Does anyone here remember the church's push to get missionaries to go out and find "golden families," a family where the man is employed, the mother at home, and nice kids, all of whom listen to the missionary lessons, and join the church. My comp and I found one such family in Lugano, Switzerland back in 1969, and since no one had been baptized there in years, we got quit famous for it.

Today seems like a different matter. Best I know, is that missionaries are left with the undereducated, the mentally problematic, the poor, and the undocumented. I think that the only people who get baptized in today's Italy are the undocumented Nigerian and Senegalese immigrants. Ditto the rest of the European countries.

Anyone see any golden families lately?

My family was "golden" although only 4 out of 7 of us joined. My parents had just split up and my dad wanted nothing to do with the Mormons. My mom was beautiful, intelligent, and lived in a beautiful home. Three of her children joined.

After my family joined back in the 70s, I don't remember other "golden" families joining. I think mine was the last.

Today, only one brother remains active. My mom didn't go to church the last 7 years of her life. I had been inactive long before she stopped going to church but we just didn't talk about it.

I doubt many "golden families" have joined LDS Inc. in the last couple of decades.

I'm very impressed that you baptized a family in Lugano. What a beautiful place to serve a mission. I wonder if any of them are active today. Hopefully not.

Of course, the church offered a lot of social programs and there was a sense of community. The church had more to offer, but they took most of that away.

Now it's "Sure come with us mormons to GC. The brethren are going to tell us off for not working hard enough. And we get the the privilege of paying tithing to be blessed with toilet cleaning duties."

Some great reward.

My husband and his ex were considered a "golden family" because they sought to join the church.

However, it all turned out to be bullshit. I think maybe his younger daughter, ironically the only one who is speaking to him, is the only active Mormon left.

Poor people have always been the major group of converts. Even back in the early days of the church, the majority of converts were poor. The poor have nothing to lose.

There were also Golden Question lapel pins to help you find Golden Families. They were two gold question marks. When you were asked by a potential victim what the question marks represent, you replied by asking the Golden Questions: what do you know about the Mormon Church, and would you like to know more?

I kid you not. That was where the Golden Family meme came from. The pins were widely available, and Good Mormons were encouraged to wear them. I think it was the late 1950s.

Of course there were the gold plates, the gold Angel Moroni on the temples, and Gold and Green Balls. Mormons were very big on gold imagery at the time. They were also pretty fond of white and delightsome in that era.

Ah, the good old days.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/21/2020 12:39PM by Brother Of Jerry.

in Zuerich, Switzerland, circa 1960, more owing to member efforts than mine, was such a family.

Fortunately-they-quit-within-a-month-of-baptism-ly yrs,

S

lol

hadn't thought of that in years.

We thought we had one in Japan in 1989.

The dad was a bank branch manager, the wife was a homemaker and there were two kids, one boy, one girl. The picture perfect 1950's "family". The Izumi Family - I even remember the name and if I look hard enough, I'll find the family pictures - that's how certain we were.

Only, they had NO interest in the mormon church - they just wanted to practice their english.

My comp was sooooooooo disappointed. I mean he was just crestfallen to figure this out. i couldn't have cared less one way or the other, but I was (apparently) that rare mormon missionary who just loathed mishie work. Even as an active, so-called "believing" mormon, I never bought into missionary work.

We had one.

I was in a foreign mission that produced a reasonable number of baptisms but almost never whole families. Here we had loving parents, three teenage kids, and an actual home. One of the teen daughters panicked at the last minute before baptism and I had a long conversation with her, telling her God didn't want to take all the fun out of her life and she could still be a kid. Into the water they went.

They lasted a few months. They showed up to church functions as a family, found the members smug and unfriendly, and thought the church was harming their relationships. So they contacted my companion and me, who were still in close touch, and told us they were going to withdraw. We said that under the circumstances that sounded like the right decision.

When I gave my homecoming speech I told their story and concluded that it wasn't the X family that was unprepared for the church, it was the church that wasn't ready for the X family. That didn't go over well. But it was true. Mormonism would definitely have undermined that excellent and loving home.

My parents had been courted by missionaries years before, but this time it clicked.

My father was gainfully employed; my mother stayed at home with the three of us. We were baptized in an East Coast ward after the missionary lessons. Both of them had callings. My father did home teaching assiduously. My parents got sealed in the temple a year after we joined. Their youngest child was born in the covenant. We were "golden".


Then, my father lost his job, and they wound up in debt. My dad had three part-time jobs including on weekends. My mother had to work too. When we went to church, it was made clear to us that we were imposing by asking for rides. I even got treated poorly in Scouts. So we stopped going.

Years later, I slightly redeemed the family by going on a mission - as did another sibling afterward - but it wasn't enough for the ward to stop treating my family as second class. They never became active again.


My father had a half-Mormon-ish funeral. My mother never went back to the temple, doesn't go to church, and hasn't gone in years. Before the pandemic, they'd get occasional home teaching visits.


I'm an out gay atheist who has resigned from the church. Two of other siblings are inactive but still on the books. The remaining sibling who served a mission married in the temple and is still active.

So much for "golden families".

Tyson

In no ways would I want the church to recover, but more converts stayed active when they were befriended and supported by members who enjoyed church activities. It was never the spirituality that got people to join.

So what good activities does the church have to offer these days?

Tithing settlement.

Invite your friends :D

Good times on Saturday morning cleaning the Ward house. BYOtoiletbrush.

I wonder what the ratio is of "Golden Families" leaving to "Golden Families" joining?

I suspect that it would be tres jolie for us EXMOs to know that figure, and tres quel domage for TBMs to have rubbed in their faces.

Who knew Satan would gain such power over ghawd's one, true church? (Satan Claus?)

My family was golden. Parents joined a branch in an eastern state when I was about five. My parents found a real sense of community. (They seemed to appreciate something called the John Birch society. I don’t quite know what that was about, but I think there were political and racist points of view my parents agreed with. It didn’t bother them in the least that blacks couldn’t hold the priesthood. ) We were a family of many talents and Dad ended up on the high council and was a bishop for a while. Mom had all kinds of leadership positions. My bro is still very active, my sis..semi, and I got out after fifty years! Sixteen grandkids, only four are active.

We were "golden" also - my husband worked full time and I was a stay at home mom. We were courted by the missionaries, all joined the church (our son, too), and were active for about 10 years. When we were forced to stay home for a few weeks due to illness, we decided to peek behind the curtain to see what Mormonism was really about (no time like the present?) We were horrified by what we discovered, both online and through books checked out through the library. Suddenly we understood why we had always been directed to ONLY use church-sanctioned materials when preparing lessons, or studying church doctrine in general. So much crap in the church's history!!! We quit going to church, and received very few inquiries as to why we had stopped attending. The great "friends" we'd thought we had in the church turned out to be fair-weathered friends.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/24/2020 06:42PM by momgyver.