Come, Follow Me October 14-20: 3 Nephi 20-26
In 2024, the Maxwell Institute will offer a weekly series of short essays on the Book of Mormon, in support of the Church-wide Come, Follow Me study curriculum. Each week, the Maxwell Institute blog will feature a post by a member of the Institute faculty exploring an aspect of the week’s reading block. We hope these explorations will enrich your study and teaching of the Book of Mormon throughout the coming year.
What I Want My Nephew to Know about Missions
By Rosalynde F. Welch
Next week is an exciting one for our family: my nephew will leave the Mission Training Center and travel to the country in eastern Europe where he’s been called to serve. In his letters home over the past months, we’ve seen the Book of Mormon set his heart on fire with love for his Savior and love for his neighbor. Here on the homefront, we’ll be praying fervently for his safety and guidance, and for the flourishing of the people he’ll be privileged to live among.
I don’t know what the next two years will hold for him, but I hope they include some of the experiences I treasured on my mission to northern Portugal: offering my testimony of Jesus to new friends hungry to know him better; sharing the sweetness of worship with those eager for the fellowship of church; and witnessing the culmination of their conversion to the Lord in the waters of baptism. In these experiences, I looked to the Book of Mormon for a model of missionary work as I understood it. In particular, I looked to the chapters at the center of the book of Alma when the sons of Mosiah travel to the Lamanite lands, arriving as missionaries but also as servants and ministers of peace. There they, together with Abish, Lamoni and the Queen, and other key Lamanite figures, act as instruments in the Lord’s hands to accompany many thousands of souls through the process of growing faith in Christ and conversion to the Lord, baptism in His way, and membership in His Church.
This is a beautiful model of evangelism. I cherish the small role I played in that work as a full-time servant in Portugal. More importantly, this model of missionary work, aimed at accompanying people through conversion and baptism into His Church, has been the means by which I have been covenant-bound to many millions of souls around the world through our shared membership in the organization of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I believe that “convert” baptisms (in quotes here to avoid any marginalizing connotation of the term convert) are not only a commissioned work of the Church, but also the lifeblood of our Zion project. The gifts of genealogical and international diversity, fresh perspective, and spiritual fervor brought to the body of Christ by those who join our people are indispensable. Our newest apostle, Elder Patrick Kearon, is a powerful example of this.
Yet the reality is that fairly little of my full-time service was spent practicing this model of missionizing--or, anyway, little time practicing it effectively. I saw relatively few conversions and baptisms in Portugal in the late 90s, though the ones I saw were memorable and moving. Instead, I spent a lot of time talking with people about their own faith, their heartaches and frustrations, their relationship with God. I spent a lot of time offering and introducing the Book of Mormon and speaking about how Jesus has shaped my life. I spent a lot of time praying, with others, to the Father in the name of Christ. And I spent a lot of time simply helping and accompanying people in their daily lives. Not much of this work led to the growth of the Church in northern Portugal. Fortunately, I was taught by wise mission leaders that this interpersonal work had an inestimable intrinsic value of its own, and I found my life in Portugal to be sweet and rewarding.
I didn’t really recognize that interpersonal labor as “missionary work” or “gathering Israel,” though. The Book of Mormon, I thought, didn’t give me a model for a successful mission that didn’t involve conversion, baptism, and the growth of the Church, like the sons of Mosiah and Abish witnessed among the Lamanites. But I think now that I missed an important teaching of the Book of Mormon: a second model of gathering that looks quite different from the missionary gathering in the book of Alma.
It’s true that the Book of Mormon contains moments of close-up narrative of individual conversions, like those of Alma the Younger and Lamoni, for instance. But it also contains important passages of large-scale, zoomed-out “salvation history” that give an overall picture of how God has and will work in the world to accomplish his purposes--above all, the fulfilling of his promises to the children of the covenant. These teachings appear throughout the book, but they are especially concentrated in Nephi’s writings--both his account of his great vision in 1 Nephi 13 and 15, and his interpretation of Isaiah in 2 Nephi 30--and, preeminently, in Christ’s teachings to the Lehites gathered in Bountiful.
On both his first and second days of ministry, recorded in 3 Nephi 16 and 3 Nephi 20-21, Christ teaches the people, for their benefit and for the benefit of modern readers, how the Lord will gather Israel in the last days. The great narrative is familiar to readers in its basic outlines: the record of the ancient Lehites, created at great cost and containing the pure covenant of the gospel of Jesus Christ, will be delivered to a degraded modern Christendom, where it will catalyze the renewal and purification of a living gentile Christianity. This restored church of Christ will then return the Lehite covenant, with its gospel of Christ, back to the remnant of Lehi, an event that will catalyze the restoration and gathering of the entire house of Jacob--a project in which the church of Christ may assist. This work of return and restoration has the double effect of returning a complete covenant understanding to the house of Jacob and of affording gentile Christianity the opportunity--if they/we will take it--to enter covenant relationship with the Lord. In this give-and-take process by which great peoples reciprocally deliver, return, and restore records and truths, God fulfills his ancient promises to Abraham and accomplishes the global salvation of all his children through the unifying instrument of the covenant.
This, in a nutshell, is what we mean when we talk about “gathering Israel.” To me, it is a stirringly beautiful--not to mention ingenious and inspired--plan of cooperation, consecration, generosity, sacrifice, service, assistance, and inclusion. It tastes good to me. I revel in the Savior’s language about the Father’s promise to gather Israel in the last days. “I will gather my people,” he says (3 Nephi 20:18):
"And then shall the remnants, which shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the earth, be gathered in from the east and from the west, and from the south and from the north; and they shall be brought to the knowledge of the Lord their God, who hath redeemed them. … And it shall come to pass that the time cometh, when the fulness of my gospel shall be preached unto them; And they shall believe in me, that I am Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and shall pray unto the Father in my name. Then shall their watchmen lift up their voice, and with the voice together shall they sing; for they shall see eye to eye. Then will the Father gather them together again, and give unto them Jerusalem for the land of their inheritance. Then shall they break forth into joy—Sing together, ye waste places of Jerusalem; for the Father hath comforted his people, he hath redeemed Jerusalem" (3 Nephi 20:13, 30-34).
He continues:
"When these things shall be made known unto them of the Father, and shall come forth of the Father, from them unto you; … when these things come to pass that thy seed shall begin to know these things—it shall be a sign unto them, that they may know that the work of the Father hath already commenced unto the fulfilling of the covenant which he hath made unto the people who are of the house of Israel." (3 Nephi 21:3, 7)
Christ’s explanation of the Father’s plan to gather Israel in the last days is striking not only for what it lays out but for what it leaves out. These chapters don’t talk about missionary work like the book of Alma does--in terms of conversion, baptism, Church. Indeed, the words conversion and baptism don’t appear at all in either Nephi’s or Christ’s accounts of the gathering of Israel in the last days. “Church” appears only in reference to purified Christianity’s covenant assistance. Instead, Christ says of the latter-day gathering of Israel that the gospel will be preached among the remnant (3 Nephi 21:26), that the house of Jacob will come to Christ and call on the Father in his name (3 Nephi 21:27), and that the Lehites will be gathered to their lands and restored to the knowledge of their identity as children of the covenant (3 Nephi 21:28). These are the Father’s aims and hopes for his covenant people.
This doesn’t mean, of course, that conversion, baptism, and membership in the Church is irrelevant to this latter-day gathering. Far from it. They may be important, even crucial, means by which the Father’s gathering is in part accomplished. But Christ’s own model of missionary work in 3 Nephi 20 and 21, which I did not recognize while I was still on my mission, suggests that the Father’s work of gathering can be carried forward by interpersonal cooperation, consecration, generosity, preaching, sacrifice, service, assistance, and inclusion that doesn’t necessarily include baptism and traditional conversion.
When I talked to people about their own faith, I helped them, I hope, recognize and reaffirm their relationship to God. When I shared my testimony of Christ and the Book of Mormon, I preached the gospel among them. When I invited them to pray with me, we called together on Father in the name of Christ. And when I served and helped them in their own worthy projects, I assisted them in accomplishing their purposes. All of these labors were, it turns out, in direct fulfillment of the Father’s plan of gathering--even though I didn’t recognize it at the time.
This is what I want my nephew to know about missionary work. Godspeed, Elder!
IMAGES
This is My Joy by Annie Henrie Nader
Annie Henrie Nader, This is My Joy, 2023. Altus Fine Art.
Maddie Baker, Alma the Missionary, 2023. The Book of Mormon Art Catalog, [bookofmormonartcatalog.org/catalog/alma-the-missionary/].
Bertel Thorvaldsen, Christus, 1833.
Sister Dickey & Sister Tuck, Christ Mosiac. LDS Living.