CORRECTION APPENDED: This story said one person translated the Book of Mormon from gold plates. Eleven other men and one woman claimed to have seen the plates and the 11 men signed statements about seeing and handling the records.

CORRECTION APPENDED: This article misspelled Elder Mackintosh's name and also misquoted the missionaries by referring to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as the Church of Mormon.

Amid the Diag bustle on a recent Thursday evening, two men, roughly the same age as everyone else, stood apart from the rest of the crowd.

You've probably seen them before. Impeccably groomed, wearing identical white up shirts buttoned to the top and sporting black nametags, their names are Elder Stoker and Elder Mackintosh, and they'd like to give you a free copy of the Book of Mormon.

Mormon missionaries like Stoker and Mackintosh have been a fixture of the Diag for years, and though there are only six of them in Ann Arbor at any given time, they put in enough hours to be a formidable presence.

That day, they set off on a winding path around the Diag and the surrounding area, approaching young people who were sitting or walking alone with lines like "Have you heard of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints?" or "Would you like a free book, the Book of Mormon?"

In 30 minutes, seven of the 20 people they solicited refused their card. Five addressees paused to hear at least a few moments of the extended pitch and one student independently approached the missionaries with interest in Mormonism.

The day's street contacting work was relatively successful for Stoker and Mackintosh, who are the missionary team currently assigned to the University area by local Mormon ward officials. Every bit of success in promoting the Mormon faith is significant for the pair, who will have spent the near entirety of every day doing nothing else for two years.

The life of a Mormon missionary is wildly different from most of the other 20-year-olds living on campus, even the roughly 100 practicing Mormons. Their days are strictly regimented, they enjoy privacy only in the bathroom and they don't have access to the phone or the Internet. Converting other young people with a wholly separate frame of reference seems like an impossible task, but it isn't. Stoker and Mackintosh say they've met with considerable success on their Diag rounds.

Stoker and Mackintosh are one of the three missionary pairs currently assigned to wards in the Ann Arbor territory of the Michigan-Detroit mission, which is one of several thousand mission locations in a highly structured, worldwide missionary system in which young Mormons like Stoker and Mackintosh shed their first names for the title of "Elder" or "Sister" and take time off from school or work to live the strictly ordered life of a Mormon missionary.

For generations, young Mormon men - and less frequently young women - have taken these two-year mission trips as a sort of rite of passage, said Steven Hedquist, stake president of the Ann Arbor area Mormon wards.

"Our children grow up anticipating that they'll participate," Hedquist said. "The put college on hold, courtship, romance, girlfriends on hold - mother's good cooking - and go out and proclaim the message of Mormonism."

Hedquist said mission trips are landmark events in a Mormon's youth and have the effect for many, including himself after his own mission to Bavaria, of changing their life perspective.

"We take these young kids in the flower of the youth and take them out of the most narcissistic, self-absorbed time of life and plant them somewhere on Earth," Hedquist said.

On the missions, they "realize for the first time that there are other people on this planet besides themselves." Missionaries often fund their trips themselves - a cost of at least $10,000 that covers room and board and about $125 per month for food.

Mission trips can land young Mormons in one of 176 countries - which country, though, they have little control over. A council of eight men whom the church esteems as living apostles pray about the assignment of each missionary and decide where in the world he or she would best serve.

During their two-year assignments, missionaries live in different cities within their mission's territory for varying lengths of time, changing partners and locations at the discretion of the local mission president and his wife.