Each week hundreds of families around the world take their sons and daughters to Missionary Training Centers (MTCs) and bid them farewell for 18 to 24 months. The MTC is where their sons and daughters embark on the beginning of their journey as a full-time missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Once they enter the MTC, they are expected to devote all of their time and attention to preparing to teach others about Jesus Christ. Some will remain at the MTC for as short a period as two weeks, whereas those who are learning a foreign language will remain at the MTC for nine weeks, before departing to their assigned mission.
Approximately one in four Americans speaks a foreign language. However, because Mormon missionaries serve in many different parts of the world, the percentage of Mormons who are fluent in other languages is higher than average. Not only are they fluent in other languages, but they are taught languages at a more accelerated pace. For example, a Mormon missionary assigned to a mission where he or she will speak Mandarin Chinese spends a total of nine weeks studying and learning the language at the MTC, whereas the U.S. military has an intense 64-week course in Mandarin taught at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California.
How does the Church teach foreign languages with great effectiveness in short periods of time? A June 2014 National Public Radio (NPR) report shares this insight: “They accomplish it through intense classroom instruction from teachers who are former missionaries, daily practice in realistic teaching situations, and learning by and following the Holy Spirit. As one missionary tells NPR, “Everything we do is trying to learn by and with the Spirit.””
The MTC in Provo, Utah teaches 56 languages. Thirty-one of those languages require a maximum of nine weeks of study and training. Twenty-six of those thirty-one languages are Asian or Eastern Bloc languages. The Church also has 14 international MTCs that teach seven foreign languages. International MTCs also provide native language training in 17 languages for missionaries not learning a second language. Each instructor is either a native speaker or is fluent in the language because of his or her missionary service.
To learn the language that they will be speaking to teach the gospel, missionaries study the language for 6 to 8 hours a day. After a few weeks of study, they are asked only to communicate in the language they are studying. They are also encouraged to pray, read the scriptures, and even think in the language they are learning.
Speaking of the challenges that missionaries face in learning a foreign language, President Thomas S. Monson has commented that he “marvels at the devotion and total concentration of these young men and women as they grapple with the unfamiliar and learn the difficult.” In a 2013 interview with The Salt Lake Tribune, Col. Derek Tolman, commander of Utah National Guard’s linguistic unit, remarked that MTCs are “excellent at teaching the fundamentals in a short time. The students are highly motivated, and the learning curve is amazing.”
In addition to language instruction, teachers also provide cultural training to help missionaries make a smoother transition into their assigned foreign country.
Missionaries for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are called to serve in many different locations throughout the world. Some are called to serve in areas not far from their hometown and are able to teach in their native English, whereas others are called to serve in faraway lands where they must learn not only a new language, but a new culture and lifestyle as well. Such was the case for Tylan Glines, Connor Peck, Davis Blount, Jake Mingus and Sumner Mahaffey, five returned missionaries for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who served their missions in the Philippines. Although their missions may have been challenging at times, the life lessons that they learned and their new-found knowledge has made a major impact on their lives.
The Idea of Making a Video in Bisava is Born
The five young men served in the Philippines Cebu Mission where they learned to preach the gospel in Bisava, a dialect of Cebuano. The Filipino people that they interacted with were astonished that they had taken the time and effort to learn their language which was a rarity. This gave Mahaffey and Mingus, who were companions at one time during their mission, the idea about making a short, single video of them speaking Bisava. Later, at a mission conference, they presented the idea to Glines and Blount, who were also companions at the time, and Peck. They all agreed that it was a great idea, but with a year left on their missions, they decided to shelve the idea until a later time.
In 2014, after returning home from their missions, they decided to revisit the idea of creating a video in the Bisava language. The first video that they made was an introductory video where each of them took turns introducing themselves, and talking about their interests and hobbies. The entire video was in Bisava.
According to Blount, although that first video was not earth shattering by any means, it was well received and amassed hundreds of views, which encouraged them to create more comedic videos. Mahaffey commented on what made the video so successful:
It was so successful because they had never had entertainment in their own language. We were trying to put out good, wholesome, clean entertainment to help them, and once we started doing that, we got these messages saying, ‘Thank you so much for making us proud to be Bisaya people,’ and that is what kept us going. We want to make them as happy as they have made us.
The Hey Joe Show Comes to Life
Filipinos are well-known for referring to Americans as “Joe,” and everywhere they went while on their missions they would always be greeted with “Hey Joe!” So, they decided that their channel should be called Hey Joe Show. Peck further commented:
We really, really wanted to go back to see the people and really interact with them, not just through videos but person to person. There’s a big difference. Especially with the kinds of things we wanted to express with the Hey Joe Show, like our love for the country, our love for the people, all those things we really wanted to do in person.
Glines organized Hey Joe Show’s first tour, and in April 2015, the young men returned to the areas where they had previously served their missions and performed five live shows in five different cities. Prior to their first show neither of them really knew what to expect. They had set a goal of at least a couple hundred people showing up for the shows, with realistic expectations of maybe 25 people actually coming to the shows. Much to their amazement, an estimated 5,000 people were in the audience of their first show. Glines remarked, “It was exciting because we love the people so much and to know that we are now even more permanently tied to the country that we love and served with was so exciting.”
In addition to the live shows, the five returned missionaries spoke at firesides and had the opportunity to visit families they had taught and served with on their missions. Glines further commented, “The love is incredible, and I hope we can, by the end of our lives, explain or show the Filipinos how much we love them. The tour kind of did that, but I still don’t think they will ever know how much we love them.”
The Future and Hey Joe Show
Since creating their YouTube channel on 27 April 2014, the Hey Joe Show has garnered almost 60,000 subscribers and over 5 million views, with each video getting anywhere from 7,000-540,000 views, and more than 451,000 likes on Facebook. With the overwhelming success of the show, Tylan, Connor, Davis, Jake, and Sumner plan to continue making videos and hopefully do another tour next summer. Their ultimate goal is to collaborate with charities and schools in the Philippines and perpetually serve the people they love. Beyond the Hey Joe Show, the five Brigham Young University students have hopes for graduate school, marriage, families of their own, and promising careers.
Five Brigham Young University (BYU) graduates were among those named on the prestigious Thinkers50 list of the best business management thought-leaders of 2015. In fact, this year, for the first time, BYU graduates made up 10 percent of those listed. The graduates that were listed include Clayton Christensen, the Harvard business professor who introduced the concept of “disruptive innovation, at No. 2, Dave Ulrich (27), Liz Wiseman (43), Hal Gregersen (46) and Whitney Johnson (49). As a note of interest, Christensen finished first in the biennial rankings in 2011 and 2013.
Dave Ulrich commented, “Like a smaller boxer who succeeds against bigger fighters, “BYU outpunches its weight.” But a person might ask, “How does this happen? Why does BYU make up a substantial portion of the Thinkers50?”
A Sunday, 3 January 2016 Deseret News article suggests:
The answers range from the mundane — how lists are compiled — to the intriguing — what the dean of BYU’s business school calls the Clayton Christensen Effect. Christensen earned an economics degree at BYU and went on to write “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” which “deeply influenced” Apple’s Steve Jobs. His ideas on innovative disruption have had such a broad impact that “disruption” is becoming a household term describing, for example, what is happening right now with cable TV cord-cutting. Gregersen and Johnson have worked directly with Christensen.
Influence of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
Dave Ulrich suggests that perhaps a more viable answer to the questions can be found in the influence that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has had on the lives of the 5 BYU alumni that are listed. He further commented, “Five LDS people on the list is amazing. I credit the LDS learning system. BYU, I think, through the missions served by so many of its students, gets that benefit. I don’t think the world understands how great missions are for learning. Gospel and theology learning, of course, but also social learning, organizational learning, personal management learning. An 18-month or two-year mission is like five years working at one of the world’s best consulting firms.”
This is not the first time that the idea of a prodigious Mormon impact in business and business management has been considered. In 2010, a Financial Times article titled “The rise of a new generation of Mormons” indicated that the LDS culture has given birth to “a professional elite.” In 2012, Harvard Business Review published an article titled “How Mormons Have Shaped Modern Management.” Christensen and the late Stephen Covey made the first Thinkers50 list in 2001, 2003, and 2005. Ulrich, who was named by HR Magazine as the father of modern human resources in 2012, joined Christensen and Covey on the list in 2007, 2009, and 2011. In 2014, speaking.com ranked Ulrich the No. 1 speaker in management and business. His creation of an index to gauge the leadership strength of an organization earned him a spot on the short list of eight people considered for the 2015 Breakthrough Idea Award.
The Dynamic BYU 5
Liz Wiseman, the developer of the idea of leaders as multipliers (people who double the brainpower inside an organization by attracting talent and making people around them smarter) and diminishers, joined Christensen and Ulrich on the Thinkers50 2013 list. She earned a Bachelor Degree in Business Management and a Master Degree in Organizational Behavior at BYU, and was Oracle’s global leader of human resource development. In the past five years, she has written three best-sellers including Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter.
Hal Gregersen earned a Master Degree in Organizational Behavior at BYU and served as a BYU faculty member. He is the executive director of the MIT Leadership Center. In 2015, the Forbes list of the world’s most innovative companies was based on methodology Gregersen created with Jeff Dyer, a BYU business professor. In 2011, Gregersen, Dyer and Christensen co-authored The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators. According to the Thinkers50 list, Gregersen is presently working with Christensen on a study about “the power of questioning and how the most successful leaders are able to identify the right question — rather than the solution — to unlock a vexing challenge.”
Whitney Johnson earned a music degree at BYU and later switched to studies in business. Last year, with more than 54,100 followers, she was listed as one of the 55 most influential women on Twitter by Fortune. Along with Christensen, she is the co-founder and prior president of the Rose Park Advisors’ disruptive innovation investment fund. In the fall of 2015, using Christensen’s theory of disruption and applying it on an individual level, she published Disrupt Yourself: Putting the Power of Disruptive Innovation to Work.
In the 3 January 2016 Deseret News article, Lee Perry, Dean of BYU’s Marriott School of Management, further noted:
I think the experiences we have in Church help us become more sensitive to leadership and organizational issues. I don’t think it’s just happenstance BYU had one of the earliest and strongest organizational behavior programs. We basically have a laboratory for leadership opportunities in the LDS Church that come with maybe even some additional challenges because it’s a volunteer organization.
They’ve done this by themselves, he said of the five Latter-day Saints in the Thinkers50, but I think their LDS and BYU backgrounds provided a nice little jumpstart.
Of the many social media venues that are available to users worldwide for sharing their content with family, friends, or other users in general, YouTube, which is currently available in 76 different languages, is perhaps the most popular. Headquartered in San Bruno, California, YouTube is a video-sharing website that was created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, purchased by Google for 1.65 billion dollars in November 2006, and now operates as one of Google’s subsidiaries. The site allows users to upload, view, and share both user-generated, as well as corporate media videos, including videos from such corporations as CBS, the BBC, Vevo, Hulu, and other organizations which offer some of their material via YouTube as part of the YouTube partnership program. Available content on the site includes video clips, TV clips, music videos, and other content such as video blogging, short original videos, and educational videos.
The Butler Family – YouTube Millionaires
Corporations are not the only ones who can earn monetary compensation for their contributions. There are many general users, such as the Butler family, who also earn revenue from the videos they upload to their YouTube channel.
Shay and Colette Butler, or the “Shaytards” as they are known online, are members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and live in Pocatello, Idaho, have five children, and earn millions of dollars per year through sharing their videos on YouTube. Because of their success in daily video vlogging, they have been dubbed one of YouTube’s first families, and were recently featured on ABC’s “Nightline.”
On 4 September 2013, the viral family posted a video that was dedicated entirely to talking about their faith and what they believe. During that video blog, which is nearly 18 minutes in length, the Butlers talked about attending the Brigham City Temple in preparation for Shay’s brother, Logan, leaving on a two-year full-time mission for The Church of Jesus Christ in Argentina. Shay himself served a two-year mission in the West Indies (Trinidad, Barbados, and Ghana). Shay began the video by explaining what temple worship means. He said, “It’s a place where we go to make promises to our Heavenly Father.” He then continued by explaining some of the basic beliefs of the Mormon faith:
What we believe is that Jesus Christ is our Savior. He is the central figure of our church. The real full name of our church is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. We’re called the Mormons because we believe in another book of scripture called The Book of Mormon. The Book of Mormon is another testament of Jesus Christ. We believe that Christ came and lived on the earth, just like you’ve heard of in the Bible.
Shay also addressed the problem of discussing religion online, stating that such conversations can easily end in confrontation. He commented, “It would be great to just be able to sit down, one-on-one, and have a religious conversation in an open environment where there is no, ‘Well, I’m right and you’re wrong’ mentality and attitude. So I’m hoping we can do that in the podcast.”
The Butlers were also featured in a Mormon Message video titled “Our Fun Family Vacation” which was released by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in September 2013. The video features clips of the Butler family spending time together and with extended family. In the video Shay comments
In our lives these days there are so many things that are trying to matter to us: emails and phone calls and advertisements, and all these things that kind of barrage us. But I feel like some of the strongest, happiest, moments that I’ve ever felt in my life are when I’m with my children, when I’m with my family.
Butler’s Viral YouTube Videos Play Vital Role in Conversion of British Woman
It is true that we may never know how many lives we touch through our humble efforts and example. For Shay and Colette Butler, the fruition of the missionary groundwork that they are laying through the production of their videos was realized through the conversion of two families – Lois and Lewis Herbert of England, and Mandy and Rick Vellinga of Holland.
In an email to Deseret News in January 2015, Lois Marie Herbert wrote:
I just stumbled across one of their videos. I clicked out of the video, and then something made me go back and watch. From then, I was hooked. I went back that day and watched every video they had made. I found them both hilarious. They were so happy. There was just something so different about their family.
I guess I was just lost. I saw how they were as people, and I wanted to be like that. I was unhappy in my relationship with my boyfriend at the time, and I wanted the love that they had for each other.
Back then, I didn’t really pick up on their religion, or I didn’t take much notice. They just made me happy and laugh. Before I found out more about the church, I would always watch a Shaytards vlog (video blog) in the morning and think to myself, ‘Today, I am going to be happy like they are. Nothing is going to get me down, as other people’s opinions don’t matter.
The Herberts eventually made contact with missionaries from The Church of Jesus Christ, and they began teaching Lois in her home. At first, Lewis showed no interest in the lessons the missionaries were teaching, but seeing the happiness that learning about the gospel brought his wife, he agreed to allow the missionaries to continue coming. His views about religion began to change and before long the family began attending church, reading the scriptures and praying. They continued to meet with the missionaries, Elder Goodson and Elder Wolfgramm, twice a week and were introduced to members of their ward. Lois and Lewis were baptized on 13 December 2014. Lois continues to watch the Butler’s videos as she embraces life as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ.
Shay Carl’s Video Play a Vital Role in Conversion of Dutch Couple
Recalling the first time that he came across one of the Shaytards’ videos on 20 June 2010, Rick Vellinga wrote the following in an email to Deseret News, “I noticed they were so happy and friendly. It made me really happy. I wanted to show the video to my wife, Mandy. It put a smile on her face, and this was the beginning of our Shaytards life.” From then on, the Vellinga’s watched each new video the Shaytards posted and became drawn to Shay’s mantra: “Happiness is a choice.” The couple even named their daughter, born on 2 July 2013, after one of the Butler’s children, Avia.
It was during Mandy’s pregnancy with Avia that she and Rick heard Shay Butler explain his religious belief that families can be together forever. Still healing from Mandy’s earlier miscarriage, this idea intrigued the couple. The 10 March 2015 Deseret News article further explains:
That was something that made us curious, Rick said. So I was searching on the Internet for the Book of Mormon that I wanted to order. After leaving my name and address, there was a page that said, ‘The missionaries will be contacting you soon.’ I thought, ‘No! That’s not what I want,’ and my wife laughed really hard.
Two days later, in September 2013, Elder Spencer Rudolph and Elder Jonathan Knudsen, missionaries for the LDS Church, knocked on the Vellinga’s door. Mandy let the missionaries know they were interested and told them come back when her husband was home. Later that night, the missionaries returned.
We sat down and their first question was if we could pray. We said, ‘Of course,’ “Rick said.”The second question was if we believed in God and Jesus Christ. We said, ‘No, but we believe there must be something more.’ So they began to teach us more about God and Jesus Christ, the Prophet Joseph Smith, and the Book of Mormon. After a few weeks, we learned a lot, and we got a really good feeling about this.
The Vellingas began attending Church in the Spijkenisse Ward and continued learning about the gospel of Jesus Christ. They were baptized on 4 January 2014. One month later, Mandy was pregnant with their second child, and their son, James, was born 11 October 2014. Rick has further commented, “Shay and Colette are the perfect examples of how to be a good mother and father, husband and wife, and church members. Without the Shaytards, we probably wouldn’t be LDS members.” Rick and Mandy continue to watch the Butler’s videos, and they hope to teach their children what Shay and Colette taught them.
Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints can be found all over the United States, as well as, in many different countries of the world. When most people think of Mormons, they envision that Utah, where the Salt Lake Temple and Church office buildings are located, has a higher percentage of Latter-day Saints than any other state, and they are correct.
The table below lists the top 10 states with the highest Mormon population (as a percentage of the overall population). It should be noted that all data is based on numbers from the Pew Research Center and Mormon Newsroom. It should also be noted that Colorado; Washington, D.C.; Maine; New Mexico; Virginia and West Virginia all claim 2 percent of their total populations as LDS, whereas all other states have LDS populations of less than 2 percent.
Each week hundreds of families around the world take their sons and daughters to Missionary Training Centers (MTCs) and bid them farewell for 18 to 24 months. The MTC is where their sons and daughters embark on the beginning of their journey as a full-time missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Once they enter the MTC, they are expected to devote all of their time and attention to preparing to teach others about Jesus Christ. Some will remain at the MTC for as short a period as two weeks, whereas those who are learning a foreign language will remain at the MTC for nine weeks, before departing to their assigned mission.
How does the Church teach foreign languages with great effectiveness in short periods of time? A June 2014 National Public Radio (NPR) report shares this insight: “They accomplish it through intense classroom instruction from teachers who are former missionaries, daily practice in realistic teaching situations, and learning by and following the Holy Spirit. As one missionary tells NPR, “Everything we do is trying to learn by and with the Spirit.””
