Sister Marianne Chambers has been on a mission for 16 months. This month, she’ll be spending her second Christmas season thousands of miles away from her family. But despite being so far from home, Chambers and her mission companion, Sister Maddy Peterson, have found a community in Alamance County to celebrate Jesus Christ with.

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“It's definitely a unique experience and a different Christmas than we'll probably ever experience in our lives,” Chambers said. “But because of that, we try to make it the best that we can and just try to focus on the Savior. He is the reason for the season and why we celebrate.”

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Chambers and Peterson are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, a denomination of Christianity that says Jesus visited the ancient Americas after being in Jerusalem. LDS members, colloquially known as ‘Mormons,’ study both the Holy Bible and a text called the Book of Mormon. The text was written by witnesses to Jesus in America and is sometimes described as the ‘New New Testament.’ 

 

A huge component of the LDS faith is recruitment. Young adults have the option to go on a mission, which aims to spread the gospel of Jesus Christ, according to the Church of Jesus Christ website. For women, missions last 18 months; for men, 24. Missionaries can be sent anywhere in the world, sometimes requiring them to learn a new language at an intensive level. Most missionaries complete their mission right out of high school or during a gap year from college.

 

Peterson has only been on her mission for two months, taking a gap year from Brigham Young University-Idaho to do so. When she recalls opening the letter informing her of her mission location, she said it wasn’t what she was hoping for.

 

“I was called to the Charlotte, North Carolina mission. When I opened my call and read that, I'm not gonna lie, I was a little bit disappointed, but only because I wanted to go foreign. I was hoping to either go foreign or do Spanish-speaking,” Peterson said. “But I realized, once I got here, that the Lord knew where he put me because I'm with the people that I needed to meet.”

 

Chambers and Peterson describe their LDS congregation, the Gibsonville Ward, as ‘kind.’ Each ward in the LDS church is based on geographic location instead of a member’s choice, meaning each congregation contains all members of the faith from its designated area. They attend services and Bible studies at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints located in the Town of Elon.

 

Even though their mission is based in Charlotte, their personal missions serve Gibsonville and Greensboro. Both Chambers and Peterson have had positive experiences in their missions. Peterson said that Southern hospitality is real; Chambers said two different families from the congregation invited them to Thanksgiving dinners.

 

But one person stands out to the missionaries for making them feel at home in North Carolina. Dr. Shawn Tucker, professor of art at Elon University. Tucker and his family host the sisters for dinners and holidays, and he has mentored them in their missionary work.

 

“He's goofy, and so, that's the first thing that I noticed,” Peterson said, “Like, when we had dinner, we were laughing a ton.”

 

Tucker, a former LDS missionary in Chile, has had different experiences than the sisters in the community. He said he has had some difficulty bonding people within his congregation who hold vastly different views.

 

“Community also comes with this difficult side too, because you don't get to pick your community,” Tucker said. “Right? And you don't. Just like you don't get to pick your family.”

 

But Tucker also said that these difficulties aren’t dealbreakers. While he has experienced less accepting groups within the LDS community, he believes that being friendly and accepting is the only way to change that attitude.

 

“Sometimes people say, well, this is a friendly ward, this is not a very friendly ward and things like that. And I always think that, okay, you can, for about the first three months or so you can say, ‘Oh, the ward’s friendly or the ward’s not friendly,’” Tucker said. “But after that, you're in the ward now. So if you're friendly, the ward’s friendly. If you're not friendly then the ward’s not friendly. You're, you're part of the group now.”

 

Outside of the church, both Tucker and the sisters say they have seen reactions to their faith range from acceptance to disinterest, but never outright hostility.

 

Dave Gammon, another Elon professor and LDS member, has had similar experiences.

 

“It's no secret that I'm Latter Day Saints, right. You know, my colleagues around me all know it, and they're pretty supportive of that. Even the ones who are atheists or whatever, you know, I think they just see it as like, okay, whatever,” Gammon said. “I guess they don't, most of them don't really see it as all that relevant.”

 

Being on a mission today is also far less isolating than it once was. When Tucker performed his mission, he was allowed two phone calls home a year, once on Christmas and once on Mothers Day – anything else had to be handwritten letters. Now, missionaries have phones and can video call home whenever they want. Many LDS missionaries even have Facebook accounts, though the church has been slow to adopt social media.

 

Tucker watched this shift happen in real time, as the church began allowing expanded contact of missionaries as his children were completing their own mission trips. He feels like this access to communication creates challenges.

 

“So our two daughters, we could just write to them and talk Christmas and Mother's Day. With our son, partway through his mission, then we can video chat with him. And then with our youngest son, we can video chat with him from the beginning,” Tucker said. “And in some ways, it was great, but in some ways, like his first month when he's really homesick? I mean, we were like, ‘we gotta end this call now before we all burst into tears.’”

 

No matter how they communicate, Tucker said that community is a core part of the LDS faith.

 

“Just having a belief on my own, that really wouldn't, wouldn't really fulfill a lot of its purpose,” Tucker said.

 

Tucker said that he finds faith fulfilling in part because it is tied to how he serves his community. But Sister Peterson believes that, while community is helpful, faith stands alone.

 

“The faith and the community, I separate a little bit,” Peterson said. “Because the faith can survive without the community but the community definitely can help each other to grow in their faith.”

 

Despite their differing priorities, Tucker, Peterson, Chambers, Gammon, and the rest of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Days Saints find their community through their faith. As they approach the holidays, Tucker says that he and his family will try to ease the missionaries’ pain from being away from home by bringing them into their own celebrations.

 

“We do the best that we can,” Tucker said. “But it's never quite enough.”