Mission Call
The LDS Mission Call Process: From Papers to Your Call
Every step between submitting a missionary recommendation and opening a mission call — who assigns missionaries, how long it takes, how the call arrives and what it contains.
Published 6 min readMissionary Tracker
On this page
A mission call is not applied for and not chosen. A recommendation is submitted by your stake president, an assignment is made at Church headquarters, and a call is extended to you. This page follows that sequence from the moment the recommendation leaves your stake president’s hands.
If you are still at the earlier stage — the form, the assessments and the interviews — that is covered separately in LDS mission papers.
The process at a glance
- Your bishop starts a missionary recommendation and you complete your part of it.
- Medical and dental professionals assess your health readiness.
- Your bishop interviews you, then your stake president does.
- Your stake president submits the recommendation — no earlier than 150 days before your availability date.
- The Missionary Department reviews it, including the health information.
- An assignment is made, and a call is extended.
- Your call materials and instructions reach you, and you respond to them.
- You prepare, are set apart by your stake president, and travel to a missionary training centre.
Everything a candidate actually controls happens in the first three steps. Once the recommendation is submitted there is nothing to chase and nothing to add.
Who decides where you serve
Assignments for young teaching and service missionaries are made by Apostles, through revelation, and the call to serve is generally extended by the President of the Church. That is the whole mechanism the Church describes, and it is worth being sceptical of anything online that claims to describe more of it.
The information in your recommendation contributes directly to that process — which is the practical reason leaders are instructed to make sure it is complete and fully disclosed rather than tidied up. Health circumstances, language, family situation and legal matters are all part of the picture that a decision is made against.
What the assignment includes
A call to serve comes with an assignment, and the assignment usually covers three things: whether you serve as a teaching missionary or a service missionary, a location, and a length of service. Single men aged 18 to 25 usually serve 24 months; single women aged 18 to 29 usually serve 18 months.
Two features of assignments are easy to miss and genuinely useful to know:
- An assignment can change. Circumstances change and so, by continuing revelation, can assignments — including mid-mission.
- The assignment is secondary to the call. The handbook says so explicitly. Missionaries are set apart for the call to serve rather than for a particular assignment, which is why a missionary whose assignment changes is not set apart again.
That framing does real work in the first weeks after a call. People who go out attached to a specific picture of their mission have a harder start than people attached to the work.
Teaching missions and service missions
Both go through the same recommendation process, with the same standards of preparation and worthiness, and both are mission calls.
Teaching missionaries are assigned to teach the gospel away from home, under a mission president. Service missionaries are assigned to serve in the Church and the community while living at home, with assignments tailored to their circumstances and supported by service missionary advisers. Service missionary assignments are not yet available everywhere in the world.
Which one is right is a conversation with your bishop and stake president, most often where health circumstances make serving away from home difficult. It is not a lesser call, and treating it as one is a mistake families sometimes make in front of the person it concerns.
How long the wait is
The Church does not publish a turnaround time for mission calls, and numbers repeated on forums are worth very little.
What can be said usefully: it has commonly been a matter of weeks rather than months, it varies, and your stake president is the only person with any visibility into it. If the wait starts to feel long, ask him rather than speculating — sometimes there is a specific reason and sometimes there simply is not.
The more common surprise is the other way round. Candidates picture a long wait for the call and a quick run-up to it, and the reality is usually the reverse: arranging a dentist and two interviews takes longer than headquarters does.
How the call arrives
Delivery has changed over the years and continues to. Call materials are made available through the Missionary Portal, and in some cases a printed call packet is issued as well. Because this is one of the details most likely to be out of date on any third-party page, ask your stake president what to expect rather than assuming it will look like your older brother’s did.
What has not changed is that it arrives without much warning, which is why most families agree in advance roughly what they will do when it does.
What is in a mission call
Beyond the assignment itself, expect the practical apparatus of getting you into the field:
- your mission and its official name;
- your reporting date and your missionary training centre;
- whether you will be learning a language;
- travel and visa instructions, sometimes with deadlines attached;
- a What to Bring section specific to your mission, which governs your packing;
- instructions the handbook expects you to respond to promptly.
Read all of it twice, save copies, and share them with your family. The first read is for the news; the second one is where the deadlines are.
Opening the call
There is no correct way to do this. Some families open a call at a kitchen table with four people and a phone propped against a mug; others fill a room. Both produce something worth keeping if a little thought goes in beforehand — mainly about who is included and how it is recorded.
Approaches, and the small logistics that make them work, are collected in mission call opening ideas.
What happens straight after
The fortnight after a call is busier than the months before it. Passport and visa work starts immediately, the temple gets arranged through your bishop, the monthly contribution needs setting up, and your What to Bring section decides what you are allowed to buy.
There is an ordered walkthrough of all of it in what to do after receiving your mission call, and the longer runway to departure in the mission preparation checklist.