senior missionaries - home/visiting teaching

it is my understanding that membership records for missionaries remain in their home wards while they serve. how then does that ward include (or not) and account for them in their home and visiting teaching reporting each month, since they may actually be half a world away? also, does anyone visit/report them in the local unit they serve in?

for single members, most often they can be grouped with their family, unless their parents aren't members. but for senior couples what approaches are being used?

geowizrd wrote:it is my understanding that membership records for missionaries remain in their home wards while they serve. how then does that ward include (or not) and account for them in their home and visiting teaching reporting each month, since they may actually be half a world away? also, does anyone visit/report them in the local unit they serve in?

for single members, most often they can be grouped with their family, unless their parents aren't members. but for senior couples what approaches are being used?

In our stake, the practice is to count senior missionaries as being home/visiting taught. The logic is that if such missionaries are considered to have attended their priesthood and RS meetings, it's reasonable to count them as being h/v taught. I can't find an official source that justifies this practice, but it makes sense and it's what we've done for many years.

Whether they are h/v taught in the wards in which they serve would seem to be a decision made by the local bishop. If that ward chooses to h/v teach them, I would think that they should not be included in the statistics for the quarterly report, since they are not included in the base number of households (that includes only households with actual membership records in the ward).

In our ward, a member of the bishopric, or a clerk, or one of the wives of those writes each missionary/couple every month on a rotating basis. We count that as them being visit/home taught. I have assigned a Laurel in the ward to keep track and email us a reminder at the first of each month who we are to write to. She is able to count it towards service hours in her personal progress goals. We also attach a copy of the Ward Newsletter to the letter or the email. If we get a letter back, we forward it to the Laurel who distributes it amongst us.

That is like killing three birds with one stone...

They are all in the bishop or in the case of sisters, the bishop's wives HT/VT districts. Makes it look like I am doing more than I am.