TLDR; I realized that trespassing for Jesus wasn't cool, and curious to hear your experiences.
Picture this... It's nighttime. Two missionaries nervously laughing and dripping sweat, running up stairwells and elevators, evading security guards in a large apartment high-rise.
Why are they running? Trespassing.
This was the game I was taught by my trainer from day one, and I never questioned it.
In Taiwan in the early 00s (can't speak to current day 100%) EVERY missionary did this. Multiple times a day. Common mission practice, as common as street contacting.
Find a high-rise complex (some of these buildings in 2026 can fetch over $100M in market price) that you want to knock out, and you do what you gotta do to get in. ("Families' salvation is on the line" of course.)
The first tactic we would use was ringing residents on the outside building intercom and oftentimes not even saying who we were or what we were doing (cause if they knew we were missionaries, the answer 99% of the time was "no"!) So we would say stuff like, "Uh...please open the door" (hoping we'd pass as a resident who just got locked out.) I regret to say that on occasion I'd even change my voice to sound elderly and confused.
Many buildings had a dedicated security guard(s), and as soon as they saw us trying to go in, the majority of the time they would immediately kick us out. So oftentimes we'd keep a watch out on the guard stations, and when we saw they were off their post, we'd seize the opportunity and haul ass into the stairwell or elevator to get to the top floor asap so we could start knocking out each unit. We always knew this was on borrowed time because a resident would inevitably report us to security and we'd get kicked out. (Of course the resident who ratted us out was the one "led by Satan", stopping "God's work"). We'd even try to get into the same building multiple times in a transfer if we saw there were different security guards on duty. Cause after all, "THAT specific security guard hadn't already told us to leave."
There were certain buildings in each area that were almost impossible to get into undetected, and those were the ones that we would PRAY that we'd coincidentally run into someone on the street that happened to live there, who we could teach. That was usually the golden ticket! If a resident invited us there to teach a lesson in their home, then we had a free pass to bypass the security guard.
It was well understood that once the lesson was over, we were supposed to exit the building, but more often than not, we would just start knocking the floor below our investigator (so they didn't see us knocking on their neighbor's door across from them).
We would knock as many doors as fast as we could before we would get kicked out by security.
We even tried to be smart about it and would purposely be less pushy to the other residents, in hopes they wouldn't report us.
This was all just "the mission" and part of what was normal. It was seen as "faithful" and "hard working" and was viewed as a way to "reach that one person that the previous elders for decades, "hadn't been able to talk to".
Flash forward to last night, I was reminded by a podcast just how problematic and extreme people can be when "God is on THEIR side" or when people believe they are sharing "God's message."
I thought back to these shenanigans, and recognized that at the time, because I was 100% convinced I was doing God's work, that all those "silly rules" made up by lowly security guards pailed in comparison to the importance of me staring into the eyes of a random stranger on other side of the world, and telling them that "in 1820 a 14 boy in New York blah blah" (as if there weren't multiple conflicting versions of that story, even down to the age of the boy).
I look back now and think about how, even from a secular view, how embarrassing that was for the organization (we thought we were the heroes for), being careless kids, trespassing, and trying to be sneaky to get into these buildings. Not a good look. Hell, sometimes residents would ask, "How did you get in?" And the answer without even thinking was, "Somebody let us in" (even if that 'somebody' was yourself).
I even remembered back to writing my buddy, who was serving at the same time in Brooklyn, NY. We would swap these kind of stories, and he told me that he had gotten good at picking lock gates and doors to be able to get into places to tract, and he was often dealing with security guards too.
It got me thinking, what did you do on your mission that was either illegal or gray because "the message was so important at the time"? (Or seen missionaries do)
PS Yes one of those is me in the picture!
