The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Lowers Its Minimum Missionary Age

On 6 October 2012, thirty four years after Official Declaration 2 ended the priesthood ban for Black members in 1978, already recorded here, and seven years before Russell M. Nelson dedicated the Rome Italy Temple in 2019, also recorded here, President Thomas S. Monson announced at General Conference that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was lowering its minimum missionary age, from nineteen to eighteen for young men and from twenty one to nineteen for young women. Monson told the assembled members that young men who had already served under a lowered age in a limited number of countries had proved faithful, obedient and mature, and that he now wished to extend the same option worldwide. Missionary applications, which had run at roughly seven hundred a week, rose to about four thousand a week in the announcement's immediate aftermath, and more than half the new applicants were young women; the number of full time missionaries serving climbed from about fifty eight thousand five hundred in October 2012 to more than eighty thousand a year later, with the proportion of sister missionaries rising from about fifteen percent toward a quarter of the total force. The change reshaped the demographic composition and scale of the Church's missionary program, one of the chief engines of its worldwide growth since the nineteenth century.