 work. I'm
committed doing the latter after the mission! This week we're putting
emphasis on first level work in order to build a foundation for more
effective efforts.
Love,
Elder Schlachter
P.S. I was wondering if someone could send me some music from my
iTunes library; I wanted to show my companion what a harpsichord is. I
was wanting the Italian Concerto played by Bradley Brookenshire, a
French piece by Rameau or Couperin titled something with the word
'misterioux' (if I can still spell in French!), a concerto for four
harpsichords played by the Academy of Ancient Music, a piece by
Scarlatti from the album by Trevor Pinnock (one with a high ranking),
and also a piece with a recorder (search for 'recorder' and pick one
with four or five stars). Thank you!
