Posted by:
Rubicon
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Date: April 05, 2018 03:04PM
After watching some videos on Mormonleaks I could see the leaders of the church have a serious concern about retaining the young members. Amazingly 75% go inactive between high school graduation and age 20 if they don't serve a mission or get married in the temple. In fact so many go inactive in the year between high school graduation and age 19 that the church moved the age of serving a mission to 18.
If the church can't keep it's youth it's history and they know it. So you have the big push to try and indoctrinate the youth more. The Martin Cove Trek, making girls camp more spiritual, doing anything to make the youth feel they are needed. If they just can get a Mormon guy and a Mormon girl to marry each other in the temple then past that point they are more likely to stay in the church. So they have to retain the boys (missions) and they have to retain the girls(marry a return missionary). This old formula is problematic because the mormon single adults are putting off marriage due to the higher cost of living and college education.
So you can see in meetings the apostles are trying to figure things out and really don't know what to do. Apparently giving young people more responsibility retains them better so let's try that.
Also the church really does a lot of window dressing to make it's members believe it's a strong organization. The Conference Center was built to create the illusion every general conference that the church was huge do to the large size of the assembly hall. It makes an impact. Calling more foreigners to high office gives the illusion it's a world wide church when in reality it's core is a few western states in the US.
It's a lot of illusion and if they can't retain their late teen and twenty something members, it's over. They know it. They are desperately trying to do whatever they have to do to retain these people. The temple marriage model seems to be still working for them. That's the only card they have to play. In my own observation. I see more temple married couples divorcing and going inactive or just going inactive. We will see a bigger focus on member retention than getting more outside converts in the future. The reason why is the church is just trying to survive right now instead of grow.