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Joni wrote:
Some churches have nurseries that run concurrently with their main worship service, neatly eliminating the problem of kids screaming when adults are trying to listen. Of course then you have the problem of when do the nursery workers get to go to church (but again, many churches have 2 or 3 worship services on Sunday. So you can volunteer with the kids at 10 and then go hear a sermon at 12. Assuming you passed your background check.
Yeah, but one of the things I like most about the church is that we go to church and worship together as a family. I do think we could do better at making the meeting more conducive to children (including making it shorter) and I have seen some other churches make some effort at it.
DarkJedi wrote:Yeah, but one of the things I like most about the church is that we go to church and worship together as a family.
For an hour, and then we split the family up for two, or more if anybody’s got a calling that requires meetings before or after the regular block. That’s sort of pathetic when you think about it, given the “focus on family.”
By having families all together during SM, and making nursery part of a “class” in primary, the ward doesn’t have to pay anyone to work in the nursery during SM. By picking music for the hymnal that either isn’t copyrighted or the composer is LDS and has been guilted into giving free use of the work, the church saves money. Lots of money. So what if the hymns are miserable? Copyrighting is why we don’t sing “Happy Birthday” to kids in primary .. Freebie alternatives were found.
Background checks cost money .. Better to just take a chance with who works in primary.
Giving the YW the same budget would cost too much and give those girls ideas that they are really valued. YW are easier to manipulate later if they grow up thinking that the boys get all the power, all the fun activities, bigger budgets, and better equipment. The girls should be okay with another journal. After all the journals will help in therapy later.
Sports for girls? But the boys always get the basketball court on Wednesday nights. We don’t have enough facilities or time slots to allow sports for the girls. By the time the guys games are all on the schedule, the only thing available is 10 pm. But hey .. Kids should all be asleep by then .. Why don’t we give the guys a few minutes to get home, and the ladies can come play a late game. That won’t interfere with the sisters who teach early morning seminary .. 10 pm would be perfect for them.
What would I change? The cheapskate attitude.
Amateur parent, I’m told there are even churches who pay a janitor. Gasp! Actually, I wonder how much of a correlation there is between churches that
hirepastors, secretaries, children’s program directors and janitors, and churches that do actualservice in their communities. After all, if you’re feeling burnt out by your internal, church-focused service (that you didn’t volunteer for and don’t have the option of quitting) then it’s hard to gin up enthusiasm for external, community-focused service. And I think this is an area where we could really stand to improve. As a good church-going Mormon I can’t think of the last time I did service for someone not LDS who wasn’t dead.Joni wrote:Amateur parent, I’m told there are even churches who
pay a janitor. Gasp! There used to be a time when we did have paid janitors. In our ward it was an older retired guy.
I don’t know why it changed.
I don’t want to derail this thread or devalue the post in any way, seriously, because it is an important post with excellent points, but . . . I think it is important to mention that the LDS Church has a higher activity rate than just about any other large denomination, overall – so it obviously does a lot of things well compared to other denominations. Absolutely, all is NOT well in Zion, and there are lots of things I would love to see improved and changed radically, but I have had multiple religious leaders in other denominations ask me how they can do more things like we do them in order to try to retain their members more actively.
Back to the discussion of possible or desired improvements.
Ray: I keep hearing that our numbers are better than their numbers. But .. They have police directing their parking lot traffic and crosswalks. They have to hire a bus to carry people from far off parking lots. People show up over an hour early to get a seat. Our small parking lot is never full. They have 60 baptisms on a Sunday. We have 2-4 youth baptisms each month for the entire Stake.
I’m not seeing our great successes.
Mormonism does have a lot of successes. To name just one: compared to other Christian denominations in the United States, Mormon teenagers tend to abstain from sex longer, even though Evangelical Christians teach very similar stances about pre-marital sex, and in some cases, are even more extreme in the dogma. I saw data the other day that indicated Christians were more likely to have abortions than Atheists (gasp!) but it didn’t include Mormons with the Christian category. Mormons were even lower in likelihood (this is all supposing the numbers are accurate).
However, in reality, we’re just a tiny, tiny religious group. Compare Mormonism to the vast religion of Islam–ever growing and inspiring religious devotion. We’re a little blip on the radar compared to Roman Catholicism. In my experience, Utah Mormons often tend to overgeneralize Catholics as not being as devoted to their own religion—wrongfully so. Roman Catholicism is a MASSIVE religion and they certainly have massive numbers of devoted worshipers around the world.
amateurparent wrote:By having families all together during SM, and making nursery part of a “class” in primary, the ward doesn’t have to pay anyone to work in the nursery during SM.
By picking music for the hymnal that either isn’t copyrighted or the composer is LDS and has been guilted into giving free use of the work, the church saves money. Lots of money. So what if the hymns are miserable? Copyrighting is why we don’t sing “Happy Birthday” to kids in primary .. Freebie alternatives were found.
Background checks cost money .. Better to just take a chance with who works in primary.
Giving the YW the same budget would cost too much and give those girls ideas that they are really valued. YW are easier to manipulate later if they grow up thinking that the boys get all the power, all the fun activities, bigger budgets, and better equipment. The girls should be okay with another journal. After all the journals will help in therapy later.
Sports for girls? But the boys always get the basketball court on Wednesday nights. We don’t have enough facilities or time slots to allow sports for the girls. By the time the guys games are all on the schedule, the only thing available is 10 pm. But hey .. Kids should all be asleep by then .. Why don’t we give the guys a few minutes to get home, and the ladies can come play a late game. That won’t interfere with the sisters who teach early morning seminary .. 10 pm would be perfect for them.
What would I change? The cheapskate attitude.
Yes.
We certainly could do a much better job of investing back into our membership. Shaving operating costs appears to be very high on the priority list. That makes sense to some degree but it feels like we’ve taken it to the extreme. It’s okay to take extreme measures when there’s $30.00 left in the checking account but it’s silly to be so extreme when there’s $30 billion. No commoners know what the financial situation of the church is but it really feels like the leaders have developed that same “hoard wealth” mentality that is sometimes seen among the rich elite. Amassing wealth can become an addiction.
Maybe it’s a generational thing or a carryover from leaner times. For example, I remember going to my grandfather’s house to do a home repair project. We didn’t have any nails. He scrounges around and produces many rusty, bent nails that have probably been in a drawer for over 30 years. He proceeds to hammer all the nails straight so we can use them in our project. He wasn’t hurting for money or anything, it may have been his generation, likely affected by the great depression. It may have been his personality. Either way we decided to go to the hardware store and buy a box of new nails for him, it was less than $5.
Maybe the church is still operating under the learned behaviors (which could be taken by some as the revealed process) of leaner times? You might expect things to be a little tight when some depression era folks are running the show. Over time you might expect the purse strings to loosen once a different generation with different experiences takes the reigns. From what people tell me it would appear that the belt has tightened over the years.
Maybe the church isn’t as wealthy as some guess? If that’s the case it’s hard to explain away that whole mall and Florida thing. If you estimate the cost of the mall at $1.5 billion and active membership at 5 million they could have cut every active member of the church a check for $300. If you don’t like the idea of cutting checks to individuals, with just under 30,000 wards and branches how about $50,000 reinvested back into every unit in the church? That’s a lot of pot blessing dinners. I’m sure a great deal is spent on each unit of the church, 30,000 units makes things add up very quick. I’m just looking at the opportunity costs of some of the more visible things that have been done recently. I didn’t want to make this a mall thread.
Maybe they overspent and are trying to recoup capital? Maybe they are so focused on having money for the future that they are blind to how the money could/should be used today? Lots of maybes.
Many words to say, yes stop being cheapskates.
Minyan Man wrote:Joni wrote:Amateur parent, I’m told there are even churches who
pay a janitor. Gasp!
There used to be a time when we did have paid janitors. In our ward it was an older retired guy. I don’t know why it changed.
My understanding was that it was both a cost saving initiative and “get the members more involved and committed” initiative. It used to be a bit of a fallback to be used as a welfare tool where if someone lost their job, they would “hire” them on as a janitor as part of the exchange for $ help until a real job came along. I don’t hate cleaning the building, but I do dislike that it takes a chunk of a precious Saturday and makes some members feel “there – I have done my ‘service’ checklist for a few weeks.” I feel we already focus service almost exclusively on members to start with. There are positives to that (“we take care of our own”), but I feel Christ wants a bigger circle within my scope of service to others.nibbler wrote:it really feels like the leaders have developed that same “hoard wealth” mentality…
There are many times I feel like this also.nibbler wrote:Maybe it’s a generational thing or a carryover from leaner times.
I do think this is true. My grandmother always took the light out of the fridge because that wasn’t needed and used electricity. I am sure my kids can relate to that mindset even less than I can.amateurparent wrote:Ray: I keep hearing that our numbers are better than their numbers. But .. They have police directing their parking lot traffic and crosswalks. They have to hire a bus to carry people from far off parking lots. People show up over an hour early to get a seat.
Our small parking lot is never full. They have 60 baptisms on a Sunday. We have 2-4 youth baptisms each month for the entire Stake.
I’m not seeing our great successes.
I live in the same state as AP and reading her post I had to agree. There are 3 other churches in my master planned community and they are all bigger than the stake center building that we have. And there are always startup churches using the school buildings. But within 2 miles of the subdivision, there are 2 MEGA churches and go out another 2 miles and another one is in creation mode meeting in an arena that holds 12K folks. And those churches no longer push anti-Mormon stuff. They no longer feel we are a threat.nibbler, I’d say the more positive word is…”frugal” 
I got the impression the church was wealthy enough GBHinckley was smart enough to tell them to open the coffers a bit and use some…build smaller temples all over the place and make it easier for saints to get there so you don’t require people spending their life savings to make their one temple trip (although those made for stories the Ensign loved to publish).
I would rather have leadership be frugal than in debt, and we probably learned from our past that we don’t want to go there again…ever.
LookingHard wrote:I live in the same state as AP and reading her post I had to agree. …They no longer feel we are a threat.
I find comparisons really hard to make between religions, but do think we are not on very many other church’s radar as much we fear sometimes. The flip side is my realization of how well other churches do things, and how much they benefit the lives of families in the community. As I’ve often said, there are many people who are doing just fine without mormonism. So many other churches have things to offer us on how well they do things…but we do some pretty darn good things too.
LookingHard wrote:I live in the same state as AP and reading her post I had to agree. There are 3 other churches in my master planned community and they are all bigger than the stake center building that we have. And there are always startup churches using the school buildings. But within 2 miles of the subdivision, there are 2 MEGA churches and go out another 2 miles and another one is in creation mode meeting in an arena that holds 12K folks. And those churches no longer push anti-Mormon stuff. They no longer feel we are a threat.
This. Just looking at Prestonwood Baptist in Dallas, they have an average weekly
attendanceof 17,000. GC tops that, but that’s pulling from every LDS with the money to travel, not just a local independent congregation. Now, that attendance comes from a membership of 40,000. That’s about 42-43% attendance. Not sure about other wards, but mine’s doing well to see 30% for the special holidays. It’s not unusual to see 25% or less on an average Sunday.
The 2 biggest churches in the big town near my smallish town has 43,500 and 23,600 weekly attendees. The really big one only fits 17K at a time (they bought out the arena from a sports team), so they have several meeting times during the day. Roy wrote:I suppose I view this as competing paradigms. The paradigm of good vs. the paradigm of right.
I once heard a pastor say that he wanted to build an environment where people would want to spend time even if they were not on board with the doctrine. In his mind, given enough time most of the doctrinal disagreements would work themselves out or perhaps were not very important to begin with. I might call this the paradigm of good.
In the LDS church I believe that the emphasis is placed on the doctrine. It is the doctrine that is true and right. It is the doctrine that gives us exclusive priesthood ordinances. It is the doctrine that provides a path of endurance (“endure to the end”) that leads to exaltation. I might call this the paradigm of right. If the doctrine is true then it would be worth bearing all manner of hardships to attain it.
neither paradigm is better and some people might be better served by one over another.
university wrote:Mormonism does have a lot of successes. To name just one: compared to other Christian denominations in the United States, Mormon teenagers tend to abstain from sex longer, even though Evangelical Christians teach very similar stances about pre-marital sex, and in some cases, are even more extreme in the dogma. I saw data the other day that indicated Christians were more likely to have abortions than Atheists (gasp!) but it didn’t include Mormons with the Christian category. Mormons were even lower in likelihood (this is all supposing the numbers are accurate).
I agree that the church demands and gets more out of the active church membership than most churches could dream about (this does after all fit in nicely with our paradigm positioning). We get a fair number of young people to leave their families for nearly 2 years to proselyte for our religion. Many of them pay their own way! The LDS church can offer an amazing support structure for helping to raise diligent and hardworking young people.
For some time I’ve thought of our church as the Southwest Airlines of churches. Not a perfect comparison by any means, but… Southwest does some things really well. Some people refuse to fly anything but Southwest. However some things you just can’t do with Southwest – like flying outside the US. If my daughter wants to be a girl scout she’s going to have to do it outside of church.
I really do love the LDS church but sometimes I don’t like it very much. I wish we were as a collective more introspective and willing to consider some of the ideas of the original post.
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