Missions receiving needed relief The number of Latter-day Saint missionaries in some areas of the world has fallen steeply because of coronavirus-related issues, but missionaries are beginning to return to the field. Four months after the pandemic upended the highly organized global missionary program of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, six American sister missionaries recently arrived in the Denmark Copenhagen Mission, including Sister Kendra DeLange, 19, of North Logan. The relief was welcome in a mission where reduced numbers meant more areas were on the verge of going without missionaries, according to returned missionaries and family members. More help is poised to crisscross the globe. Many stateside missions are full of Americans holding international mission calls who are unable to travel to their assigned callings because of pandemic-related restrictions. The U.S. State Department’s decision on Thursday to lift its Do Not Travel advisory, in place since March 19, may help. As the pandemic spread, church leaders recalled 30,000 of its 67,000 missionaries. About 26,000 young missionaries were sent back to their home countries and 4,000 senior missionaries were released because they were at higher risk of COVID-19 complications. At least one mission, in Hong Kong, temporarily emptied out completely. Others continued with a fraction of their pre-pandemic population. Several thousand missionaries who had planned to enter the church’s Missionary Training Centers this spring and summer instead trained at home for six hours a day. Thousands more continued to receive new international mission calls, and many of them learned their new languages through instruction provided in Zoom conferences in anticipation that pandemic restrictions would lift. DeLange was in the Provo MTC when the pandemic threw her plans into disarray. She had arrived there on March 4 destined for Denmark. Suddenly, her planned five-week stay was cut to three weeks. “The missionaries were called to a Sunday meeting, and at the end they were told the MTC would shut down by the weekend,” said DeLange’s mother, JoAnn. “She found out the next evening she would be going to Gilbert, Arizona, and she was on a bus to the airport by 8 a.m. She found herself in 100-degree weather with a whole bunch of cold weather gear for four months.” Missionaries also have traveled from stateside reassignments to Finland and Hungary. Read the rest of the story, including interviews with another missionary and the recently returned president of the Russia St. Petersburg Mission. | 
