And that was 10+ years ago.

How on Earth can they claim it's a proper ward in a stake?

I think it's there just because they have a chapel since the 1950s, and because there's no other location nearby.

But to call it a ward...

...no biggie. What they will do is to have the Ward Clerk fudge the attendance numbers. That way they can show SLC the need for more Missionaries, supplemental funding, or the need to expand Ward boundaries. Tithing is described as lacking due to low economic demographics or member movement in/out of Ward. Seen it, done it before...SOP.

They typically have to accept several male-only callings. Sometimes, the ward has had two pairs of missionaries. That can hardly be justifiable. Poor missionaries.

I was a ward clerk for a while. We counted the empty sacrament cups to determine a head count for sacrament meeting. The bishop had me add 20 to the total, you know, some people don't take the sacrament and some are visitors who also don't take the sacrament.

The ward clerk used to walk down the aisles during sacrament mtgs where I grew up, doing a head count. Sometimes he doubled back like he was double checking himself.

There can be miracles
When you believe
Though hope is frail
Its hard to kill

You may have only one
In your Pri~mary
You may have none
In your priest quorum

But if you believe
You can make believe
And have a ward in your heart
Even if in reality
It's just one old fart

I remember our ward clerk Festus doing actual head counts during meetings.

Of course they weren't ALL named Festus. But there was always a ward clerk counting people during sacrament meeting. Just one of many oddities that I didn't think much about because all of the adults seemed to think nothing of it. Every Sunday, some guy is sitting or standing or walking up the aisle visibly counting heads with his fingers.

It's God's church...so that must be God's counting guy. All is inspired and all is well...all is well...or was well...until one flew over the cuckoo's nest and dropped some weird white goo on everyone. But that's a story for another day.

His name wasn't actually Festus but we insolent priests called him that because he was the spitting image of the character from Gunsmoke.

I was a ward clerk for a while too. The Bishop had me walk up and down the aisle during the talks to take a count. He was never happy with my numbers. So he took it upon himself to take a count himself. After he found I was right, he directed me to add 25 to the numbers each week.

When I was ward clerk, I assigned the membership clerk the responsibility to walk the aisles and count the people. On those rare occasions when he missed sacrament meeting, I had to do the head count.

My bishop never asked me to alter any numbers, but the stake clerk was a different story. On more than one occasion, he asked that I come to his house and review numbers. He was retired, and he spent many hours reviewing and re-reviewing every number. He'd ask me questions like "why is it that course 14 in Sunday School had an average attendance of twelve in the first quarter and only eight last quarter?" I tried telling him once that I just reported what the auxiliary secretaries reported to me, but he didn't accept that answer. I learned to report fictitious numbers that were close to, and sometimes slightly better than, the previous quarter.

When I was growing up my Dad was a ward clerk, then in the Bishopric for many years. He always said their was a general 40% pattern in the church. Generally the numbers would always come in around 30-40%, for every statistic. 30-40% of members on the roll would be "active". 30-40% of the "active" members would be full tithe payers and have recommends. Home teaching would always be around 30-40%. When I was a ward clerk, that turned out to be the case. When looking at the church as a whole, the best reliable estimates put the total active population at around 6 million members or so, which would put it in that 30-40% range of the 16 million global members the church likes to talk about.

I have to believe you guys telling about how the numbers were "collected" and then "corrected".

I think that's a horribly dishonest procedure. I never thought in my time that they would do something like that.

And there I was, examining myself all the time, so that I'd be as clean as humanly possible. Never thought I was clean enough to ask for a TR.

What a waste of time and effort.

I never understood the Mormon obsession with numbers. On the other hand, I never complained when my assigned friend (home teacher) counted me as visited when he waved at me when I drove past his house.

The ward that I am assigned to has an average attendance of 50 out of a membership of (rounded off) 300. That is a whopping 16%

So here are my numbers from SM in the 1990s (+350 members outside of Utah).

About 6 families (with 4-5 children moved out of the area). It dropped SM counts by some 25-30. I remember one month, I think it was Feb that dropped the number to 140 from 185 (and those numbers well inflated). Once a month, I sat in his living room and provided him a gazillion church reports. He questioned every stat and I had to have some sort of justification through roster reports, last month's report as well as the previous years' reports.

The bishop looked over at me and tossed everything on the floor. "Messy, I don't buy it. Your numbers are off and this report is garbage. How do you plan to fix it?"

I reminded him about the 6 families leaving and the stormy weather, but like a good Mormon bishop he rejected the facts. From that point on, I had to use the previous year's stats. I grew tired of arguing about computer database errors; as well as being too dumb to accurately count people and SM cups.

I'm sure they include the Three Nephites and probably Heavenly Mother, Peter, James, John, etc. You cannot prove they weren't there.

Plus there's always a crowd in the bathrooms!!