Where Are Missionaries Likely To Get Called?
Language, religion, region, and other mission call probabilities
Introduction
When I was 18 and graduating high school, I remember feeling overwhelmed by the possible places you could go on a mission. After all, missionaries get called to every continent (except Antarctica) going anywhere from large cities like Tokyo to jungles in Colombia, deserts in Africa, or perhaps remote islands in the Pacific Ocean. As it turned out for me, I got called to the Salt Lake City East mission in the heart of Utah. Ironically, I was in Salt Lake when I opened my mission call, in the same place where I would later spend 2 years.
So this post is for eager future missionaries who submitted their papers (like I once was) or for people who are interested in data behind where mormon missionaries are sent.
Data
I spent a while digging around the internet, but was unable to find a publically accessible authoritative list of all missions. From this article, I know the most recent missions announced and the total number of missions 450, but still could not find a complete list. So, I compiled the list they had on wikipedia which totaled 449 missions, so I guess I'm missing one mission somewhere though I don't know which one.
From this list of missions and regions, I imputed some data using the Gemini API (a few other data practitioners I follow have recently done this with success) like religions and languages in each mission. I also joined some regional population numbers to the data.
I've included the data and my Rscript which I will provide on request.
Charts
Looking at this figure, almost 2 in 3 missionaries are called to somewhere in the Americas (assuming an equal number of missionaries per mission). The fewest missionaries are sent to Oceana, Europe, and Asia.
I will say I theorize there is likely a strong interaction with where you go given your current citizenship. Missionaries are more likely to get called in their own nation than in another nation as the process is much more seamless and simple (and perhaps less costly). I'll call this the citizenship interaction. But, ignoring this, the graph above shows the probabilities of going to each region.
The next figure compares the number of missionaries by the regional population.
Russia is included in Europe for this analysis.
Interestingly in North America, there is a missionary for every 10,000 people. But, in Asia (even excluding china) there is only 1 missionary for every 420,000 people. This is a huge difference! Interestingly, South America is almost twice as saturated with missionaries per capita than Central America. There are also many more people than missionaries in Europe and Africa comparatively to other regions
.I know one of the big questions I had when getting a call was "What is my probability of going stateside in the US?" Well, our answer is ≈ 3 in 10 missionaries go to the US. I'm guessing that the citizenship interaction plays a role here, so US citizens are probably more likely to get called stateside than others.
For whatever reason, when I was a missionary in Utah, I used to tell people that 1 in 12 missionaries get called to Utah. It was just what I had heard passed around and what I told people I talked to. However, this is clearly quite wrong as only 1 in 33 go to Utah which is a few times less likely than I claimed
.These figures are rounded, so 0% < Hinduism < 0.5%. But only a small region of the world is majority Hindu.
As a missionary, you are most likely to learn Spanish, Portuguese, or Filipino. You are also more likely to go to a Christian majority place.
When I first saw this graph, I was confused as I thought that more religions would be represented in the graph. However, more research confirmed that this was indeed the case.
Conclusion
Thanks for reading though my post here. It actually took more time to compile this than I was anticipating, but I hope that it was informative for people. And, hopefully the extra information perhaps even helped calm a nervous future missionary waiting for their call.
Discussion
What things most surprised you when reading?