Okay, I think its time for my periodic unscientific Morg growth poll. How is the Morg growth in your area/ward/stake? I grew up in LaCrosse, WI and our city hit its peak in the 90's when the overzealous Bishop got the ward to split. BY 2000 the two wards were recombined. Out building was foreseen as a stake center, but alas our stake has not yet split.

How about yours? I'm more particularly interested in areas outside of Utah, but you guys are welcome too.

This directive was given SEVERAL YEARS ago.

Guess what? --Still no new stake in the relevant area!

But my wife attended the Gardendale branch there. It was made an official Ward in 2007 I think. They built the next section on to the tiny building so it even had a real chapel. I couldn't tell that there were many more attending. Oh wait, they assigned some senior missionaries to commute out from Birmingham to augment the numbers. It must have worked.

My favorite memories are listening to the leadership bitch about all the people who used the building without cleaning up. It sat right in front of the temple so all the visiting van loads of temple goers would trash the building and leave it.

I should point out that I never actually saw a van load of people at the temple. It seams like it was only open on the weekends and then by reservation/appointment. So maybe it only happened once but they really liked to bitch about it to make themselves feel important.


Stunted

It seems that if a large number of temples are only open part time then they are more for looks and are designed for very short and specific hours of operation.

We had a convert family last year -- the wife just left her husband. So much for families being forever.

But I looked up the LDS missions in the European countries where I've lived (plus neighbouring Germany, Holland and France). Here's what they have now compared with about ten years ago:

Italy: 2, down from 6
Spain: 3, down from 5
Portugal: 2, down from 3
Belgium and Holland: 1, down from 2
Austria and Germany: 2, down from about six or seven I think
France: 2, down from about five

If you go back another ten years, to about 1990, the decline is even more pronounced: back then you had two missions in little Belgium (Antwerp and Brussels) and two in the city of Lisbon, for instance. I remember members complaining about decline as early as 2001.

So that may give you a more realistic idea of church growth/decline/consolidation/freefall than the stakes and wards. Most stakes and wards are run by BIC American expats and missionaries, and in the sunbelt also by long-term European members from other countries who retired to sunny climes with low cost of living. I know wards with enough leaders for every type of sunday school class or calling and hardly any other active members born within 100 miles.

IMHO, missions are a much more credible indicator of success or failure than once-thriving wards and stakes that are now in limbo.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 01/30/2011 06:54AM by Zeno Lorea.

I think looking at missions is a good way to gauge growth. When I was a missionary in Japan 30 years ago there were roughly 7 missions for the entire country IIRC. They had a fair amount of growth in the 80s and added many more missions.

Now, today I look on the internet and find that Japan has 7 missions. Not much has changed in 30 years.

When I was leaving Japan they were announcing the first Stake in my mission. Today, 30 years later their are two stakes in that same mission.

The church does not seem to have grown in Japan in 30 years.

I live in eastern PA, and can only report on my former branch. I haven't been to church or even interacted much with any of the members (formerly some of my best friends) in about 10 years, but I do know this. Most of the die-hards of my generation (Boomers) who are still active have kids who have left the church completely. Only a handful went on missions. There are babies out of wedlock, divorce, tattoos, and temple marriages are the exception. So it seems the younger generation, at least around here, is falling away in droves.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/30/2011 07:29AM by DebbiePA.

I left the church about 4 years ago, and I don't think there have been many, if any baptisms in the local branch in that time. Last year the missionaries were in and out on a 3 month rotation, and last I heard they aren't even there anymore. I check the mission president's blog to see what's going on once in a while.

http://presidentmcintyre.blogspot.com/

I'm guessing they put up a picture of every person who gets baptized in the mission each month. I thought it was interesting that of the 19 people who were baptized in December, 5 of them appear to be non-Japanese.

FWIW

Before the last stake conference we all had a big butt chewing by the stake to get more people out for stake Conference. The SP talk edged on desperation.
They quoted stats that less that 55% attended Stake Conference
and that was unacceptable. SP was/is an arrogant azzhole.
Even in Moville people are tired of the burden & guilt.

I love it!

My theory is that there are Mormon demographic *waves* if you will.
I went from an in-city stake that merged with an adjacent suburban stake (around 2003), to two subsequent stakes that both split while I was in them (2006 and 2010).
To me it looks like a demographic wave. There are places that young families are simply more likely to go socioeconomically. I've expreienced this my whole life, even as a youth in Utah. My in-city ward in SLC as a youth was one of those "newly-wed or nearly-dead" wards (which has merged since I left 25 years ago), very few families with teenage kids. Then I moved to suburban WVC where wards were packed with teenagers. It was totally the part of town, new housing expansion, working economy instead of student or retirement economy.
There are concentrations of Mormons where their more typical socioeconomic habitat is.

Growth in some areas is pretty much equal to decline in others.

It gives you a broader picture than looking at individual zip codes.

... going down, :)

...what the deal was with the LDS church here (when I had to find out where to send my resignation letter) there were two wards meeting in a building on the south side of town, and two on the northeast side (white, upper middle class areas, of course). So just now I looked up the info on mormon.org, and there are four wards in that same south side building, but the names of the wards are from small cities to the south, across the state line, while one of the wards that used to meet in the south side building is now in the northeast building.

There are two possible explanations. One is that the wards to the south have grown so much they need to shuffle things around to pack them into available buildings. The other is that membership is shrinking in my city so they're bussing in wards from the next state.

I vote for the latter. This is a banking & finance town and a lot of white collar people lost their jobs and moved away. I think Mormon "growth" here was just BICs moving into what, all through the past few decades, was a booming job market.

This is the Bible Belt. Mormonism is a very hard sell. I used to run into missionaries. When I did, I'd ask them how the work was going. It was essentially stagnant. Some missionaries assigned to the Spanish-speaking population were slightly less bummed out, but with the collapse of the construction boom, a lot of Latinos have moved on. And I haven't seen missionaries around town in years.

Less then half my ward attends regularly, and this is BYUI student territory.

Much worse in the Bay Area...our ward was smaller then some branches, the stake pres. lived in the other ward, and didn't want to redraw boundaries, though....instead we got a lot of pressure to talk to our blend of gay, atheist, and Muslim neighbors about the church. Good luck with that. Of course it's our fault the area is going to pieces.

http://www.mormonwiki.com/Church_growth

Try to read this without gagging, please. Note that they are still trumpeting that outdated (1984) prediction about phenomenal growth (265 million by 2080). They still use the word "fastest" about its growth rate.

They claim a million members in Mexico, but fail to mention that 75% of them can't be found by the government census.

Bunch of liars!!

The guy was using an exponential growth model. I would be so embarrased if I was the person who put out those numbers.

As far as church growth goes, I think the biggest thing that will happen in the future is less and less missionaries. Not only are convert rates per missionary going down, but missionary numbers are headed down.

Monson probably thinks people don't go on missions right now because of the recession. News flash, it's because people are becoming less ignorant and using the internet/other resources.

My 25-ish nephew spent two years in France trying to spread "the gospel". He baptized: (drumroll) zero people.

And tscc wants to build a temple there? Sheesh.

My nephew recently returned from Germany. I asked him point blank if he personally baptized anyone. His response: "Nope."

2 years of blood, sweat and tears. Oh well.

I know of one area that is growing though- my inlaws live outside of Sacramento (in Rocklin), and they added a new stake today (as announced in Stake Conference today). It had 18 wards as part of the stake before the split. It may be just members moving from one place to another- or also due to lots of housing development in that area in the past decade or so.

But interestingly, they have been wanting to build a new stake for a few years, but the residents of the nearby town (Lincoln) voted against building a chapel there because they didn't want Mormons to move to their city. Unfortunately with the economic and housing market, the town of Lincoln is desperate for income from any source, including the building of the new chapel.

Boise, Idaho. Church is shrinking, combining wards. Part of that is demographics as the city gets older and young families move out to Meridian, Kuna, Eagle, etc.

Meridian (just outside Boise) was growing so fast that they couldn't build church buildings (or schools, for that matter) fast enough to keep up with the growth. Lots of that growth was people moving from Boise and the building boom of the 90's and early 00's.

From what I can see, that growth is slowing. I haven't heard of any new stakes out there for a while.

They recently made an overlay single adult stake, so that took away our stake's YSA branch and left us with only 5 wards. A stake needs 6 units to stay alive, so they gave us the BSU married student ward. So, we essentially have a ward that lies entirely outside our stake boundaries, but the alternative was to dissolve the stake, which they are loathe to do.

Realistically, they need to realign all of Boise and take the 5 stakes and make 3 and make the wards more viable for youth program. The Boise South Stake has so few youth that all the youth in the stake meet together for mid-week activities (mutual, scouts). The whole stake! There are wards in Meridian that have more youth than that entire stake.

My old ward in the Midwest was at one time pretty large and they were talking of splitting it BUT so many members in the ward worked for the same company (mostly in management and were recruited from BYU, etc) and all most all of those people got let go a few years back and have moved on. (There was a Mormon purge after the Mormon CEO/Stake President got canned). The ward is the only one in the building and it's now small enough to be a branch.

The last 10+ years we've lived here we saw a few people get baptized but all most all of those have dropped out (except 2-4 from maybe 20-25 who joined). More than half of those baptized were folks who mostly found the church useful for economic and social reasons and when that didn't work out they left.

The ward is so small now and is really struggling to find enough people to fill themajor positions. I talked to a member of the bishopric I'm still friends with last week and he said things are really bad on more then one level.

The ward use to have up to three sets on missionaries assigned to the ward. That was a crazy number!! Some Sundays there would be as many as 7-8 missionaries-(some Spanish speaking and a couple of pair of English speaking regular pairs).

People are still leaving. Two more strong families are moving out or have moved out just recently because of job changes and another one of the retired couples has decided to move closer to a temple. I'm not sure how they are going to keep things together if things keep going like they are.

Very strange how a very large ward (filled up all of the chapel, the overflow and half of the gym for sacrament meeting)
can dwindle down to just a few active members in just a few years.

During the last couple years of my activity, all but one of the new converts had left the church after less than a year.

Recently (I haven't been there to verify) on the ward website:

High Priest Group has no leadership listed.
only an EQ Prez with a secretary.
a YM Prez with only a secretary.

And the young adults are missing from the membership listings (could all be out of town for school...)

And the womens auxilliaries/Primary are all staffed by the old timers.

My wife reports seeing three different members since summer who say that they don't go there anymore.

I would love to get a real report somehow, just to see what is happening.

How can there be growth when, I was told, stake leaders are
already talking about combining 2 wards for sacrament
meetings.

Now that would be creative accounting! Keep the number of stakes and wards but let them them have sacrament meeting together. Hey, you could even create new wards and stakes, perhaps one stake for each row of pews? Every member a bishop.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/31/2011 04:59AM by Zeno Lorea.

In my ward there has been 6 convert baptisms in five years.
Of the 6, only one is still active, the others left activity within weeks of their baptisms. Also during that time three complete families of four have left activity in the Church.

Activity runs at less than 30% of the people on the ward list.

Our SLC ward had to combine with another ward for primary and Ym/YW. There were no new converts in the years I attended. Once in a while, some ward members would bring in someone from a foreign country, such as Korea, Mexico, Russia, Tibet, Africa (whatever country was the current fad) and members would scurry around them to try to convert them, but they were never baptized.

Senior missionary couples would be called on missions to other wards closer to downtown SLC, to fill ward positions there.

When we resigned, there were about half the number of members in the chapel every Sunday, as there had been when we first moved into the ward.

The Sacramento temple is by appointment only, and my relatives there have a hard time finding a convenient time, it is open so seldom. They drove to the Oakland temple a few times, then lost interest.

The entire stake I grew up in, in California, has disappeared, and the stake house we all took such pride in building was sold and torn down 20 years ago.

My friends' ward in Sandy, Utah, was divided in half between two other wards. Many members stopped attending, because their friends were in the other ward. Extended family members were split, and the bishops would not make an exception for them to all be in the same ward together. So, this family now goes to church together at the Methodist church!

I grew up in this area in the 60s and 70s and it was growing (morgwise) like hotcakes. I'd love to know what it is like now. I swear El Dorado County felt pretty much all Mormon to me.

More people in the UK went to watch Arsenal versus Huddersfield in the FA Cup than attended Sacrament meeting.