Missionaries: two years, unpaid, and the résumé line that follows

The alarm goes at half past six. Two hours of personal and companion study follow, then the missionaries are out of the apartment by 10 a.m. and expected back by 9 p.m., with lights out at 10:30. They work in pairs of the same sex, and the rule is that the two stay within sight of each other. Dating is forbidden. So is being alone with anyone of the opposite sex. Until February 2019 a missionary could telephone home twice a year, on Christmas and one other day; the rule now allows a weekly call, text or video chat, initiated by the missionary. Men serve 24 months, women 18, and senior couples one to three years depending on circumstances. The Church calls them elders and sisters, assigns them a location (they do not choose it), and moves them between towns within the mission at the discretion of a mission president, himself an unpaid volunteer who has usually left a career to do the job for three years.

On October 6, 2012, Church president Thomas S. Monson lowered the minimum age from 19 to 18 for men and from 21 to 19 for women. The effect on the numbers was immediate. The missionary force jumped to about 89,000 by 2013, then drifted down to 65,137 by the end of 2018 as the surge cohort finished. The pandemic cut it to 54,539 across 407 missions in 2021. In 2025 the Church lowered the age for women to 18 as well.

• End of 2024: 74,127 full-time teaching missionaries, plus 31,120 senior service missionaries and 4,192 young service missionaries, across 450 missions (Church statistical report)
• End of 2025: 451 missions; the Church's report published in April 2026 gave the full-time count as 88,500 with mid-2026 updates, alongside 5,916 senior and 4,584 young service missionaries
• All time: more than one million people have served since the Church was founded in 1830

Service missionaries are the newer category: they work in Church operations, welfare facilities or community projects, often from home, and the count of them has grown while the teaching force has fluctuated. For most purposes on this site, "a mission" means the full-time proselytizing kind, because that is the one the executives in the profiles served.

Missionaries pay their own way, which in practice means their parents do. Before 1991 the cost depended on where you were sent, from under $50 a month in some countries to $900 in others. Since then the Church has run an equalized program in which every missionary from a given country contributes the same flat amount into a ward missionary fund, and headquarters draws it down monthly. The United States figure was $400 a month from 2003. On June 27, 2019, the First Presidency announced an increase to $500 a month from July 1, 2020, for missionaries from 18 countries including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and Japan. The Deseret News did the arithmetic: a two-year mission would go from $9,600 to $12,000 and an 18-month one from $7,200 to $9,000, the first change in 17 years, against a consumer price index up 39 percent since 2003 and rents up more than 60 percent. Whether the $500 figure took effect on schedule I could not confirm from a published source; the Church's own missionary-finance help page gives no dollar figure and tells local leaders to ask their area office.

The Church pays for training, travel to and from the field, and the incidental costs of the work. Families pay for clothing, a bicycle where needed, medical costs the mission does not cover, and the phone. Missionaries from Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and Tuvalu pay nothing. Ward members often chip in for a neighbor's child, so the fund is communal in a way the flat fee hides.

The Missionary Training Center sits next to Brigham Young University in Provo. It began as the Language Training Mission in November 1961, in the Hotel Roberts downtown, and took its current name in 1978 when it stopped being only about languages. The Provo campus holds up to 3,700 missionaries at a time and teaches about 55 languages. English-speaking missionaries headed to English-speaking missions stay three weeks; those learning a language stay up to nine. As of August 2024 there were 11 training centers worldwide: Provo plus São Paulo, Kinshasa, Preston in England, Accra, Mexico City, Auckland, Lima, Manila, Johannesburg and Bangkok. The Accra center was rebuilt in August 2017 with room for 500. Missionaries serve in about 150 countries and teach in about 60 languages.

"Most of what I was trying to do was rejected." Mitt Romney on his mission to France, 1966-1968

Romney's line is the honest version of the mission story, and it is worth putting next to the boosterish one. He served 30 months in France from July 1966, estimated that he converted ten to twenty people in all, survived a June 1968 car crash that killed the mission president's wife, and by December 1968 was supervising 175 missionaries and had the mission's best baptism total in a decade. Sixteen years later he co-founded Bain Capital. Nobody can prove the one caused the other, and the record on this site does not try. The record does show how many of the profiled executives carry the same line. David Neeleman went to Brazil at 19 and returned to found Azul, a Brazilian airline, in 2008. Clayton Christensen learned Korean in Seoul from 1971 to 1973. Stephen Covey served in England, then ran the Church's Irish Mission from 1962 to 1965 before the book that sold 65 million copies. Gary Crittenden served in Germany and, after being chief financial officer at American Express (2000-2007) and Citigroup (2007-2009), became managing director of the Church's Missionary Department in 2017. J. Willard Marriott went to New England from 1919 to 1921, passed through Washington on the way home, noticed the street vendors selling cold drinks in the heat, and opened a root beer stand there in 1927. Don Bluth spent two and a half years in Argentina between leaving Disney in 1957 and returning in 1971. Jack Gerard, later head of the American Petroleum Institute, served in Sydney. Carlos Wizard Martins served in Portugal, built a language-school chain in Brazil, sold it to Pearson in 2013, and ran the Brazil João Pessoa Mission from 2001 to 2005.

Utah's employers noticed the pattern long before this site did. A 2005 piece in The Globalist reported that Brigham Young University counted 72 percent of its students fluent in a second language, that Nu Skin, Goldman Sachs, eBay and Intel were recruiting returned missionaries in the Provo area, and that Governor Jon Huntsman Jr. was pitching the state to multinationals on exactly that workforce. Nu Skin's finance chief, Ritch Wood, said there was "a wonderful, talented, knowledgeable hiring base right here in our backyard." The skills are the unglamorous ones: knocking on doors for twelve hours a day and being told no, keeping a schedule with no manager in the room, working with a partner you did not pick, and learning a language by using it. Whether that adds up to a better executive is an open question. Whether it adds up to a better sales hire is not one Utah's sales companies bother to ask.