When discussing missionary work in our ward, the term “non-members” often comes up. We use the term “non-members” to describe people who are not of our faith. Lately, we have been discouraged from using this term, as it is ex-clusive, rather than in-clusive, and some of our friends and neighbors don’t care to be labeled as a “non-member”. Completely understandable.
The difficulty is finding a way to differentiate between members of the church and non-members without using that term. So, as we were instructed in Conference to serve more, I have spent some time in your service looking for options to replace the term “non-member”.
Ideas
Gentiles: A little too strong, and can be a little confusing – especially to our Jewish neighbors
FOOF’s: Friends Of Other Faiths. Sounds a little silly, but not as bad as…
POOF’s: People Of Other Faiths. Nope. That’s definitely not going to go over well
POOR: People Of Other Religions. As in he is a POOR man, I am a Mormon
PS: Potential Saint. My friend Joe is a PS
Bunko-ites: At least in our neighborhood
TB’s: Terrestrial Buddies (Or Telestial Buddies, depending on the neighbor)
SIP’s: Saint in Progress
Guiltmongers: (Like a rumormonger stirs up rumors)
BIF: Blissfully Ignorant Friend
MF: Missionary Fodder
LDS-T: Latter-day Saint Target, vs LDS-A (Active) or LDS-LA (Less-Active or Lazy)
FUSSIN: Friends Unaware Spiritual Salvation Is Needed
After spending long hours coming up with this insightful list of alternatives, I have decided that none of them are adequate to express the relationship we have with those wonderful people who are not of our faith.
I guess I’ll just call them my friends.
(This post dedicated to Steve, because he is strange enough to appreciate it.)
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Guess we could call them “Member-bait.” We used to call all males “Prom-bait” before a school dance.
I kinda like POOF’s. But that’s just me.