Stairway to Heaven

So last week I mentioned that we made a new baptismal board. We had one before that was about time. It only kept track of the months in which our investigators would be baptized. It helped us plan for the coming months, but we often saw that most of the people on the board would not actually progress or go to church. We worked out a system that will allow us to better track the people that are actually progress toward baptism.

The idea is to divide the investigators into groups based on their percentage chance to be baptized; we have 3 groups: 20%, 50%, and 90%. The requirements to be counted in those groups are as follows:

20%: Go to church, and start reading the Book of Mormon

50%: Go to church twice and accept a baptismal date

90%: Go to church thrice and start living all the commandments necessary to be baptized.

This all stems from the requirement in the Philippines that to be baptized, you have to go to church at least 4 times. We have seen in the past the struggle of getting people to church. Once that stumbling block has been overcome, most of the time people love what they learn at church and have a desire to keep coming back. Its always that first time.

Elder Lutz and I have two wards to work in. There is lots of work to do to fix our schedule so we can work in both wards without people getting dropped out of the teaching pool. It has been a little bit of a struggle; but we have also seen many wonderful things happen with those that we are teaching, and we have found some good potential investigators this last week that might make it to church this coming Sunday.

Today we had a fun zone activity where we all got together and played capture the flag and a couple other games as a zone. It was a little unorganized, but in the end almost everyone had a really great time; we were able to get everyone participating. This zone is a really hardworking one and we are generally pretty close, so it was nice to see everyone joining in today.

Well that is a really short email. Sorry about that I will try to get everything longer with pictures next week. There will be pictures. 100% promise.

Love you all

Elder Faulkner