The church will ask missionaries in those areas to pay for their iPads, which will be their property during and after their missions, at a cost of $400 apiece.
So the cost of serving a mission just went up by $400. Presumably if they get pinched then it's at the missionaries own risk. I suspect this is about the Church saving $28,000,000 and the cost of insuring or replacing lost/stolen iPads. Penny pinching by the Church that spent $billions on a shopping mall.
If the iPad is the property of the missionary, the Church cannot control the content on the iPad. Oh dear.
This also changes the game in terms of keeping in touch with the folks back home.
Ah, but wait....
Starting later this year, missionaries will be asked to buy specially configured iPad minis for studying and teaching, which they’ll be able to keep after their missions.
http://fox13now.com/2014/07/02/changes- ... l-devices/So, this IS just a penny pinching ploy by the Church.
What if the missionary says 'No'?
I will wager a small amount that missionaries are required to buy these iPads from an approved source and that someone other than Apple Inc. will be making money from it.
Evans said the church, as of Wednesday, had 85,593 missionaries serving, up from the previously publicized record of 85,039 in April.
He said the missionary department anticipates the number to rise to 88,000 this fall before starting to decrease.
LDS Church President Thomas S. Monson precipitated the dramatic two-year surge in missionary numbers when in October 2012 he lowered the age requirement from 19 to 18 years old for male missionaries and from 21 to 19 for women.
Elder Evans, who called the surge "one of the greatest faith-inspiring things I've ever seen," said the church expects the number of missionaries will eventually settle somewhere in the high 70,000s, well above the 58,000 serving at the time of President Monson's announcement.
"We don't believe we're ever going back to the 50,000s," Elder Evans said.
Remember this statement.
About 64 percent of the church's full-time missionaries are young adult men, 28 percent are women and 8 percent are senior missionaries.
"We believe the young people of this church will continue to say yes to missionary service, and they'll continue to choose to become young disciples of Christ," Elder Evans said. "For them it's an absolute free-will offering to the Lord and to their fellow man."
And for the Church it's a virtually no-cost way of securing more tithe payers either through conversion of nonmembers or by the conditioning of the individual sales people...err...missionaries.
He also spoke about convert baptisms and missionary safety.
"Every month, if you compare month over month, the baptisms are up," Elder Evans said. "Right now for this year, there's about an overall 15 percent increase in the number of convert baptisms this year compared to a comparable period last year."
I'm not sure what this numeric means in isolation.
If activity is up 15% then that's a good story. But even then, what would that really tell us?
Elder Evans said missionaries now are being asked to have a "safety moment" at the beginning of each day, an effort to increase their sensitivity to safety issues after several injuries and deaths among missionaries made news, particularly last year.
Those incidents remain few compared to the general U.S. population of 18- to 21-year-olds.
"It is by far the safest place for any young single adult to be that I'm aware of," Elder Evans said. "I've read statistics that suggest being on a mission may be as many as 20 times safer than being generally out in the population."
Unfortunately Elder Evans neglects to mention what statistics he's referring to.....