Caleb Asked If Missions Have a Roster Cap

Caleb wanted to know if there was a roster cap.

David had read the number out loud off his phone on Tuesday night, 88,500 missionaries serving, more than at any point in the history of the Church, and Lily wanted to know where they all sleep. Caleb put his fork down. In rec league they cut the roster at twelve, he explained, so what happens when there are too many people who want to go? David said they opened more missions. Fifty-five new ones, as it turns out, as of July 1st. Caleb thought about that for about four seconds and went back to his taco soup.

That was the whole conversation, and it's been sitting in my head ever since, mostly because of what happened an hour later.

Tessa's call

Emma texted around nine, from Provo, which is how most news reaches me now. Tessa had opened her call. Tessa is the girl who used to wait on our porch swing at 5:40 in the morning for Emma to drive her to seminary, in a sweatshirt with the sleeves pulled over her hands, and who is now eighteen and headed to Spokane.

"I'm so happy for her I could throw up," Emma wrote. Then, a minute later, "also I am weirdly jealous??? I've been home seven months."

I read it standing at the counter with the wooden spoon still in my hand. Emma came home from Brazil in December and has been a very good English major ever since, and I think she's still looking for the room where anyone speaks Portuguese to her. In January she told me she'd spent all of sacrament meeting running a hymn number through her head in Portuguese, just to hear it. Her roommates are kind about the rest. They also have no idea what she means when she says a certain street in Recife smelled like rain on hot cement, and she has stopped trying to explain it. So of course part of her wanted to be the one tearing open an envelope on a Tuesday night, and of course she's also the one who knew exactly how Tessa would feel at the kitchen table afterward, holding the paper and not yet able to read the second line.

I didn't say any of that to her. What I wrote back was that Tessa was going to be terrified and wonderful and that Emma should send her a card with actual stamps on it. Emma sent a heart and then a photo of a card she'd already bought, which is the most Emma thing I can think of.

I stayed at the counter a while after that. Tessa's mother had stopped me in the grocery store in June, by the bread, to say the papers were in and the call could come any week, and I'd said all the right things and meant them. Walking out to the car I felt proud of her daughter and also a quick cold drop, the kind I get at the top of a roller coaster. The same drop came back at the counter, and this time I knew what it was about.

How old can a sister serve now?

Eighteen, since last November, when the Church lowered the minimum age for women from nineteen. Young men got the same change back in 2012. The old record of 88,000 stood since 2014, and the number that caught me this week was less the record than where it came from, because the announcement credits it mostly to the first wave of 18-year-old sister missionaries. Elder Rasband said it plainly: "What a marvelous time to be engaged in the Lord's work."

I left for São Paulo in August of 2000, three months past my twenty-first birthday, and at the time twenty-one was the earliest a sister could go. I had my classroom Portuguese and a duffel bag my mother had labeled with a Sharpie. I had nothing in common with somebody fresh out of a graduation robe, and eighteen still seems very young to me. I don't know what to do about that yet. I picture Emma at nineteen, stepping off the plane in Recife with her name tag. She seemed young too. She was fine. I'm still no closer to knowing where my own line is.

Caleb at the sink

Later that night, quieter, while David rinsed bowls, Caleb asked whether Emma had ever been scared in Brazil. I told him yes, in the first month she called us from a phone shop and cried for nine minutes and then said, "Okay, I'm good, I have to go, my companion's waiting." He nodded like that was the answer he needed and asked for the last of the cornbread.

He didn't ask whether he had to go, and I didn't offer. Some young women and young men go and some don't, and a lot of faithful families I know have one of each. Caleb is eleven and still hasn't settled on a favorite pitch, so if I made a future out of one dinner-table question I'd be deciding for him, which I can't stand when people do it to my kids. It was the family table that made room for his question at all, and I'd like to keep it a place where a question can just sit there.

After he went up I looked for a verse and landed on Doctrine and Covenants 4:4, the one every missionary seems to know by heart:

For behold the field is white already to harvest; and lo, he that thrusteth in his sickle with his might, the same layeth up in store that he perisheth not, but bringeth salvation to his soul.

I wasn't reading it as the mother of a returned missionary or of a boy with roster questions. I was reading it as a twenty-one-year-old in a borrowed skirt at a zone conference in São Bernardo do Campo, who had no idea what she was doing and went anyway. I think I'll copy it onto Tessa's card.

Frequently Asked Questions

When did the Church lower the age for sister missionaries to 18?

In November 2025. Women can now begin full-time service at eighteen instead of nineteen, which follows the 2012 change that did the same for young men. Sisters still serve eighteen months and elders two years.

How many missionaries are serving right now?

About 88,500 as of the July 14, 2026 announcement, an all-time record that passes the 88,000 from 2014. Fifty-five new missions opened on July 1st, which brings the total to 505.

Has the Church seen a jump like this before?

Yes, between 2012 and 2014, when the minimum age dropped for men and then for women. The force grew about 49 percent and the share of women serving went from 13 percent to 30 percent. Those of us who remember those years are watching something familiar start up again.

Should I bring up a mission with a child who's only eleven?

I wouldn't push it. If they ask, answer what they asked. Caleb wanted to know about rosters so we talked about rosters, and the rest can wait until he brings it up.

The card for Tessa is on the counter with a stamp already on it, a plain one from the post office and nothing like Emma's. I haven't decided how to end the note.

with love, Melissa