For those of you who attended wards or branches in areas of the world where it is mostly made up of converts and/or members who aren't "strong" in the church what was it like? The church always mentions areas of the world where they need a stronger "priesthood," etc. How was is it different from a standard Utah ward?

In my experience when they don't have enough qualified leaders they crazy really starts to come out. Headquarters seems to want to train people to be leaders but this never works well. It becomes a blind leading the blind situation and with a church with such crazy mixed up doctrine and doctrine that is not included anymore things get interesting.

As an example:
My first Sunday in this small branch, coming from a normal ward, I was a little late and walked in during one of the testimonies. The guy was repeating conversations he had had with various woodland creatures. Couldn't help wondering which family the nut was going to rejoin. Instead, he took his seat next to the bishop. He was the first councilor. That branch got worse from there.

I cant really say how its different because I had nothing to compare it too but I can tell you what it was like at the thibodaux, la ward.

Louisiana is mostly Catholic and the attitude is just like the phrase laizze la bon temp roulette. Nothing gets in the way of a good time, and you will find few extremist religion wise compared to other places. So the major attitude at church was spend as much time in our mafia so outside ideals wont conflict with church ideals. If you didnt you were ostracized or snubbed. It was so extreme a lot of families either only had friends from school birthday parties or friends from church birthday parties, never a mixture. Most were church friends parties.

Apocalypse food wasnt strange since we live in hurricane area, the fact that it was for the apocalypse was. We had at least one hurricane every 2 years or so where you were cut off and on your own for awhile, so they tried to scare us but thats just something we live with and live through.

If you drank coffee or coke you did it in secret, you hid the coffee pot and coke often. If you bought anything on sunday you prayed no one saw you. You shut your mouth if men were present or you reaped an ass chewing in front of ss class and the next few weeks were devoted to teaching you how to be a good Mormon girl in ss and sm and your parents were glowered at the entire time. Once it got so bad they had the bishops wife tell us in detail about her wedding night, with the girls all seated up front, the boys behind us and the creepy bishop looking on from up front smiling.

Only a few families had more than 2 or 3 kids and only one of the larger families was from Louisiana. The rest were implants steming from relocations for bayou oaks mental hospital. All of those families were weird except for one replant family. One kept having kids and couldn't even feed the ones they had, that is strange in our culture. Not that people aren't poor here but they mostly wouldn't exacerbate the problem of their own accord, and they would be embarrassed to not feed their family. Cajuns are typically very proud but will give you the shirt off their back.

What you wore was suspect....one sunday a very Mormon family mind you, the mother wore a *gasp* leather skirt, obviously everyone eyeballed her and freaked out, she never wore it again. I thought she looked nice. Once I went to a church friends bday swim party, all I had was bikinis. The girls said they wish they were brave enough to wear one, I thought that was ridiculous, I was never invited again. What a whore....haha.a lot of those girls ended up pregnant and caught doing interesting things way before 17. This bikini whore didnt.

Things got stepped up a notch with the pressure on my family when I was in 6th grade. I went to a school dance, that was held during school hours in a cafeteria all lights on for 1 hour. My "boyfriend" gave me Valentine's chocolate before the dance, I mistakenly shared this with a friend and was overheard. Next thing I know no one will talk to me or my parents except missionaries. 1 miserable year later we were traveling to houston to be sealed as a family minus my older brothers. It was creepy, once they finally brought me to my parents tgey all smiled at me and liked me again. Gag.

Im sure this isnt suprising in mordor but here in Louisiana all that is mormon is freaking ass weird.

Sorry its so long tried to pare it down and I left out plenty just tried to hit some highlights.

I grew up in a ward with mostly converts in California. We were a poor ward, & it seemed like we were always struggling. Some old guard BIC would look down on the convert members.

I've seen a ward that really should be downgraded to a branch - whatever the number of active PH holders required for a ward they are below it - and they make up the difference with senior missionaries

when I visited this particular 'ward' there was only something like 40 or 50 people in sacrament meeting - and 8 of them were senior missionaries

two of those sets were from elsewhere but the other two couples were actually from a neighboring town - their 'mission' is to attend a ward that is over an hour drive away - keep in mind that 'attending' also includes filling callings - several callings, actually

I found out about the PH holder number thing and all the callings these 4 couples were holding down because it was told to me as a story of how faithful these missionaries are - really it's painfully obvious that these people are being taken advantage of just so TSCC doesn't have to give-up a ward

something just occured to me: maybe there is a magic number for how many functioning wards are required for a stake - maybe if they lose this one ward they lose the entire stake??? since they are not in the morridor and it's a very rural area they can't simply redraw the stake boundaries to absorb PH holders from another stake

anyway, what you see in these types of units is literally a few people doing ALL of the work: the early morning seminary teacher is also in the RS presidency, the EQ president has to do everything himself because his counselors are basically inactive, etc.

recipe for burnout

During my time in the church, over the years, mostly converts from bishopric down. At least 4 young male missionaries and a senior missionary couple. Later a transplant from Utah but not sure if they're still there.

Average attendance - about 30ish, rising and falling from about 50 when baptisms peaks happened, then dropping back to mostly convert regulars and the missionaries.

We had, amongst our little tribe, several oddballs and loners. Now and again there'd be an admonishment for young to only court mormons but finding a mormon worth dating was impossible.

Briggy

In almost every ward I've ever seen, there has been at least a small core of "strong" members. It often goes that there is a group of as few as 5 or 6 "core" members with a little branch of 20-60 transient convert or less-active members. The transient members come and go, they'll stick around for a few weeks, but if they get annoyed by somebody, or they don't like their calling, or they just get sick of being bored for 3 hours per week they'll just suddenly stop showing up.

But the Morg isn't ok with just accepting that the branch doesn't have the manpower to function like a "real ward." They try to fake it, and at least put on a face like everything is working fine. The "core" members end up doing all the heavy lifting. Its not uncommon to find 3 or 4 guys who have been passing the branch presidency around between them for as long as the branch can remember, usually with at least one of them in there as a councilor as well. The BP's wife is probably the Relief Society President, and ward pianist, and the entire activities committee (sure, there may be a few other nominal members of the committee, but all activities succeed or fail with one person).

Its really a big strain for the "core" members and some of them simply get burnt out. They just can't keep doing it any more and stop attending. This causes major problems for everyone else, since the responsibility load becomes even more unbalanced. Programs get neglected. Sometimes the youth program just kinda stops functioning, for example.

Its really just a big mess compared to a "well-functioning" ward.

My husband has mentioned before that when he was a kid, his family of seven moved into an area where they were essentially the branch. Their first week there, all of the branch presidency was absent.

I saw it all the time in central america. It's hard to fill callings and nothing gets done. More often than not the missionaries end up teaching lessons and giving talks

I lived in a small ward in Australia for a couple years, and I felt bad for the members there. The few faithful members just swapped leadership callings without having any breaks. It seemed exhausting. Also, some people would have to travel over an hour to go home teaching. What surprised me was that we were considered to be one of the strongest wards in one of the strongest stakes in Australia. I don't think tscc has a big future in Australia.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/16/2013 10:25PM by mike222.