Future of Missionary Work? Incredible New Digital Missionary Program feat. Jonah Barnes

With this Digital Missionary Program, 50 cents gets an interested person or family (looking for the missionaries) connected with the missionaries. This is incredibly exciting and may be the future of missionary work.

Advertising dollars are tracked directly to the countries targeted and a newsletter shows photos of baptisms and success on the ground.

Gathering Israel - https://www.gatheringisrael.org/

 Raw Transcript

it proved the concept our technology was working we It was working we were
getting missionaries referrals real names contacts of people who wanted to
hear the gospel all right what will 50 cents get you these days how about a convert to the Church of Jesus Christ of
Latter-day Saints a new independent missionary program online has been
started by some church members that is having an incredible amount of success it's outside of the church but they work
with the church so that they are able to track the success from the point of an
advertisement online to the eventual picture of an individual being baptized in a far away country perhaps in Africa
or somewhere else this is being run by my guest today Jonah Barnes and others like Cardinal Ellis of Ward Radio and
they're having a huge amount of success could this be the future of the missionary program for the church now
this episode is brought to you by Go and Do Travel i am the official spokesman for Go and Do Travel and the Wavemakers
Latterday Saint podcasters cruise coming up on November 15th to 22nd this year 2025 you're going to have individuals
there from the YouTube and podcast world like Jacob Hansen of Thoughtful Faith
and Cardinal Ellis of Vard Radio and the Paul Brothers Jackson and Hayden from
the Stick of Joseph David Boyce of 52 Churches in 52 weeks and Dave Butler of
Plain and Precious Things Jasmine Rapali formerly of Scripture Central and myself
this is a chance to take the online world that is being created out there that community and bringing it front and
center and in person on a cruise down the Mexican Baja to find out more go to quickdia.com
cwicdmedia.com scroll to the top go to trips and events and then go down to wavemakers 2025 we'd love to see you
there here we go all
right welcome to Quick Show my name is Greg Matson and I am your host in this episode we bring on Jonah Barnes jonah
how are you doing excellent greg how are you i'm doing excellent as well listen you guys you guys have got an incredible
program that I've little birds have been telling me more about this um you have a
rocking outside of the church missionary program online that seems to be working
tell tell us a little bit more about this well look don't don't try to deflect Greg we're all here we're
concerned you're looking a little thin you're looking a little thin okay don't know what's going on all right if we
need to get some Do we need to have a bake sale do we need to have like a raise some some baked goods for great
send your cookies and your muffins away to to down there to Arizona uh 999
Madson Street okay so that Greg can bulk up a little bit you're looking super thin man yeah because you've been you've
been riding camels and a lot of fasting and a lot of heat in Egypt
well yes so you're going off to these exotic places we're not going there
physically but we do have a missionary program that is going there digitally actually so yeah yeah so I don't know
how much you've you've heard about it already but uh we have a digital finding technology
that we're using to connect people to missionaries and we've been working on
it for a while we think it's kind of ready we think we're about ready for prime time um we've been slow rolling it
because we don't want to get ahead of our skis but we're thinking it's ready for prime time and there is no prime
time like quick show time so we figured it was time to D prime time yes D prime
time so Greg did you serve a mission Greg i did mexico City oh cool oh cool
so you learn to speak some French down there was it is it French right that's what I thought that's what
I thought um yeah cool and uh did you did you get a lot of referrals
you know here's the thing that's interesting about Mexico City you know when I was down there this okay this is aging me a little bit but you know this
was like at least 10 years ago and and so it was it was right after Cortez left i I never wore a badge we weren't
allowed to wear a badge when I was down there really and so I went badgeless my visa said I was a volleyball
coach because they just had this strange thing kind of going on in Mexico where you weren't allowed to bring missionaries into the into the uh into
the country so you know we were they're sleuththing so to speak and uh so we
weren't allowed to knock doors wow my mission president would not I did it one day i did it one day because I
just wanted to have the experience so we spent the whole day one day knocking doors just so I could say I did it
because everybody else could do that do that so we were 100% referrals actually
everything we did no kidding crazy oh by the way number one baptizing mission in
the world holy cow or or maybe say is how they would say it in Yeah
that's what they would say right there in Mexico that's right that's exactly what they would say um wow that's crazy
so that is the like the polar opposite of my mission i served in Russia and I remember when we got two referrals from
Salt Lake City two little slips came into the mission office we didn't know what to do with it the mission president
had never seen it before we're like "What do we do with these?" And they were like from the Temple Square or something somebody knew a person in
academ and said "Hey you should go visit these guys and give them a copy of the Book of Mormon or something." So we got
these two slips of paper and we're like "We don't even know what are these." We figured out their referrals and so we
would go off and our our my mission was uh a lot of knocking on doors way too
much of knocking on doors um there's different ways of doing it of of serving
a mission and it's getting uh the the model that we have has been sending out
Idaho farm boys 2 by two uh to take the gospel to all the world and it's been
awesome it's amazing and the church has grown in the latter days at an amazing
rate but but we have some other methods of preaching the gospel take Dan Jones
dan Jones one of the greatest missionaries in in history went over to Wales and baptized like everybody his
fingers were like permanently pruned because he spent so much time in the water he was baptizing like mad and he
didn't do it by knocking on a bunch of doors he actually was a publisher dan Jones was a very successful pamphlete
that was the new technology of the day over in England and George Cuchanan Wilfrid Woodruff and these guys utilized
they they they used it they used it to they pushed it to the edge how many can
we print how fast can we print how many different print things can we print let's get these out and they were at the cutting edge of technology of their day
to print uh pamphlets send them out to pastors and towns and then after they'd been there a day or two then Dan Jones
would show up and say "I'm the guy that you've been reading about." And he'd have a sermon or whatever and he ended
up converting thousands so the church has actually been pretty
good at staying up on technology but the Lord gave us a charge to take
the gospel to all the world everybody if we emptied every mission Mexico City
Russia Europe everywhere and we sent every single as a matter of fact if we called every single man woman child and
baby from the church on a mission to India knocking on doors and contacting
one by one we wouldn't finish reaching those 1 billion and change people before
babies had been born lived and died a very fruitful life in India
entire lifespans would go by and we wouldn't be able to get to them all so there's a lot of people in this world
that need the gospel and we have to hasten the work we got to do something so back when social media was
invented this crazy guy named David Grant Stewart Jr who is I think he's
he's a surgeon out of Nevada he said he was a divergent thinker and he's like
this social media thing we could we could do this like let's take out advertisements let's let's plaster the
whole world we can reach places we've never been able to reach before and he had kind of this wild idea formed this
group it was a Facebook group originally called go ye into all the world of which I was a part and we would take out ads
on Facebook in other countries okay that what's the big deal
the cool part is you've been to Egypt Eypt greg how much was a cup of coffee in Egypt and don't pretend like you
weren't drinking coffee Greg i know you were drinking coffee over there well uh my lattes were uh Yeah yeah is that what
they're called are they or do we call them lattes i don't Yeah I think they're 42 cents yeah i I I don't know i'm get I
can tell you that aspirin or or or Tylenol is is about 27
cents for a bottle interesting interesting so you bring over a US
dollar and you can get that latte frappa china mocha whatever their things are
listening to members of the church talk about coffee must be hilarious for other people um but your dollar goes a long
way doesn't it goes quite a long way right sure so what we figured out is
that if we're taking out ads in Arizona or California or New York we're
competing with big advertisers online for US dollars and the the way that
Facebook sells ads is an auction and so if we're competing at auction with these other big companies it's expensive to
get your ads up and it wasn't we but if we go to Africa or we go to East Timor
or we go to Thailand and we want to buy ad space there $1 goes a long way
because no one's competing for their eyeballs and so we'd walk into these we
digitally walk into these spaces and say uh can I buy oh I have a dollar can I
buy some ad space and they'd say oh we'll get you 5,000 clicks you know and you think "Holy cow." So we were getting
huge bang for our buck and we're doing it in these places and and we would put up an ad and it would say uh you know
get a free copy of the Book of Mormon and it would be in French or Spanish or
Portuguese or whatever or Swahili or whatever it was or Aphreakans and we'd
we'd put those ads up and we'd get a bunch of clicks and the and Facebook allows you to direct people to a website
so we direct them to the church's website we'd say "Click on this ad to get a free copy of the Book of Mormon." And then all of a sudden they end up at
the you know uh free the Gracia Gracia Liro de Mormon you know website that the
church puts on do you ever do you get do you get do you have any further feedback from those individuals once they've
clicked on that i mean is that the is that the first step of the process and there's other steps excellent so that's
an excellent question so this is what we did for years we would put up the ads send to the church website and
then hope we didn't know we had no idea what happened to them after that and
that was highly discouraging to the group and after doing it for months and
months you you you gather this data you find out which countries you get the most clicks uh which countries you get
the least you know that all this stuff but then that's it which ads do better than other ads okay fine that's good but
you were always wondering like did anybody did anybody find the gospel out there like is it really working um
because we never got any feedback after that once they left that form to the church's website they were out of our sight okay so then fast forward to uh
Ward Radio ward Radio is a uh faithful LDS podcast that I happen to
be part of it's a good time it's a good time and uh Carton Ellis the host of
Orvido he said "This is amazing do you get any feedback just like you asked?" And I said "Well no we really don't."
And he said "Well I know a guy in the church office building why don't we ask him?" And there's a guy in the church
office building we can't tell you who he is he's kind of our inside man he he remains anonymous because he associates
with Ward Radio i think we know who he is okay but we contacted him and we said "Can
you see any of this if we ran a campaign and we gave you 3,000 clicks does does
that show up on your side of the wall?" And so he used his analytics and he looked and he said "Oh yeah there it
is." And he could tell us that it worked and we're like "Oh my gosh this is amazing." So I'm going to show you a
little um I'm going to try to share my screen here a little bit ready okay so we had So this is an example of our ads
okay so we'd run an ad and it would say receatis get a free book and it'd take
them to the veniato.org website and they oh that's interesting and then they'd fill out a
form right and then we had uh uh and we could see this we could see oh look it's
only costing us less than two cents per click we spend 60 bucks which is I think
the price of two cups of coffee and we would get 3,000 clicks this is amazing
right and then with help from the church office building guys they said "We're
seeing uh like we ran it during this this first two weeks of October here and they said
"We used to get three people to fill out a form for a Book of Mormon on average
now we're getting 73." We used to get uh 90 average of
what of people filling out a form but three people out of what uh I don't know
who people who would go to the website the church's website and start filling out a form they said in this country at
this time uh you know we on average we would get about three forms filled out
every 20 days okay or so but when you ran your ad it jumped from three to 73
wow so they're like something's happening and and the graph 25 times
it's like 25 times and and you can see it it was a
2570% increase in form fills it went from 90 to and we did this for a number
of different places and we were like "Oh my gosh this totally works." Because it's never worked we'd never seen it
work before so we're psyched about it um and uh we got some feedback now what
Jonah were you guys running a different type of ad uh well we have lots of different ads uh lots of different ads
that we run so we do some that are uh a free copy of the Book of Mormon and some are meet with a missionary some are strengthen your family some are uh draw
closer to Jesus and they're your own you made the ads we would make the ads yeah and uh and and it was funded by the
individual digital missionary themselves your own credit card on your own Facebook page because I I was I I didn't
want to do like a group i didn't want to touch other people's money i was nervous about that and so we say "I'll teach you how to do it i'll teach you how to do
it." And these guys would do it and increasingly people would say "Hey man I
don't want to learn how to do this but I have money i don't I don't want to make an ad can I just give it to you okay and
can you do it?" And for a long time I said "No no I really don't want to do that i don't want to touch other people's money i'll show you how to do
it." Um but we started having success we
got feedback from people on the ground and they this is a one particular area
where one of our digital missionaries ran some ads for a while and he wanted
to focus on this place he ran them a bunch we saw the blips in the in the graphs we thought "Oh this is going
great." And then it kind of we wondered if anything ever happened well a few months later we get contacted by one of
the missionaries in that exact same place like in the village and he
says "We had over 75 baptisms in a single day." And we're like "Wait what?"
Like huge success now just to be clear that success is not because of us that
success is because the Holy Spirit and the missionaries working hard and the
commitments those individuals are making but it proved the concept our technology
was working we It was working we were getting missionaries referrals real
names contacts of people who wanted to hear the gospel and those missionaries
then were taking it and running with it and these are good referrals these aren't just a name it is somebody who
they have to go through a form they It's like a filter or two a hurdle or two so
there's no spam there's no noise there's no bots and they were good referrals and it was translating and we thought "Oh
hot dang." So the process is still the same though you're you're putting up an ad they're clicking on it you're sending
them a Book of Mormon you're not sending it but the church is sending them a Book of Mormon is that still the same thing
so that's what it was okay and that that's what I'm telling you just missionaries now we've upgraded it so
after this one of our viewers a very enterprising guy he said "We've got to
we got to do this right?" And Jonah you got to be stop being afraid of taking
donations he's like "We can do this." And so we used got a team of guys together very enterprising uh LDS dads
who love the gospel and put together gathering Israel and gathering Israel is
now the quantum leap of of this work so previously whereas we couldn't see where
people went we had to maybe hear a little bird tell us that that it was working now we have full visibility
start to finish from where we take out the ads and the click rate and yada yada
yada how much we spend all the way to uh how they were how their teaching
regimen the commitments that they kept did they go to church did they get baptized when they got baptized who
baptized them all the way to the end start to finish we have visibility it's tremendous it's a
quantum leap from what I was doing 10 years ago with these guys on Facebook
now it's like a full uh start to finish a toz process okay so question so now
you're gathering in well apart from Israel you're gathering the donations in
right so you're funneling where they're going to go mhm are you is the strategy
that you're going to say "Okay well Ghana is the cheapest of all of these where we're having some success it's the
most efficient perclick that we're getting our cost let's put all of our
money into Ghana get something a momentum really growing there and and and go from there." Or are you spreading
it out to the top three top five most efficient how does that work that's a great question it's a great question um
we have not started collecting donations oh you haven't okay it's only been kind of us you know contributing we haven't
really opened it up yet you're kind of the first guy I've told so right now we use our own money and we're looking at
uh we have a bunch of different places most of them across Africa we have some in in South America we some have in
North America we actually just got a baptismal commitment in New York City in the Bronx which all places wild right um
so uh I think last week we this this system of the people that we can see
start to finish i think we're on our 15th baptism this week um of of people
that we can see it takes a little time to get through the teaching pool we've been doing it for two or three months
and now we're seeing those fruits start to really come in and it's very edifying
but what we do is to answer your question we're looking across a bunch of different nations we have a lot of
Nigeria uh Zimbabwe Kenya South Africa we've had several baptisms in South
Africa um we're we have a mission contact in Peru we really would like to
coordinate with the missions better to to to know like hey are you following up on these uh you know how how should we
do it where should we do this like do you have any advice for us like how can we best serve you and since we have a
contact in one of the Peruvian mission presidencies uh we're doing some there
so that we can try to show them that the process works um and then of course in America we're in America so we're trying
some in North America it's a little more expensive but we we're we're trying to develop and learn the process as well as
we can in the short time that we've been doing this we have seen like tremendous
success so we can see so what what just so that everybody knows this technology
is a finding technology it's a finding system it finds people and connects them
to the church we do not compete with the church we do not step on the church we
want them in the church so we're giving them to missionaries this that you're
you're seeing here on my screen is the church's system of how missionaries it's
actually fantastic like bravo whoever at the church put this together because like this is amazing um that lets
missionaries track their referrals they have somebody in the in the teaching pool it's the preach my gospel app that
they use and you can see over here and maybe I'll I'll zoom in so people can see this better mhm so this right here
is our system if we were a mission companionship we've got almost 3,000
people in the teaching pool 3,000 Oh excuse me 3,000 people who have submitted referrals 2435 in the teaching
pool i think this is a little old this is like 2 weeks old it's probably almost twice this now we're And then we can
track them using the church's own system and see are the missionaries teaching them you can see commitments kept over
here you can see we the referral was sent uh and they started teaching they
contacted them by phone uh they contacted them on the WhatsApp they attended sacrament meeting and the dates
they did it and so forth and so forth so you can track the progress of that investigator it's amazing and then we
started getting missionaries contacting us and they said "Hey thanks for the referral here here he is he's baptized."
Nice hey thanks for this baptized this is just some of the of the people who
have committed to baptism through this program in the past like two months that
is so exciting Joe that's amazing yeah that this has been around it totally works it's like kind of like "Wait
what?" And they have and they're and we we we had one guy interviewed and he said "Yeah I saw the ad and I just knew
that I needed something new in my life i needed the peace you know and I and so I got baptized and thank you." And the
missionaries take it all over like once we find them it's the missionaries do it all they do it all and and you know then
we're Yeah all we do is we do the finding for them we want So when you run
a business Greg you've been the CEO of several Fortune 500 companies you know that when you run a business
Fortune50,000 pardon me pardon me 50 50,000 oo that sounds even even better doesn't it
50,000 is a lot more than 500 um you don't want your CFO licking envelopes you don't want to
pay your chief legal counsel to sweep the floor that's a dumb way to run a
business you want that guy doing the thing that you're paying him for the expensive stuff that only he can do and
you can hire somebody else to sweep the floors or you can hire somebody else to lick envelopes our missionaries can
teach and testify and bring the spirit into people's homes and they can give
personal witness of Jesus Christ and the gospel i'd rather have them doing that
all the time than walking a mile to a
hut to knock on a door to find they're just not home and then walking back it's
a better use of the resources of our missionaries if they are doing the work
that only they can do and so our tool is a finding mechanism so that missionaries
you know ideally could show up and have already here's all the people I'm teaching here's the people who are
interested in what I'm going to say and just go down the list and just teach them and do the thing that you do best i
I attracted a lot on my mission a lot of on my mission and I taught a lot teaching is way more fun than dracting i
think everybody will agree with me dracting can can have some great stories that come out of it but there's
nothing like nothing like teaching and so that's our goal is to get these people to where they're being taught
so another aspect of this which I'll just touch on briefly is
uh being able to reach not only places that that find people for missionaries but find people who could never be found
so I ran a campaign in Guinea Basau guinea Basau uh is in the the west coast
of Africa it does not have a church presence at all using my own money we're
talking like 60 bucks okay this is not a lot of money 60 bucks of ads i hit
guinea bisau with a bunch of these Facebook ads and I asked the church office building contact are we getting
anything and this is before gathering Israel would have made this way easier and the church office building contact
said yes you are you're getting actually quite a lot here and those referrals
were then sent to the nearest mission which I I it was Ivory Coast maybe or
maybe it was Cape Verde and after a while I got a an email from the
missionaries and they said thank you so much for running your ads this is uh
well I don't know to say their names nusa and and Fernandinho they're the first two baptisms in the nation of
Guinea Basau wow um the first they sent missionaries mission that was it was I
think it was any mission s Sierra Leone it could have been Sierra Leone mission
because you know it it didn't have its own so it's a neighboring one of the neighboring missionary uh mission presidents who it's incorporated to
he'll say hey who are all those people requesting a Book of Mormon and he'll say maybe we should send somebody in
there yeah I'm just putting this up here right now so you've got this is way over here on the northwest side of Africa
here tiny little country here what I don't know what made you pick this one out but
it's right above uh Guinea and right south of the Gambia and Sagal but right a little bit north of Sierra Leon as
well so Sagal was back in the days when this was first starting at the Facebook group i I was assigned to Senagle i did
Dar Sagal for a long time and then the church opened Sagal to the gospel and I
thought wait was that because of me did I help like you know I didn't know but I was like wait I threw I threw a a
barrage of referrals over at you guys maybe somebody saw maybe that's why and so then I moved to Guinea which is just
next door but it shows that this technology can reach people who could not else be reached there was a guy
early on and I think his picture was up here a second ago who was baptized who
contacted us and said "I never would have opened the door to the missionaries i never would have i'm too shy." But
because I saw your ad I clicked on it and invited them and that's what got the ball rolling i never would have found
the gospel and we're like "Oh oh my gosh that's the greatest thing." You know um
so not only can it help do what we're already doing but it can do things that we can't do that we can't do right now
so anyways well the reach is incredible i mean obviously I mean if you had enough money right i mean you could be
hitting a lot of these places with a lot more ads and and really do some damage so to speak well and just Yes now just
just for perspective we got in as of kind of last
week the numbers that we have we got about 3,000 new referrals for $1,500
3,000 referrals referrals so 50 cents for a referral a referral
being they they they they contacted the missionaries a referral being they
clicked on it they filled it out with their name their address how they'd like to be contacted yes they and they went
through one more intense form of filtration so no bots 50 cents
now we're we see this and we're like what do we do with this information because it's like scary how effective it
is um but I I want to I want to show you a little the the this is the quantum
what I believe is the quantum leap in in missionary work here okay so this is the
website for Gathering Israel gathering Israel now because of these crazy
tech guys very and very committed uh uh guys
who joined the cause now this is formalized so instead of using my own
money and my own ads which I'm terrible at by the way I didn't do marketing I'm no good at it um these guys have said no
no no no no no you're not doing this right they've we we employ a number of
internet marketers in Africa who understand it better than we do um
they're professionals at this it's a team kind of scattered around there but they know how to get
the they know how to drive the cost down they know how to reach people really well they know how to get rid of the
noise in the data and they have refined the process down and that's why it's so it we're we're getting success at such
incredibly low costs jonah Jonah Jonah you need to raise your level oh no my my
voice level no you need to raise your donation level oh
after we put this out I'm just telling you you need to raise the donation goal on this well you're very you're very
sweet you're very sweet i for anybody who who who wants to contribute you can go check this out gathering Israel.org
go look at it you can see some of our success stories we actually had a Ukrainian refugee design the website for
us we're trying to get him to take the discussions um but uh the uh for donors
if if you if you want to be a part of it um we think it's we think it's ready for
donations everything is 100% uh charitable it's 501c3 so it's
taxdeductible um and all the operating costs of that team that helps with the
marketing those things they are all 100% covered by internal private donors you do not have to worry about any of that
that is all paid for um a 100% of anything that is that is donated goes
directly to those ads um and that we're very excited about that um that we can
that we can run it in perpetuity without any without ever taking a dime of these ads these go directly to getting the
gospel in front of the eyeballs of people who might never get a chance they
might never get a chance if it wasn't for something like this so yeah and and and on the other hand it's also when you
see the effect how effective this is on the other end which we don't care about
as much but it's still important is those that are donating can have a real
feeling like this isn't just a shotgun approach I'm throwing out there maybe something will happen you're looking
at direct numbers that are showing that about you know you're getting a referral for every 50 cents you're putting out
there imagine the power of throwing $100 or $500 or $1,000 in there $1,000 is
$2,000 referrals to missionaries that's an incredible feeling yeah it's that you're actually making that happen well
and we're going to do better than that because we have a newsletter any anybody who donates gets in on the newsletter
and the newsletter um if I can try the share screen i'm getting better at this i'm getting better at the share sharing
of the screen so the newsletter um will give you data because we're data driven
we want to make this we want to drive the costs down as low as we can and make it as effective as we can so this data
right here shows uh the success we've had just this is the past two months it's a very young program but the costs
used to be the orange is kind of the cost the dotted line with the orange the cost per referral and then driving that
cost down and then seeing the referrals go up every month any donor will get this in an email and they'll get to see
what are the what are the geographies that we're in awesome how how how is the cost going they'll be able to see all
that and they'll be able to see testimonials of people that week who have accepted the gospel um they'll be
able to see them testifying and actually I'll I'll even let me even bring up um I
could even bring up a newsletter here for for people to see you'll you we want we want help we want ideas we want um we
don't want to just go do it with someone else's money we want every member a missionary mhm and this is a way that
that people can do there's lots of people out there who you can't fly to Africa and knock on a door you know
maybe your son or your or your grandson can do that but you can't do that and so
how what do you do um and this is a this is one way to feel a little more
connected to that so I'll bring up the newsletter here for May okay so here's here's a a snip
of the of the newsletter okay so this is for the month of May the beginning of
May these are quotes from the stories from people who just this month as of this month have received uh contact have
made contact with the missionaries because of the program because of your dollars or whatever this is the Truth
Mormon book i'm a proud owner of the Great Book of Mormon then it'll show you the stats updated number of referrals
donations cost of the ads jonah that is incredible that is incredible and then
here's the stories this is Idrisa from Freetown Liberia he says "I'm texting to
humbly express my heartfelt gratitude by saying a very big thank you to you and to two missionaries that came here last
night to teach and preach the gospel to me i am I so much appreciate their coming i'm a proud owner of the Great
Book of Mormon here's Fred from Kenya David from Freetown and and you'll and anybody who
wants to participate will get those updates we want to connect we don't want
to just do it we don't want to do it we want people to feel connected to it every member is a missionary if anybody
out there would like to donate please do that's great it's all taxdeductible if anybody out there
knows of has an idea how to do it well please contact us on the website or if
you have any contact in the mission department or a mission presidency or ward mission leader um we want to try to
make this great the we want the CFO to spend his time CFOing
we don't want our wonderful missionaries out there we want them to spend as much
time testifying as they can because they can connect with people the Holy Ghost
can do that if we can do this we're freeing up the Holy Ghost and those
missionaries to do the real work of conversion so I am very excited about this i've
been doing this for over 10 years and it's been like maybe there's some potential here and I finally feel like
oh shoot we could change the world with this thing we could really take it to
the moon so just in the past week we've had 14 15 baptisms we get photographs
they say "Thank you so much it's one of the most fulfilling things in the world and we want to share it with people." So
that really is such a big part of it is the connection you know it's kind of like it's kind of like doing uh uh work
for the dead in the temple right if you're just out there going and you don't have a name and an origin of where they are and when they were born or
anything else like that you know there's no connection at all it's just I'm doing this and it's going to somebody yes
right here you're getting a real connection and that's really important to understand because it's it's Yeah
you're not walking over with a missionary and walking into their home and with the lessons but but you know
you're making a difference and you feel the connection and they probably feel a
connection to some degree that's that's really important as part of the work i think that's that's an excellent way to
put it well uh somebody uh and I'm not going to remember who it was but one of the apostles said "If all
you do is take a is get a name given to you when you go to the temple you're missing out on half the blessings." Mhm
finding that person and connecting with that person is the other half right just like what you said same thing with this
program i for years was throwing referrals over the cubicle wall
and I was like I hope this is getting somewhere and just hoping it was and that's great and maybe that made a great
difference maybe it helped get East Tumor open maybe it helped get Dar Senagle open maybe it's helping get
Guinea Basau open maybe that maybe I contributed to some of that but now we can close the loop and we can show
people like I I I think we can prove to the world that missionary work in the
latter days is just beginning just getting started like that's exciting it
is not plateauing it is not waning it is just getting started there are people
there's a billion people in India there's a billion in China and and
there's people in backwoods Africa and little islands in the Pacific who all they have is a little phone with
Facebook and we can reach out to them and we don't have to spend $10,000 to send two missionaries from
Farmington Utah to knock on their little grass hut hopefully when they're home from their fishing that day and connect
with them no we can do it for pennies and then those missionaries who show up on that island and have 5,000 grass huts
can just have people come to them and and then do the teaching and the testifying when I was in Russia we had a
team of lawyers who were in Moscow who I think many of them were retired LDS
lawyers excellent lawyers who spent all their time just keeping us in the country keeping us from being you
know shipped out of the country mhm and God bless those those faceless men who
who allowed me to serve a mission because they made that sacrifice but
that's not cheap that costs a lot of money and a lot of time and I spent a
lot of their time walking riding on a bus knocking on a door oh no one's home
and walking and those things and that was good for my soul but if we could
expedite that and get right to the testifying we could we could meet the
Lord's charge to hasten the work in the latter days i think this is just the
beginning of missionary work this is just the beginning of the church we had the highest baptisms 2024 highest
baptisms in like 25 years right this is not slowing down and
this is a great way to be a part of it so that's awesome so one more time tell everybody where they can go to find out
more about this and to get involved go and do travel atquick media no I'm just
kidding i'm just kidding no I'm just kidding um you can go to gatheringisrael.org
gatheringisrael.org lowkey why didn't the church own that URL anybody i have
no idea why but we have gatheringisrael.org you can go check that out um and you can be a part of it
and even donating 20 bucks you can be a part of the newsletter it doesn't cost us anything but we want we want to
relight the fire of missionary work in the world we have a new finding technology out there and we're going to
juice it as much as we can so yeah yeah and you can really again you can really feel like you've you've you've really
done likely really really done something with this it's so efficient and so effective jonah thanks so much for doing
this to begin with because this is really exciting and and seems to be working very well i love that you can
track everything you've got the graphs you've got the newsletter you keep people in the loop they're involved all
the way not just from money yep and it's uh that that's a it's a great program really appreciate you doing this yeah
man it this is th be excited this is the latter days things are not slowing down
things are speeding up this is there's never been a better time to be a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Saints
this is the most exciting time joseph Smith would have been jealous of how exciting it is to be a member in 2025 so
get excited that's awesome appreciate it Jonah thanks Greg great to see you man