Excerpt from a February 27, 2015 interview with Apostle Jeffrey R. Holland and Hugh Hewitt: ¹

HH: The first was a man, the second was a woman. I would wonder what the burden of having all these young people on the road in an era of religious intolerance is like.

JH: It is a burden. It is a worry. We proceed with great faith. We say a lot of prayers on behalf of those young people, because they’re your sons and daughters and my sons and daughters, collectively speaking, and they’re someone’s child. And we worry about them a lot. But the miracle is that every indication we have, and we try to be very careful, we try to be very sensitive about where they work and to what locations they’re assigned and so on and so forth, but having said that, the statistics are that they’re safer in the mission field than they were at home. The chances for an accident, the chances for a serious difficulty or a death, are really minimal. We have been very, very blessed. We knock on wood and say our prayer, and don’t want to be arrogant about that, because there is a very high risk. But we’re greatly blessed, and they continue to come They continue to serve. And those numbers will increase. We’re projecting out probably within four years, the baseline number for the missionary force will be something around 100,000.

Excerpt from the February 1, 2018 LDS News Release ‘Church Announces Mission Adjustments’: ²

“Changes to mission boundaries are common. Since President Thomas S. Monson announced in 2012 the change in the ages for missionary service, the Church has created 76 new missions to accommodate a surge of growth in only a few years, from 58,000 to 88,000 missionaries. The initial wave of missionaries has since receded to about 68,000 missionaries, as anticipated.”