We are the Summerhays.  This week we met our new missionaries!  We love them and are excited to serve with them and have included a photograph of your missionary.  We express our love and appreciation to our friends, President and Sister Pugh (we have homes in the same ward in Salt Lake City).  They have done an outstanding job presiding over the Pennsylvania Harrisburg Mission these last three years and have provided us with great assistance in this important transition.  They will be dearly missed.

We began our missionary experience a year ago, presiding over the Pennsylvania Pittsburg Mission (PPM).  A few months after we began our service we were notified that the number of missionaries serving in each mission in the Northeast Region of the United States would decrease in 2009.  This is due to the fact that the number of missionaries serving world wide is not increasing, but the need for more missionaries is growing in many places.  The only way to provide for the increased demand is to take missionaries from places where the Brethren feel the work can be done effectively with fewer missionaries.

In a telephone call from Elder Jay E. Jensen, one of the Seven Presidents of the Seventy, we learned that the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles had decided to consolidate the Pennsylvania Harrisburg Mission with the Pennsylvania Pittsburgh Mission on July 1, 2009.  The headquarters of the combined mission was to be in Pittsburgh with the name being the Pennsylvania Pittsburgh Mission.  Subsequent to that call, it was decided that the Scranton Stake of the Harrisburg Mission would become part of the Philadelphia Mission.  There are currently 22 missionaries serving in the Scranton Stake.  As of July 1st the new combined PPM has 184 missionaries, which should decrease to between 140 and 150 missionaries when the reductions are completed.  We include about 75% of Pennsylvania's land mass, part of New York, West Virginia, and Ohio and serve seven stake and one district.

Together, with your missionary, we are in the unique position of personally implementing a decision made directly by the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve!  We are excited to welcome your missionary to the new PPM as part of that decision by the Brethren.  In Mosiah 18:21 it reads: "And he commanded them that there should be no contention one with another, but that they should look forward with one eye, having one faith and one baptism, having their hearts knit together in unity and in love one towards another."  With that kind of unity and love, the new combined PPM is the perfect mission for each of our missionaries.  We appreciate your support of your wonderful missionary and ask for your faith and prayer for all of us as we seek to find and baptize the "elect" here and combine the two best missions in the world into an even better one!

Sincerely

Lane A. Summerhays
Mission President