Filmmaker Nancy du Plessis first noticed the Mormon missionaries in the Munich subway. With their white shirts, dark suits and name badges, the shorthaired adolescent boys stood out from the other passengers, nervously talking and joking in American English.<\/p>\n
Each year, approximately 60,000 Mormons travel abroad for missionary duty. This religious rite of passage is a crucial one: at age 19, missionaries\u2014who are predominately male\u2014leave their lives behind and, often with their families footing the bill, devote two years to spreading the faith across the United States and throughout the world. Get the Fire! Young Mormon Missionaries Abroad<\/em>\u00a0follows three boys from their homes in Salt Lake City through their training and service in Germany. What is it like for them to leave their families behind, move to a foreign country and talk to people about God in a language they barely know?<\/p>\n The film opens with Utah teens Jake Erekson, Brady Flamm and Matt Higbee and their families celebrating the boys\u2019 mission assignments to Munich. Two months later, the three young men are undergoing intensive preparation at the Missionary Training Center, where leaders admonish a roomful of teenagers to address each other only as “Elder” and “Sister\u201d and to read aloud from the Missionary Handbook each day\u2014and to follow its rules to the letter.<\/p>\n Once in Munich, Elders Erekson, Flamm and Higbee are sent to live in different cities with their “companions,” fellow missionaries of the same sex that they are required to keep within eyesight and hearing 24 hours a day.\u00a0Get the Fire!<\/em> tracks these pairs through their strict daily routines, which they must plan and document by the hour: proselytizing in a snowstorm, knocking on strangers\u2019 doors in the evening asking to be let in to discuss The Book of Mormon<\/i>, singing German hymns in big missionary meetings. For the entire mission, they must break completely with their past lives. Phone calls home are allowed only on Christmas and Mother\u2019s Day. No first names, newspapers, movies, television or radio is permitted, in addition to the usual ban on alcohol, coffee, tea and tobacco.<\/p>\n Interspersed throughout footage of these three young men are interviews with five former missionaries who have subsequently left the Church, including Adam Bass, who grew up Mormon and was sent home three weeks into his Chile mission because he was gay and Robert Shiveley, who married a member and became unable to reconcile the Church\u2019s teachings with his own intellect.\u00a0Get the Fire!<\/em> examines how the missionaries serve out their time abroad and return to Utah as local heroes\u2014despite culture shock, pressure, hard work and isolation\u2014and leaves the audience to ponder what the young Mormon missionary program is about.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Three young Mormon men, age 19, embark on a two-year rite of passage in Germany as part of a long-standing worldwide effort by Mormon missionaries to spread their faith at home and abroad.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":11169,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"topic":[1293],"class_list":["post-93","films","type-films","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","topic-youth-and-family"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n