LDS Mission Preparation Checklist: Everything to Do Before You Leave

Mission preparation is not one list. It is a year or more of small things — habits, appointments, paperwork, money, a suitcase — arriving in a rough order that is set by two dates: when your recommendation is submitted, and when your call arrives.

This is the whole runway in one place. What to start in the year before you submit, what changes the day the call comes, and what is genuinely left for the final week. Work through it in order and very little should arrive as a surprise.

How far ahead to start

Work backwards from your availability date — the date you are able to begin serving. Under current handbook guidance a stake president may submit a young candidate’s recommendation up to 150 days before that date, and the availability date itself cannot be earlier than the point where you have reached the qualifying age, have been a confirmed member of the Church for at least a year, and have finished or left high school (that last condition applies only if you will not be 19 by then).

That single rule sets the shape of everything else. If you hope to enter the field in September, your recommendation can be submitted somewhere around April, which means the medical and dental appointments that feed into it want to be booked in February or March — and dental work in particular has a habit of needing a second appointment six weeks later.

On length and eligibility: single men aged 18 to 25 usually serve 24 months, and single women aged 18 to 29 usually serve 18 months. There are teaching missions away from home and service missions served from home, and both go through the same recommendation process. The full set of ranges, including senior service, is in the current LDS missionary age requirements.

So the useful answer to “when should I start preparing?” is: about a year before you want to leave for the habits, and about six months before you want to leave for the appointments and paperwork.

Spiritual preparation

The thing that transfers into the field is not how much you knew before you left, it is whether you already had the habit. A missionary who has never studied for an hour on their own does not suddenly become someone who studies for an hour on their own because they are wearing a badge.

So the target is consistency rather than volume. Twenty minutes of real study every day for a year does more for you than a heroic fortnight in July.

Worthiness is worth addressing plainly. The handbook is explicit that a candidate must have repented of serious sin before a stake president may submit a recommendation, and that the process includes enough time to show that change. That is a reason to talk to your bishop early, not a reason to delay talking to him. The timeline is far more forgiving nine months out than it is nine weeks out.

Learning to teach

Most people arriving at the MTC can recite the first vision and cannot hold a conversation about it. Those are different skills, and only one of them is what you will do all day.

The practical version of teaching preparation is: explain something you believe, out loud, to a real person who is allowed to interrupt you. Do that thirty times before you leave and you arrive ahead.

• Learn the lessons in Preach My Gospel as ideas you can rearrange, not as a script you recite.
• Practise explaining the Restoration in three minutes, then in one, then in a single sentence. The compression is the exercise.
• Teach from the Book of Mormon rather than about it. Get comfortable opening it and reading a few verses with someone.
• Ask your ward mission leader whether you can go out with the full-time missionaries. Bishops are encouraged to arrange exactly this, and an afternoon of it is worth a month of reading about it.
• Practise listening. Most new missionaries talk too much, and the fix is a habit rather than a technique: ask a question, then wait.

If you end up with a language assignment, none of this is wasted — you will be taught the language at the MTC, and the missionaries who do best there are usually the ones who already knew what they wanted to say.

Practical life skills

This is the part of preparation that families most often skip and new missionaries most often notice. A mission is the first time many people run their own week: their own food, their own laundry, their own money, their own alarm.

None of it is difficult. All of it is much easier to learn in a kitchen you know than in a flat in a country where you cannot read the packaging.

The other half of this is living with someone. You will be with a companion nearly every waking hour, often someone you would not have chosen. Sharing a room with a sibling, a roommate or a friend for a few weeks before you go teaches more about that than any amount of advice does.

Health, appointments and physical preparation

Health assessments are a required part of the recommendation. Medical professionals assess your readiness, and those assessments are reviewed by the area office and the Missionary Department. A recommendation can be returned with instructions on improving health readiness before it goes further — which is not a rejection, but it does cost time.

Book early. Dentists in particular are the single most common source of delay, because a filling found in March turns into a second appointment in April.

Emotional preparation

The hard parts of a mission are rarely the ones people prepare for. They are the ordinary ones: a companion you find difficult, a month where nothing works, being tired in a way that sleep does not fix, and missing people while having very little time to think about missing them.

The Church publishes a booklet for this — Adjusting to Missionary Life — and it is worth reading before you leave rather than in week three when you need it. A few things that genuinely help:

• Practise being uncomfortable on purpose. Talk to strangers. Ask for things. Get told no by someone whose opinion you do not need.
• Learn to describe how you are actually doing, in words, to another person. Missionaries who can do this get help early.
• If you already see a counsellor or therapist, talk to them about the transition rather than stopping abruptly the week before you go.
• Set expectations low and specific. Most days are ordinary. That is not a sign anything has gone wrong.

The missionary recommendation

What families still call “mission papers” is now an online recommendation completed with your bishop and submitted by your stake president. In outline: you complete your part, you have your health assessments, your bishop interviews you, your stake president interviews you, and he submits the recommendation.

The interview questions are published, so you can read them in advance. The interviews are meant to be searching rather than adversarial, and both leaders are specifically instructed not to add extra standards of their own.

The full sequence, the timing rules and how long the wait usually runs are covered separately in LDS mission papers: the process, timeline and what to expect.

Money

Missionaries and their families contribute a set amount each month toward the cost of the mission, paid into the ward missionary fund. In many countries this runs through the Church’s equalised contribution programme, meaning the same amount is contributed for every missionary regardless of where they are sent; elsewhere the amount is agreed with your bishop and stake president. Ask your bishop what the current figure is — it has changed over the years and is not something a third-party site should be quoting at you. How much an LDS mission costs goes through the whole financial picture, including what the mission covers once you are there, and has a savings planner for the one-off costs below.

Two details that catch people out. Contributions beyond the monthly amount should not be paid in advance, so you cannot simply hand over a lump sum at the start and forget about it. And no worthy, prepared candidate should be delayed from serving for financial reasons — if the family cannot cover it, the bishop can ask the ward or stake to help.

Beyond the monthly contribution, the real costs sit in the months before you go: clothing, shoes, luggage, a passport, visa photos, glasses, and the personal items you will use for two years. That is what your saving is actually for.

After your mission call arrives

The call changes the shape of preparation completely. Until it arrives, everything is general. Afterwards you have a place, a reporting date, a language or not, and a mission-specific set of instructions that overrides most generic advice — including some of this page.

The first fortnight after the call has real deadlines in it: passport and visa paperwork, the temple, travel, and reading your mission’s own What to Bring instructions before you spend money on clothing. There is a full ordered walkthrough in what to do after receiving your mission call.

Write the dates down properly while you are reading the call — your reporting date, your MTC assignment and the month you are expected home. Everyone in your family is going to ask for those numbers repeatedly for the next two years.

The temple

Newly called missionaries are encouraged to receive the temple endowment as soon as possible after the call, and to attend as often as circumstances allow before leaving. Your bishop and stake president arrange the recommend interviews and help set the date, so raise it with your bishop in the same conversation where you tell him the call has arrived.

Two practical notes. Go more than once if you can — the first visit is mostly about taking it in. And do not buy temple clothing to pack: temple clothing is provided to missionaries at the temple at no cost, and it is a common and expensive packing mistake.

Packing

One rule governs everything here: buy nothing mission-specific until you have read your own mission’s What to Bring instructions in the Missionary Portal. Climate, dress expectations and even what counts as normal proselyting clothing vary by mission, and a suitcase bought from a generic list in January can be wrong by March.

What you can safely do before the call: sort documents, replace things that are worn out, and start breaking in shoes.

The detail lives in three separate guides: the full LDS missionary packing list for the mission as a whole, the MTC packing list for how to pack for training specifically, and what to bring to the MTC if you just want the short version for arrival day.

Your farewell talk

The bishopric will invite you to speak in sacrament meeting before you leave. It is worth knowing what that meeting actually is: a regular sacrament meeting, focused on the sacrament and the Savior, at its normal length. You are asked to speak about Jesus Christ, His restored gospel and the joy of sharing it — not to give an autobiography. Family members are not normally invited to speak.

The handbook also asks members and leaders to avoid the things that turn it into a send-off: special printed programmes, reception lines afterwards, open houses other than a family gathering. Knowing that in advance saves an awkward conversation with your mother about programme design.

For how to actually build the talk — choosing one idea, structuring it, and using a personal experience without the talk becoming about you — see preparing an LDS missionary farewell talk.

Personal admin to sort before you go

This is the least interesting section on the page and the one most likely to save someone at home a headache in nine months. You are about to be very hard to reach for eighteen months to two years, and anything that needs your signature needs it now.

The final month

The last month is mostly confirmation rather than new work. Two Church things happen in it, and both are arranged for you.

Your stake president sets you apart as close as possible to your start date, with a short interview beforehand. Brothers serving away from home must have received the Melchizedek Priesthood before being set apart, so if that has not happened yet it needs arranging now. The setting apart is not recorded — you are encouraged to write about it afterwards instead, which is worth knowing in advance so nobody is fumbling for a phone.

The final week

Keep the last week smaller than you think it should be. Most missionaries describe the final few days as exhausting for reasons that have nothing to do with packing.

• Do the real pack early in the week, weigh everything, then live out of a small bag for the last few days.
• Set aside the carry-on separately: documents, medication, a change of clothes, and anything you would not want to lose with a suitcase.
• Say the important goodbyes early. The last day is a poor time for anything that matters.
• Two things surprise families, so say them out loud now: the MTC does not hold a farewell meeting for families, and families are discouraged from meeting missionaries at airports when they leave the MTC for their assignment.
• Sleep. Arriving tired makes the first week considerably worse.

Help your family prepare

Your family is about to spend two years answering questions about you. Where is he serving? When does she get home? What was the name of that city? Is that the same mission as the neighbours’ son? The amount of friction in that depends almost entirely on whether the answers were written down once, in a place everyone can reach.

Before you leave, make sure they have:

• Your mission name, your reporting date and your expected return month, written down rather than remembered.
• An explanation of how contact works in your mission, and what the expectations are — this is the thing extended family most often get wrong.
• One person who is the point of contact, so twelve people are not each forwarding the same email.
• Your mailing address and a realistic sense of how long post takes.

What happens after you leave

In sequence: you are set apart, you travel to your assigned missionary training centre, you spend roughly three weeks there if you are not learning a language and around six if you are, and then you travel to your mission. Your call materials give your actual dates — training lengths vary by assignment and by MTC.

After that the rhythm of the mission takes over, and preparation stops being something you do and becomes something you did. What continues is on the family’s side: the countdown, the areas, the transfers, and the steady work of keeping everyone informed. There are guides for that too — how to keep track of a missionary’s mission and how to share missionary updates with family are both written for the people you are leaving behind.