(One drop at a time.) My journal entries about offering copies of the Book of Mormon, the Bible, and other LDS church books, mainly to immigrants in their native language, mainly in Indianapolis, Indiana. With 106 translations, the Book of Mormon (along with the Bible) is a good "Rosetta Stone" for learning English or other languages, in addition to being a missionary tool.
My goals in keeping this blog/journal are: to encourage others to offer people copies of the Book
of Mormon and the Bible, to illustrate the incredible number of recent immigrants who are eager
for bilingual material, to illustrate the ease of encountering them and offering them material,
and to make known the wonderful deeds of the Lord (Ps 105:1, Isa 12:4) in arranging many of these
encounters. I realize that the concept of offering foreign language books to strangers is just
plain weird to many people, so here are some hints if you are intrigued by this and wish to try it.
Respectful comments and constructive criticism are invited.
The goal of the book placement effort is to provide, in a friendly non-threatening way, gospel
material to someone who is willing to receive it in their native language and English.
To the recipients of these books who read this: I thank you again for allowing me
to be of service to you. I encourage you to read the material, and pray to God that He
confirm the truth of it to you. The Bible and the Book of Mormon are both the Word of God.
Living according to their teachings brings happiness.
At our stake conference on February 7th, the Stake Pres challenged the stake to index a million names in 2010. That's do-able.
Labels: Family History, genealogy, indexing
posted by Bookslinger @ 12:07 AM
4 comments
4 Comments:
Careful...that familysearch stuff is as strong as cocaine. My wife started doing familysearch six months ago....I haven't seen her since.
Millions of future users will be grateful to you, Bookslinger, even though most will never know what effort went into it.
I hope your stake president gives regular updates on how the stake is progressing with the goal. If so, please mention the progress here -- it would be kind of fun to watch the totals grow.
What stake are you in? I am working on getting more people involved in FamilySearch indexing and am interested in seeing the results from this program on the FamilySearch side of things. I'd love the program to be a success for you and everyone who gets involved from your stake.
Jim,
I'm sure many have figured it out, and some people who read this blog know me, but in the interest of staying mostly anonymous, I'll just say that I'm in one of the stakes with "Indianapolis" in the name. (The blog header gives it away.)
This was pretty much an assignment from our stake president, given over the pulpit at stake conference. (I just now added that to the original post.)
When you sign up for indexing, it asks for your stake and ward (you don't have to give it though.) For the stake, you have to choose a pre-coded stake name, but the ward name can be entered free-form.
And there are "admins" or consultants for that stake, and those people get to see how many volunteers there are in the stake, and how many there are in each ward. They also get to see the totals for the stake, and by ward. But I don't know if they get to see the actual usernames/email addresses of those who volunteer, or the amount of work done by volunteer.
This is part of the Stake presidency's push to get the stake "temple ready", both at the individual level and as a stake to get a temple in Indianapolis.
There are five temples surrounding Indianapolis: Louisville KY, Columbus OH, Detroit MI, Chicago IL, Nauvoo IL. And none of them are operating at capacity. I think it unlikely that Indianapolis will get a temple as long as those five temples are short of both patrons and workers.
By my estimates, based on analyzing the number of stakes per temple district at www.lds.org/temples, there needs to be at least 10 stakes per temple district East of the Mississippi river.
We have six stakes in Central Indiana that would geographically be part of "our" temple district should Indianapolis get a temple. We would therefore need to grow four new stakes here. Plus, the temple districts of Chicago, Columbus and Louisville would need six new stakes of their own to replace the ones we would "steal" from them.
So, we're looking at a minimum of 10 new stakes for Indiana, Northern Central Kentucky, Western Ohio, and Eastern Illinois before Indy can get its temple. That's going to be a while, if you figure a stake needs at least 2,000 active regular-attending members, plus depth of leadership, etc.
But I think Indy is a Johnny-come-lately. Louisville KY and Columbus Ohio out-shone us with temple recommend holders, tithe-payers, and temple-going activity, and they got their temples before we did.
Geographically, you'd think Indianapolis, being on the crossroads with all the Interstates, and a greater-metropolitan population of over 1,000,000 people, would have gotten one. But we didn't have the pre-requisites with number of members, etc.
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