Before I get into this, I want to make it clear that I believe that the gospel of Jesus Christ has been restored to the earth, and declaring this is among the most important things we can do. I gladly served a mission for the church in Georgia, and enjoyed it very much. I have been directly involved with getting one individual and one family to join the church since my mission.

Now after having said all that, it seems evident to me that I feel less urgency regarding missionary work than some people seem to feel. Particularly the inviting part. I suspect that my level of urgency in inviting is lower than it should be. I would like to review some of the reasons why this might be, and I welcome your corrective advice. Some of the reasons include:

Everyone is going to hear the gospel eventually anyway.

It is commonly believed that prior to final judgment every individual will have a fair chance to hear the gospel and accept the ordinances. If this is the case (and I believe it is) then should there not be an emphasis on the quality of the invitation rather than the immediacy of the invitation?

Preparation is the most important step.

The commitment pattern is prepare, invite, and follow up. Of these three I believe prepare to be the most important step. There is a reason why member invitations have a greater chance of success than missionary invitations. It is because the members are patiently preparing family, friends, and neighbors to hear the gospel, and the missionaries are inviting random strangers like mad. Both approaches can work, and I believe the combination is a good one. If members were to dramatically ramp up the frequency of invitations to hear the gospel they might have some good initial success, but quickly run out of friends to invite. They would then have to invite randomly like the missionaries do.

The spirit should motivate this.

I believe an important part of a quality invite is the timing. The only way to know the proper timing for sure is to follow the spirit. In spite of some inspiring stories, missionary tracting is a brute force approach to inviting. Forcing invitations on others before they are ready can have negative results in the short term - particularly if the invitations are motivated by something other than the spirit.

Fear of rejection and negative results.

If I make a serious invitation to someone to hear the gospel who has not shown any interest, and whom I feel is not prepared, I fear that a rejection is likely to come. With some possible negative results. Why take the risk? Would it not be better to do some preparation first and see if there is at least some interest?

Anyway, our stake is insisting that every organization in each ward should have its own mission plan with goals reported to the stake each month. These organizations are going to be held accountable for these goals (whatever that means). The emphasis is on invitations. So help a brother out. Please help me understand why I should have a higher level of urgency when it comes to missionary invitations.