With more than a hundred high-school students expected to descend upon her house for a party, the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City star Lisa Barlow knew which aspect of planning to home in on: the catering. Her favorite Italian cookies were flown in from New York City, and a local chef prepared caprese skewers and charcuterie boards.
For the most part, the 2023 event looked like any other party showcased on Bravo. But Barlow’s cause for celebration—aired this past fall, during the show’s fourth season—was a Mormon mission “call opening” for her then 18-year-old son, Jack. That explained why the two-story cake was decorated to look like a suitcase.
At 18, young Mormon men, referred to as “elders” within the Church, are eligible to apply for a two-year mission. (“Sisters,” meanwhile, can’t sign up until they’re 19, and are only able to serve for 18 months.)
The lengthy process requires teenagers to prepare an application submitted to their local ecclesiastical leaders, and then to the Missionary Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which is the official name of the Mormon Church.
Missionaries—of which there are currently 67,871, according to the Church—are assigned to locations around the world, from Namibia and Seoul to Panama City and Bogotá, where Jack was deployed. They aren’t permitted to return home or to see friends and family for the duration of their program.
These “call-opening parties,” during which a teenager finds out where he or she has been called to serve, combine the pomp and circumstance of a gender reveal with the coming-of-age bent of a Bat Mitzvah.
“Initially, we didn’t want the opening on the show,” says Barlow. “But our production team [helped us realize] that it’s a very unique thing within the Mormon faith that they still have full-time missionaries. It’s good for people to understand what that looks like and what that means for our family.”
Barlow identifies as “Mormon 2.0,” meaning she drinks alcohol and coffee, supports divorce, and dresses far from conservatively, all of which the Church disapproves of. Her preference for pleasure over piety is no longer an anomaly in Salt Lake City’s Mormon community.
“This generation is really making decisions, like ‘Why am I going to obey this rule, or that rule?’” says Stephanie Santiago, a Mormon mother of eight, five of whom have already served missions. “They’re making space for not doing every [rule] but still being dedicated [to the faith].”
“Call-opening parties” combine the pomp and circumstance of a gender reveal with the coming-of-age bent of a Bat Mitzvah.
In Salt Lake City, this shift has also led mission-call openings to transform from small family gatherings to reality-television-worthy spectacles. “Mission-call openings can become super-extravagant because of social media, like a lot of things in the world,” says Mary Santiago, Stephanie’s 21-year-old daughter and a former missionary who served in Dallas. “At the heart of it, they’re still such a spiritual celebration,” says Mary, whose siblings had theirs at the family’s indoor basketball court.
“When you turn in your mission papers, there’s a time lapse of anywhere between two and six weeks where you’re waiting for your mission call to be received,” explains Stephanie Carn Yrungaray, who runs the Missionary Square blog. Like college admissions, “in the old days, they would send you an actual envelope in the mail. Now you get a text saying you have received your mission call, click here to read it.”
“The calls are usually sent when school gets out in April and May, and they all come on a Monday or Tuesday,” says Mary.
These events have grown increasingly over the top. Yrungaray says she attended one at a venue that was “like a wedding reception.” Some teens are choosing to open their calls ahead of time so they can decorate the party in accordance with the mission’s locale. “They’ll have treats from the local area or flags from the country,” says Courtney Zwick, a friend of Barlow’s who considers these events to be a rite of passage. “My son [broadcast] his live on Instagram, and I had a board that said ELDER ZWICK, great catered food, and balloons everywhere.” He was headed to Arequipa, Peru.
“[Missions] aren’t fun. They’re a grind,” says Yrungaray, referring to their standard 16-hour days spent proselytizing, studying the Book of Mormon, and completing volunteer work. Or, in the case of Mitt Romney, driving around senior members of the Church, a task he was assigned while on a mission in France in 1968. It resulted in a car crash that killed one passenger.
“I think it’s such a neat thing that they’re willing to sacrifice two years of their life in the name of their beliefs,” says Yrungaray.
Barlow jokes that kids might just be making the sacrifice for the celebration. “I even asked Jack at one point, ‘Did you want to go on a mission just for this part?’” she recalls, adding that Jack’s was “the most extravagant.” “He was like, ‘No!’ But it’s just become such a huge deal.”
Samantha Leach is the author of The Elissas and the Associate Director, Special Projects for Bustle and NYLON. Her work has appeared in New York magazine, Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, and many other publications
