Seventeen-year-old Ava Pettijohn’s life was unexpectedly upended by a text from her sister. In a good way. She was “flabbergasted” after her sister sent her a screenshot showing that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints lowered the age young women can now serve a mission to 18.
Pettijohn never thought she’d go. In their kitchen after Sunday church, her sister told her she would be a good missionary.
As she realized she would be, her earlier fears shifted and she started to cry.
“Because I'm like, ‘Oh my gosh, I need to go,’” Pettijohn said. “I just think that it would be so awesome, and I would love to share the gospel.”
If not for the age change, she doesn’t think she would have changed her mind. And she’s not the only one making new life plans after the big announcement.
Her friend, Jocelyn Shuler, another senior at Salem Hills High School in Utah County, is going to serve a mission at 18 now, too. She was with the school’s student council when the news dropped.
“We're freaking out,” she recalled. “Girls are, like, walking out to go call their moms, and we're all, like, texting everyone we know.”
LDS missions are a year-and-a-half commitment for women. Church leaders assign missionaries anywhere in the world to proselytize.
The age change will make it easier and more convenient for young women like Shuler, who just turned 18. She already planned to serve a mission, but now she can leave right after high school instead of waiting until the end of next year.
“There's not going to be that awkward period in between graduation where it's like, ‘Do I go to a semester of college? Do I just work?’”
She also pointed out that high school sweethearts who both want to serve a mission will now be able to at the same time. Before the change, one person would leave earlier, so it was possible they wouldn’t see each other for at least two-and-a-half years. The reason is the term of service. Women serve missions for 18 months while men serve for two years. And they were starting at different ages.
There has been a wide range of reactions to the change. Some are excited. Others are celebrating that this is the first time young women and men will be able to go on a mission at the same age. It’s always been older for women, but the gap used to be larger until it changed in 2012 from 21 to 19 for women and 19 to 18 for men.
Jana Riess, an American religion historian and author of “The Next Mormons,” believes the latest age shift reflects how some women in the church feel and what they’re “willing to kind of put up with.”
“They have certain expectations that they will be treated with equality and that they will have every opportunity that the boys and men their age have,” she said.
The change could also come to further shape church culture.
“We have seen previously that when women are given leadership opportunities on a mission or elsewhere, they run with it and they become better leaders,” Riess explained. “They're not simply as deferential to men as they might be otherwise.”
Gen Z women are leaving religion more than men of their generation, and Riess’s research in her book “The Next Mormons” shows the LDS Church is having trouble retaining younger members in the U.S. Other research finds that younger Latter-day Saints are less devout.
Lowering the mission age, she believes, could be a reaction to those trends.
“From a sociological perspective, this is really a genius thing to do. A mission can help keep them in the church in that critical period of the end of high school and the beginning of whatever is coming next.”
The flexibility to choose to be a missionary following high school graduation is one of the things the church emphasized after the announcement.
“It gives them an opportunity, as they leave from young women and enter into adulthood, to think about all of the options that are available for them,” said the church’s young women general president, Emily Belle Freeman, in a video provided by the faith.
That’s the way Shuler sees it. Going on a mission will give her time to figure out what she wants to study in college, she said. Another young woman, 15-year-old Emmy Jensen of Provo, is also excited to be able to attend college after a mission.
“I think it's going to help me mature better and be a better student at university because I think a mission is just such a good experience of, like, self-discovery and testimony building,” she said.
There isn’t perfect parity yet, though. Some wonder why the mission term is still two years for men and a year and a half for women. The church’s first counselor in the primary general presidency, Amy Wright, said they asked young women around the world what they wanted.
“We have learned that, overwhelmingly, it has been their desire that they prefer that their term of service is 18 months,” she said in a church recording.
The church also emphasizes that missions are a duty for men and optional for women.
Now that Pettijohn is seizing the opportunity because of the age change, she can’t wait.
“I want to be able to help people come closer to Christ because it's changed my life so much, being able to grow closer to Him, and I want that for others.”
She turns 18 in July.
