Back in 1971 my old Ward in Bellevue WA was buzzing with activity. Weeknights the parking lot was FULL....we had over 120 youth doing boy scouts, Beehives, Mia Maids, roadshows, basketball leagues, etc etc. Tonight I visited and it was dead. Spoke to the bishop and he said currently they only have 7 youth total! Wow....

[Edited by mod to remove IRL, identifying information.]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/25/2019 03:02PM by Tevai.

A few months ago I took a peak into a suburban Christian Science church on a Sunday morning. Lots of empty pews, and one--ONE!--girl in the Sunday School.

I live in a suburb of SLC. My neighborhood is 80+% LDS. The homes were built about 25-30 years ago. Typical big Utah neighborhood with about 70 wardhouses in a city of 100K people. Some, right across the street or half a block away from each other. Most of my mormon neighbors that have 6-8 kids are now empty nesters. Where, my neighbors drive to a wardhouse about 1.2 miles away, passing 2 closer wardhouses to get to there. I never understood that. One is 2.5 blocks over. They went to early service (8:30) half the year and then all changed to late service(1pm) the other half. Recently, they go at 11:00 am. I asked my neighbor why. He said they combined 2 meetings into one. I'm guessing that there's not enough to support 2 services. As older mormons sell their homes, newer buyers have been mostly non mormons. They even let their kids play outside on Sunday and mow their lawns on Sunday morning (like I do).

There are 3 wards that I went to in the Portland area. I lived there until I was 25.

I googled all three, and they no longer exist.

The one ward in the area I live in has about half as many cars in the parking lot as it did 15 years ago.

Gradually, shrinking every where I look.

I wonder about this frequently. I know how things are in my neck of the woods, but one can't reliably extrapolate how the church as a whole is doing based on the sampling of a single locality. Nevertheless, I read hundreds of other anecdotes here and elsewhere that more of less matches what I am seeing here in my own neck of the woods.

It seems to me that throughout much of the time between 1980 and 2010-ish, the church created a lot of new wards and stakes. However, while some of this could be attributed to growth, I think a lot of it was merely cutting the same size pie into smaller and smaller pieces. Perhaps the church created smaller units in anticipation of accomodating growth. I don't know. But what I see now are wards everywhere that had just barely enough people to run them when they were created and now are well below that threshold. And now instead of dividing and creating new units, the church in many (if not most) areas is either stagnant or consolidating units.

I do remember being in several wards growing up in the 1980s where 200-300 people regularly attended sacrament meetings, where most weeks we had more Deacons than necessary to pass the sacrament, and we had very large turnouts for youth conferences, youth dances, etc. I was working in the Young Men's program When I left in 2013 and the contrast between now and when I was growing up was huge.

"Build them and they will come" didn't work out so well.

Sounds like the authorities expected that large cities would produce large congregations faster and faster. LDS,Inc. didn't want to get caught without enough room to hold them all as members moved there or joined and grew the ranks.

Modern day prophets? Just hopeful business men.

I'd love to know the annual foot traffic through each temple around the world. I bet it is abysmal in many places outside of Utah.

Ward houses are real estate investments for LDS, Inc. The cult needs enough members to make the buildings look like they are a necessity for the religion. The Mormon corporation can hold these buildings and over-sized parking lots and grounds TAX FREE! Notice that these buildings are on PRIME real estate, on the best lots in the neighborhood, often on view lots.

As the wards dwindle--and it's a fact that the Mormon cult is "bleeding members"--the Mormon church "consolidates" two or three wards together, so there will be more people using each building. Our neighborhood ward is now three consolidated wards. Several other wards in our area are added to. Each ward house is now called a "stake house". The parking lots are empty during the week here, too. I live in SLC.

One of the wards added into the neighborhood ward has to drive about 8 miles to get here. Their ward house, in an older, run-down neighborhood, has been "closed indefinitely". Our building is a better investment for TSCC, you see.

My home ward in CA disappeared years ago. My parents and other members donated to the "building fund", and put some of their own manual labor into the building of it. The Mormons sold it to the Seventh-Day Adventists, who sold it to the Scientologists, who flipped it to a developer, and the new houses on the property sell for a million dollars each! 5 wards in our area of CA no longer exist, and 2 stakes are gone.

There's a neighborhood in Sandy, UT, that has lost 3 wards, in the last few years, and everyone was shifted around, and life-long friends were split into different wards. The ward is mostly older people. Then TSCC stopped the visiting-teaching program, and people felt isolated, and several have stopped going to church altogether. In the east side of Salt Lake Valley, I see a definite decline in church attendance.

Sorry--I'm sleepy.

One of my points is that when LDS, Inc. keeps enough members in each building, they get free maintenance of their investment holdings! Janitors, painters, grounds-keepers, pavers, roofers, etc, all free! (At least it is for our stake-house-with-a-view.)

Plus, the maintenance personnel pay the cult 10% of their income, to do these jobs. What a racket!

Same is true where I'm at but for a reason that is easy to understand. I live in a more established part of town, lots of older people, so the primary is small. But there is a whole lot of growth out in the fields. Lots of young millenials with their quiverful, their $40,000 trucks, their $350,000 ranchette houses with fake dormers and stucco. How they can afford it I don't know, but It's the American Dream, I'm so happy for them!

Any previously split wards re-combining into one?

That would be interesting

This was a few years ago (late 80's)

Dundee Scotland had 2 strong, thriving wards, they split into 3 to try and encourage growth. they recombined into 2 wards a few short years later. There was zero meaningful growth from any of the 3 wards, and a net loss from the 3rd ward that was formed from part of the existing 2.

Edit to add, the 2 remaining wards have both shrunk since then as well.

Edit to update the time frame



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 09/25/2019 01:01PM by Darren Steers.

Yes!

The ward I grew up in split in 2000. At the time, we had over 500 active members (1,500 on the rolls -- the stake president announced the numbers when he announced the split) and a HUGE number of youth. I was a Laurel at the time and there were 15 of us, and a similar number of Mia Maids and Beehives. We had a lot of fun. The smaller wards were not so fun.

My parents still live in the same ward, but last year they recombined the previously split wards after 18 years. Now they have trouble getting 100 people to show up for sacrament meeting. My mom is in the primary and they only have a handful of kids there and just five active young women.

Other than my parents still being active, it's all good news in my world =)

Wow! That’s good news.

On the other hand, your post made me a little nostalgic for the Mormonism of my childhood ((70s-80s).

It was fun to go to the Ward building on a weekday after school, for primary say, and see teenagers shooting hoops and others practicing a play on the stage and all manner of kids running around the halls and moms everywhere chatting and holding babies and etc. It was lively.

The Ward was a community hub, the Stake Centre more so. It was vibrant. Then all the Sunday School wonks, the champion scripture chasers, had to ruin it all with their Doctrine.


I sense that present day mormons are a little embarrassed about their Mormonism. Heh, they don’t even use the name anymore. In the 70s there was a confidence, a confidence not born out by study but one based on faith. Now that so much study has shown the whole enterprise as bunk, criminal bunk at that, the faith has fled.

If we have 50 people in attendance at SM it has been a B I G day

My childhood home ward building was sold to an Asian

church about ten years ago. There is now no new ward

building in that area. It was a suburb of Los Angeles.

It held lots of good memories for me. I was sad to see

it go.

Looks like organized religion in general is declining:

https://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/americas-changing-religious-landscape/

my First Seattle ward was the 10th, I'm curious to learn what's happened there lately.

I'm also curious as to where (wards?) all those Amazon employees are living, whether or not they're 'active' or not...

Declining birth rate is a bitch for ChurchCo.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/25/2019 11:23PM by GNPE.

Hey, mormon church goony bird GAs, here's a freebee for ya!

Announce that you're postponing current and future temple construction, for one generation, 20 years, and that during this time you will be paying $10,000 for every new baby born to mormon parents, no matter their activity status; they just have to be on the records and they have to have a baby blessing. Once the baby is blessed, the check, from which tithing does NOT have to paid, will be issued.

BOOM! Church growth, big time!!

You're welcome.