At my Cub Scout committee meeting tonight, I have a new TBM committee member talking about her old ward in Monterey, CA.

She said that the ward was one of the "guinea pig" pilot wards for a lot of the new ideas that the big-15 dream up. The idea that was going to be tried out before she moved back to the morridor is a way of integrating multi-lingual branches/wards.

The idea is to still have the translators and the headsets, but have some newfangled sound system that can instantly switch who hears what, so that everyone could participate seamlessly.

Nice idea, but the thing I took from it is that they're trying to find ways of combining and integrating wards because attendance is declining.

Has anyone heard anything else on this type of thing? I really, really hope it's because attendance is down.

It wouldnt surprise me. They a have a spanish-speaking branch in my area and they recently created a new spanish-speaking ward in an adjacent stake and took about half of our stake's active members. Now our spanish branch has like 35 people regularly attending, which is barely enough to run a branch. Rumor in our stake has it that the spanish speakers have told the stake prez that they would rather go inactive than integrate into an english speaking ward. Due to that threat, our branch remains in place.

I've seen this done before in California, Tennessee, and Florida. It isn't a new idea, as far back as the mid 90s and it will have the same result it always does. Everyone who is not an English speaker will go inactive.

I think the reason for this, is that in many areas, Spanish speaking branches request more for welfare assistance then they pay out in tithing. Church doesn't care if they leave.

It's probably the same mysterious boxed set of headphones and microphone system that travels around "the mission field" of the church.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 05/22/2013 10:30AM by forbiddencokedrinker.

I was in an Asian speaking mission in the US. We had members from Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos. The missionaries would translate and the members would wear headsets. After I left the mission, the "revelation" back them was to integrate the Asian members into english wards. They shut down the Asian branches. Most of the members quit going to church. Also once our group left the missionaries quit driving the members to church. We were their taxi service. It seems their "revelation" is telling them to rehash old ideas.

I was in a ward about 3 years ago that had 2 simultaneous sacrament meetings. The english meeting was held in the chapel with the bishopric presiding and the spanish meeting was held in the Relief Society room with the missionaries presiding. There were separate Sunday school classes, but then everyone was lumped together for priesthood/RS. Most of the spanish speakers only attended the first 2 hours and went home.

In my old ward in Atwater, CA they dissolved the Spanish Branch and combined it with our regular ward. The missionaries operated the translating for the headsets, but their Spanish sucked. I listened in a few times and could have done a better job. But yeah, the ward was getting small and so was the branch. This was about 10-15 years ago.

Sounds like another pitfall of central, corporate control. Turn this mess on over to the locals to deal with and let them raise their own money.

Oops.

Except two things would probably happen:

1. The locals are now raising their own money and taking care of themselves, which is something the corporate kiss-asses only pay lip service to, as it would make it harder to build shopping malls.

2. The locals in far-away countries, when they have to do more of their own worship, are probably going to get around to saying, "Why do we have to learn about this weird American dude?" and leave.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: The church has painted itself into a corner. They're damned if they do, and damned if they don't. They're screwed. Let the schadenfreude begin.

A lot of "language" branches also pull leadership from the English speaking wards in the area. If attendance is down it could be that these men are needed to fill positions in their home wards.