While many Hillsdale students avoid leaving campus even for a semester abroad, a small group of students and professors have intentionally stepped away from their studies for two years to serve a higher calling.
Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints at Hillsdale, whose numbers fluctuate in the single digits from year to year, regularly practice their religion like any Christian denomination on campus. They attend a two-hour worship service at the Jonesville Ward on Sunday, participate in a weekly scripture study called Institute, and pray together throughout the week. But the Latter-day Saints share one thing that sets them apart from other religious groups: most serve a mission.
“Mission life is very demanding,” Associate Professor of Spanish Todd Mack said. “For two years you are completely dedicated to serving God and his children. Missionaries wake up early, and they spend their days doing service or preaching the gospel.”
Young church members between the ages of 18 and 25 may volunteer to serve an 18-month or two-year mission at one of more than 400 missionary sites around the world, according to the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-day Saints website. After a brief time of training, missionaries are sent out in pairs to do humanitarian work and share the gospel.
“Nothing in my life makes any sense without understanding my mission,” Mack said.
Missionaries have very little say in where they serve, according to Mack.
“In our church, we don’t choose where to serve, we simply apply to be a missionary, and an assignment comes,” Mack said. “For example, my father served in Japan. My brothers served in Holland and Paraguay. My sister was a missionary in Anaheim, California. I have friends that served in Fiji, and Mexico, and the Philippines and in a number of other places all over the world.”
Mack, the current bishop of the Jonesville Ward, spent two years from 2001-2003 as a missionary in Madrid, Spain, an experience that led him to study and teach Spanish.
Life on mission is rigorous but rewarding, Mack said. Restrictions on music, books, and activities yield time for prayer, study of the scriptures, and service.
“Imagine if every young man and woman took 18 months or two years of their life between high school and college to completely dedicate themselves to spiritual growth and serving God’s children,” Mack said. “I think college would be really different.”
For Associate Professor of Economics Roger Butters, those two years changed everything. Butters left college from 1989 to 1991 to serve his mission in Northeast Brazil, where he worked in Fortaleza, Teresina, and Natal.
“Everything I am, everything I have become is the consequence of that experience,” Butters said.
Butters lived on $30 per month as a missionary, called his family only three times per year, and shared the total poverty of those he was living with.
On Christmas day, 1989, the power went out in the missionaries’ house.
“We had no water in the house, we had no lights, we didn’t have any air conditioning anyway,” Butters said. “We had no food because the new government had just come into power and had frozen all the bank accounts, and so we had no money, no food. For that entire month, I ate one meal a day and that was because Brazilian families fed us.”
Butters said he came face to face with the suffering of the Brazilian people when he visited a children’s hospital in Fortaleza.
“I walked into that children’s hospital, a starry-eyed young man who liked to write poetry, kind of a romantic,” Butters said. “What I saw in that children’s hospital — I haven’t written any poetry since.”
Walking with the Brazilian people, visiting their homes, and sharing in their poverty opened him up to the suffering in the world.
“It was in Brazil that I learned and understood what it meant to love other people,” Butters said.
It also led him to his current academic discipline.
“We get so used to the idea of our wealth. We take it for granted that being rich and comfortable is just how things are, and they aren’t,” Butters said. “The reason I got into economics is because in economics I found an explanation of how to solve the problem of poverty.”
Butters goes back to Brazil every chance he gets and plans to spend part of his sabbatical next year in Teresina doing humanitarian work.
Missions looked different for sophomore Nathan Scoffield and juniors Benjamin and Joshua Burnett, who served recently within the U.S.
Scoffield worked with the Navajo Native American tribe in the Four Corners. from 2013-2015.
“Imagine two years straight, every day you get up at the same time, and you have the same purpose every day, and that’s all you do,” Scoffield said. “In that two years, there’s no question what that purpose is. It’s to bring the gospel to people because they need it. It’s so satisfying, and it’s so hard at the same time.”
Though many people turned him away, Scoffield said he was struck by those he encountered who were lonely and starving for spiritual direction.
“You see in those people something that you don’t see in people that don’t feel like they need help,” he said. “You see into their soul a little bit. That’s a really sacred thing because you get to see this is God’s child.”
Scoffiled said he grew through the challenge of reaching out to others every day and offering them the gospel.
“That was transformative to me, learning to find joy in not thinking about myself,” Scoffield said.
Benjamin saw COVID change the mission field when he served in Denver, Colorado, after one semester at Hillsdale.
When he started his mission, Burnett and his companions knocked on doors or talked to people in the street. While many were receptive to their message, others said they were too busy to talk, turned them away, or made jokes.
“You learn to laugh as a missionary because there are just crazy things that happen,” Burnett said. “When we found people to teach, they were often very interested. And of course, it’s everybody’s choice if they want to know more about Christ’s restored gospel, so we respect that. Along the way, we just got to share.”
COVID quickly changed the work for Burnett and his companions.
“It helped open our eyes to other ways to find people who are seeking to know more about Christ or find people to serve — lots of online stuff, social media, making videos to uplift people,” he said. “We weren’t sure what to do because we were inside our doors. Eventually we learned there were ways to still reach people even if we can’t be physically around them.”
Joshua learned Arabic in six months when he was assigned to San Diego, California, to minister to Iraqi and Syrian refugees during the fallout of COVID in 2021 and 2022.
Though it was hard to leave the friends he made in his first year at Hillsdale, Joshua said what he gained was worth it.
“If this is something that matters to me, I wanted to share that with other people,” he said. “I grew a lot as a person. I grew a lot also in my faith, trying to push myself as a person.”
He said his daily life involved prayer, study, and community service. Most of his work focused on building the congregation, helping with Sunday school classes, and teaching English.
Unlike the missionaries of previous generations, Joshua and his companions regularly used the internet and social media for ministry. When a man from Egypt living in Russia wanted to know more about the church, other missionaries in Russia connected him with Joshua through Facebook because he spoke Arabic. They have kept up ever since.
“He’s probably one of my favorite people ever that I know,” Joshua said. “Meeting him and helping him at that time was really a fantastic experience.”
The Burnetts agreed the transition back to Hillsdale was difficult, especially because their classmates were seniors when they returned.
Other Hillsdale students often have questions about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, according to Benjamin. He said they also often have incorrect assumptions about what Latter-day Saints believe. Regardless, the questions fellow students ask can lead to fruitful discussion.
“I’m really grateful I came here because it allows me to see more of what other people believe. I definitely saw it before. I saw it on my mission,” Burnett said. “But I’ve had conversations where they are wanting to know more. Either way, I’m grateful to share.”
