How to Handle Missionaries After Leaving the Church
Y'all hate when people knock on your door. You hate that your consent to withdraw is never respected. You hate when toxic messaging shows up uninvited.
And yes. You could choose to spread the emotional contagion around by taking those frustrations out on a couple of 18 year old strangers. You could try lashing out at the institution that has hurt you via the person who is now, and will probably always be, powerless to change the situations you're actually mad about.
And I understand the temptation. Believe me. When you've set boundaries, added your name to the ward's Do Not Contact list, or even taken you name off the records of the Church, and you still have missionaries showing up at your house. It's frustrating! Especially when you've done your best to decline politely, communicating with them as an adult by saying "The way you can serve me best right now is making sure you and others at church don't come to see me anymore."
You've done all the right things. But in the endless shuffle of missionaries coming and going, leadership changes, and unit boundary shuffling, they're still showing up.
But let me tell you a secret about being a missionary, from someone who served a mission.
Rather than wasting your energy getting angry at this situation, you could choose to occupy a permanent space in their head instead.
Do you know who haunts me still and keeps me up at night a decade later?
The people who were abused and abandoned by the Church who told me their stories. The ones who made me think, for the first time, "This isn't okay. This shouldn't be happening. They deserve better than this." Those are the moments that made me realize that as long as the Church won't serve everyone, it can't save everyone.
There was a gay man in my first area in Brazil who joined a different church after coming out to his family. We ran into him at a grocery store. We'd seen him before because part of his family was still active. He was a returned missionary. He loved God. He loved being part of a church community. And in the middle of the grocery store, he just started telling us his story.
What became obvious to me is that he never wanted to leave the Church. There was a very real part of him that still wanted to come back.
"How can I be there, being what I am?"
That question is forever carved into the side of my brain.
He did that. He changed my life forever in that moment. That was the first time I really understood what the Church loses, the harm it does, by refusing to affirm our LGBTQ+ community in full fellowship.
I cried myself to sleep that night because I wanted so badly to snap my fingers and make the Church better in this one way, and I just couldn't. There was nothing I could do for him. And he made me realize that in a way I can never deny again.
Because he chose to engage with me as a person, it gave me the opportunity to do the same with him. That interaction has permanently changed who I've become as a member of the Church. For the rest of my life, I'm different now because one former member of the Church chose to tell me his story.
Former members of the Church don't owe those who stay that emotional labor. But if you're in a situation where whatever combination of circumstances has brought missionaries to your door, it's worth remembering you have a choice in how you respond. And who knows? Maybe you have exactly the right message a young Elder or Sister needs to learn, and they can only learn it from you.
