What you Need to Know about Serving a Senior Service Mission

Choose a senior service mission or design your own

In The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, we believe in giving service. As senior missionaries, you might choose to serve around the world, but many missionaries will serve while living at home. In some situations, it may be more effective to serve in your home country or area.

The Church’s 27,000-plus senior service missionaries help assist in Church communication, mission offices, distribution centres, FamilySearch centres and libraries, self-reliance programmes, BYU-Pathway Worldwide, employment centres and many other places. You could also have a customised mission based on your specific skills and interests.

The Church is launching a new worldwide senior missionary management system to help seniors find or create a service mission opportunity. Under the direction of Elder Robert Gale and Sister Leslie Gale, area coordinators are being called around the world to help you figure out which mission might be right for you.

If you can serve abroad as a full-time missionary, there are many opportunities and needs. If you have health challenges, family needs, or other concerns, a service mission might be the right path for you. If you have special skills to offer, the best option might be working with your area coordinator to create a mission just for you.

Service missionaries serve eight to 40 hours per week for six months to two years. Missionaries may be married or single. They may drive a few miles to their service location or sit in front of their home computer to complete their tasks.

After serving a full-time mission, Elder Peter Kopp and Sister Beatrice Kopp worked as service missionaries in welfare and self-reliance close to their home in Switzerland. During this time, they gained a firm testimony of the self-reliance initiative of the Church. They said about their service mission, “Since we knew almost all the stake leaders we were called to work with, we had easy access to all of them. They had an open ear for us and felt our excitement for this part of the work.”

As a qualified therapist-counsellor, Elder Robert Durkin had a custom-made mission. He was called as a pre-mission assessment coordinator. He also coordinated all the addiction recovery programme coordinators throughout the Europe areas where the addiction recovery programme is being used. He trained the coordinators and made sure records were kept up to date.

He and his wife served a full-time mission at the MTC in Chorley where he was in the MTC presidency. After her passing, he decided to serve another mission. He wanted to serve and live in Germany, so he was planning to move from the UK to Frankfurt, where he would have paid his own expenses as a service missionary rather than paying the monthly missionary fees. Due to COVID, he stayed in the UK and completed his mission from his own home. He says he was able to do everything he needed to do while living at home. He encourages others to serve a mission. He says, “Don’t miss the opportunity. A mission is a great way to get closer to the Lord.”

If you have experience in local politics, you could serve a mission in key opinion leader outreach to help the Church build relationships in the community. If you love to write, you could serve a mission writing articles, reaching out to the media in your local area and posting articles on social media. If you are active in the service community, you could help develop JustServe opportunities to post on the website in your area. You could even teach BYU-Pathway Worldwide in Africa while living in your home in Europe.

Visit the new service missionary portal on the Church website under “Serve,” “Volunteer & Serve,” “Senior Service Missionary” then choose “Search Opportunities”. You can also talk to your stake or mission president about how you might serve. As the area coordinators are called, you can talk to them about opportunities, and they will help you decide on a mission or assist you in creating your own.