In a previous Church communications calling, I asked hundreds of missionaries a simple question:
“What do you want from members? I mean, what do you really want?”
Their answers were surprisingly consistent.
They did not speak first about referrals, rides or additional dinner appointments. They shared candidly a desire to feel loved and linked to the members around them. They want to be treasured and remembered.
Over and over, missionaries described the same hope in similar ways. They want to feel less like visitors passing through and more like members of a Church family. They want every single area to be their favorite, the one they cannot think of leaving and the one they cannot wait to visit when the nametag comes off.
When I was transferred, all of them brought me to my knees and to tears—prayers of gratitude for the blessing of serving there, and bittersweet tears at having to say goodbye.
Three decades have passed since I walked the streets of Sete Lagoas, Viçosa and Ipatinga. The feelings described by today’s missionaries are the same feelings I carried then. When I felt most connected to the work, the members were not spectators. They were full partners. We weren’t just friends. We were a forever family.
Here are five ways members can help missionaries feel loved and linked to the congregations they serve.
1. “Who can I pray for this week?”
Missionary work begins long before a lesson or invitation. Praying for missionaries by name — and for the people they are teaching — changes hearts on both sides of the prayer.
In one ward I attended, an elderly sister asks the missionaries every week for specific names to include in her prayers. The practice changed the way she sees the missionaries and those they teach. And the missionaries know someone is thinking about their friends, whispering those names in reverence to the Lord and sharing the spiritual weight of the work.
A question like “Who can we pray for this week?” reminds missionaries they are not serving alone.
2. Reach out between Sundays
Missionaries often feel surprisingly disconnected between Sundays.
Unless they are invited into a member’s home for dinner, most of their relationships with ward members are built in passing — casual conversations in foyers and hallways, quick check-ins while everyone is hurrying somewhere else.
Those moments matter more than members may realize. The connection becomes more meaningful when it continues during the week.
A midweek text can turn a hard day around.
“How are you doing?”
“Need anything this week?”
“Happy birthday!”
“We’re praying for you.”
Even the most consecrated missionaries miss their families and have hard days. A reminder that someone sees them and remembers them can make a ward family begin to feel like their own family.
3. Offer ordinary kindness
“I made extra cookies. Can I drop some off?”
In the age of ministering, members have become wonderfully accustomed to thinking about others during ordinary moments of life. The extra batch of cookies. A homemade birthday cake. A trinket brought home from a family vacation.
So why not missionaries?
Simple gestures build belonging. Missionaries may forget many dinners over the course of a mission. They rarely forget the members who made them feel genuinely welcome.
In one mission, the parents of an elder were so touched after members delivered fudge to their son’s apartment that they tracked down the mission leader who had arranged it and mailed a handwritten thank-you note.
To the member, it may have felt small. To a missionary far from home, it was the Lord seeing them through the eyes of an angel from church.
4. Help them feel connected to families
Many missionaries are young adults living far from home for the first time.
Members who learn where they are from, ask about their parents, remember birthdays or send a photo after a ward activity help missionaries feel perfectly placed, not just assigned.
One member has dozens of contacts in his phone with names like “Elder Smith’s Mom” and “Sister Johnson’s Dad.” After a meal, a service project, a baptism or even an unexpected sighting at a grocery store, he takes a quick picture and sends it home.
Sometimes the photo alone says everything a missionary’s family needs to hear:
We sure love your missionary.
Paired with a few sincere words of gratitude for the elder or sister’s service, it becomes a gift unlike almost any other.
Families sending missionaries into the field wonder how their son or daughter is really doing beyond the weekly emails and calls. A thoughtful message from a member can bring enormous peace. It can remind parents their missionary is being seen, loved and cared for far from home.
5. Support their work online
In many missions today, online finding and digital outreach are significant parts of missionary work.
Missionaries spend hours creating thoughtful videos, invitations and messages meant to reach people scrolling through phones looking for hope. Too often those posts are met with silence.
Local engagement helps. When members in the same city comment on, like and share missionary posts, more people nearby see them.
Follow local missionaries online when mission rules allow. Leave encouraging comments. Share uplifting messages. Even short interactions can help someone encounter a message of hope at exactly the right moment.
Missionaries are called to preach the gospel. Members are not called to entertain them.
When members and missionaries become genuinely connected, both the work and the ward become stronger. Members become more involved. Missionaries have more success.
But that bridge is rarely built all at once. It is built prayer by prayer. Smile by smile. Text by text. Conversation by conversation.
And the people gathering in the middle of that bridge — members and missionaries — are changed forever.