Daily Inspiration Quote by Richard G. Scott

Scott frames growth as a moral accounting, not a numbers game. The line looks like a promise of expansion, but it actually functions as a warning: stop chasing baptisms as a metric and start treating each one as a covenant with consequences. He builds a clean cause-and-effect chain - retention earns more opportunities; sloppy follow-through shuts the pipeline. That conditional logic is doing the persuasive work. It gives leaders a sense of agency (and responsibility) while translating a spiritual problem into operational discipline.

The subtext is a critique of performative success. In any church system where baptisms are tallied, reported, and celebrated, the temptation is to prize the headline over the hard work: teaching, integrating, mentoring, and sustaining belief when the initial glow fades. Scott flips the prestige economy. A baptism that does not "keep commitments" is not merely unfortunate; it becomes evidence of collective failure, an indictment of the community that welcomed someone in and then let them drift. His use of "the ones you have" is pointedly unsentimental - people are not trophies, but they are also responsibilities already on the books.

Context matters: Scott spoke within a Latter-day Saint culture that emphasizes missionary work alongside enduring conversion and covenant-keeping. The quote reads like a corrective to any surge-driven evangelism. It also quietly asserts a theology of divine triage: God withholds new seekers when the church is not prepared to nurture them. That reframes retention as spiritual readiness, not just good management, and makes care for converts the prerequisite to growth.