A Family Legacy of Service Missionaries

My son Henry is a service missionary. He spends his time doing volunteer work at various places in our town, including a museum about the local pioneer history, the Bishop’s Storehouse where food is distributed to families in need, a charitable nonprofit that makes wooden car toys to give to kids around the world, a family history center where he helps index archived records, and of course the Temple, where he works in the baptistry and also outside as a groundskeeper.

He wasn’t sure at first that he wanted to do a service mission, because he had always imagined himself as a teaching missionary, and because he detected a stigma associated with service missionaries. He said it felt like he was a “second class” missionary.

Over time he has grown to enjoy his service and we have seen him grow in confidence and capability. He has developed friendships with the other service missionaries and with other workers at his service sites. I see his mission as an important turning point in his life, directing him toward future success that he could not achieve without the missionary experience. Now that he is near the end of his two years he says with confidence that his mission experience was just right for him.

However, he still has some ambivalence about the whole thing.

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For the last few months I have been working on a song about my ancestor Henry Weeks Sanderson, who I named my missionary son after. The song tells a story I found in his autobiography about when he was a rescuer for the Willie and Martin Handcart Companies in 1856. I love this great man and I am so impressed by all that he accomplished in his life. He was a disciple of the Lord who was willing to help and serve wherever he was called to go.

While working on this song it occurred to me that Henry Weeks Sanderson was a service missionary. He answered the call of a prophet to help those in need, just like my son Henry is doing.

Our family has been accepting service missionary assignments since the earliest days of the Church. We have built cities in the desert, pushed roads through uninhabitable wastelands, worked farms, established productive mines, dug canals, dammed rivers, erected massive stone temples, and done whatever the Lord’s prophet called us to do, whenever and wherever he sent us.

And not just in pioneer times! Henry’s grandmother was a service missionary at the Church History Museum on Temple Square a few years ago. Several of my aunts and uncles have been temple missionaries and service missionaries. Henry’s brother wants to do a service mission when he is done with high school. That is the culture of our family, and a blessing of being a part of the Lord’s church.

Service missions as we know them today are a recent development, and are still evolving their organization. They are getting better all the time and blessing the lives of many people. We need service missionaries, and they need the opportunity to serve. But service missionaries are not new; we have had them for as long as the gospel has been revealed to God’s children on earth.

There is nothing “second class” about serving the Lord and his children “with all of your heart, might, mind, and strength” (Doctrine and Covenants 4:2). Consecrating your time and energy to do the Lord’s work “with an eye single to the glory of God” (Doctrine and Covenants 4:5) is what first class disciples do.

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Alan B. Sanderson, MD is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and is a practicing neurologist.