Posted by:
caffiend
(
)
Date: July 12, 2019 01:45AM
Levi wrote, "Very interesting about the unused portion of the HK temple building, and you hit on my point about making an already underused temple larger."
Something similar happened to the Christian Science "Mother Church" headquarters in Boston in the late 1950s/60s. They bought a lot of property around their core campus, gentrified some residential sections, and built a huge corporate campus designed by prestigious architect I.M. Pei:
http://en.hmc.lowebhost.com/resources/project_details.php?lang=en&id=34#PhotoSwipe1562909900949[The expansion was the now little-used Sunday School building (bottom, pie-shaped), building, the high-rise office tower (top right), and the long "colonnade" building fronting the reflecting pond. All those structures are now rented to non-CS parties. (Nice cash flow!)]
My point: CS was IN DECLINE at that time, but didn't know it, or ignored the drop in membership. They overbuilt in a frenzy of optimistic expansionism. Could this be happening to LDS? What about that compulsion to announce more temples every year? Hey, I'm not ex-LDS, but it seems to me that, like the CS building, there was a blindly optimistic feeling of "if we build it, they (new members) will come."
Except with CS, they didn't.