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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.
NightSG wrote: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.
To be fair to Ray, it depends on how you calculate the numbers.
I recently went to a membership meeting for one of the churches where we participate and I learned some interesting things. This is a growing church that is expanding with weekly new converts and purchasing surrounding tracts of land to build overflow parking lots. One individual asked if they needed to send their former church notice that they are officially joining a different church. The answer was no. This prompted me to ask what this church does with old membership records – after a while people move or even die. I was told that the board of deacons regularly (at the very least once per year) go through the membership records and remove people who no longer attend. The church by-laws permit removing someone from the church records after their intentionally missing as little as three consecutive Sundays.
I love the church that I am speaking of. They have great programs and great people. Had I not been Mormon I probably would have joined right there at the membership meeting. I am just trying to illustrate how comparing church figures gets tricky. It is easy to see how removing all LDS “inactives” from the membership records would improve LDS attendance statistics.
LookingHard wrote: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 have thought about this before. I remember the ward custodian in an old ward where we lived. When we deep cleaned the chapel as a ward activity she was not permitted to participate. Essentially because of laws associated with the Fair Labor Standards Act her employer cannot knowingly permit her to work for free. This got me thinking about all the OSHA and workman’s compensation laws and how challenging it must be to keep everything in compliance in far flung ward buildings. I believe then and I believe now that the church decided to avoid the whole headache by having all the cleaning done by volunteers.
However – that is my speculation. The church response has been all about getting more “sacrifice” and “eternal blessings” for the members. The following is the most detailed explanation I have ever seen:
https://www.lds.org/ensign/1999/06/news-of-the-church?lang=eng Quote:Bishop H. David Burton
Question: What is some of the thinking behind the request for members to help care for meetinghouses?
Response: The same opportunities to sacrifice for the kingdom do not exist today as they once did. There was a time in the Church not too many years ago when members donated funds above and beyond tithing and fast offerings to help operate their local wards and stakes, including the costs of maintaining buildings and providing electricity, water, and telephones. More recently, through the faithfulness of members across the world, the Church has been in a position to fund those kinds of expenses at the local level. But as that has occurred, some members—particularly youth—have lost respect and appreciation for Church buildings. Today it is often easy for us to slip over to our meetinghouses and treat them as any other ordinary building that we may enter during the week.
Basically, the meetinghouse care program is simple. Members of the Church are invited to participate in the cleaning of their buildings in such a way that, by their sacrifice, they will come to honor and respect and love these beautiful houses of worship. The most important thing to understand is that this program was not primarily instituted to save money. This is a program to develop personal character and receive eternal blessings. Those priesthood leaders who teach their people that this is an opportunity to sacrifice and build the kingdom will find success in their efforts.
Sounds to me that he is saying that the financially flush position of the church was making the membership too comfortable and complacent … and so this new program was implemented for the membership to better learn the art of sacrifice (he used the word sacrifice three separate times). Reading between the lines, Bishop Burton seems to acknowledge that saving the church money is part of the motivations for the new program but emphasizes that it was not the primary factor.
I always enjoyed a more intimate setting at church. IMO church would be a better experience if wards were half the size (with a reduction in callings to go along with that). Sitting in a room with 23,000 other people every Sunday isn’t my thing but I can understand the appeal. Intimacy, being a part of something larger, whatever helps a person make a connection. Variety is a good thing. I hope this isn’t off topic. I’ll make it short. I recently saw my old boss the other day. She asked what I was doing in retirement. I told her I was doing Family History / Genealogy.
She didn’t know I was a Mormon when I worked for her. She said her family used to be in the Mormon church back in the pioneer days in SLC.
Her GGGrandfather worked & died helping build the SLC temple. The church didn’t help financially with the loss of this brother. So, the family
sued the church. Then, when the courts didn’t help, they left & didn’t look back.
I’m sure that issues like this made the church change to professional builders & contractors with insurance coverage & OSHA requirements too.
A few years ago, I did some rather extensive research into attendance trends within Christianity. Generally speaking, older, mainline Protestant churches (the more “liberal” ones) and the Catholic Church dropped quite significantly in total membership, percentage of total membership in the United States and/or regular church attendance rates, while conservative Protestant churches and the LDS Church increased in each category. Also, the newest and largest churches (“mega-churches”) and smallest churches (under 100 attendees) showed the largest growth measures, while the oldest and mid-sized churches showed the steepest declines. It appeared that people weren’t leaving Christianity as much as they were changing churches – generally from more liberal ones to more conservative ones. Much of the change was from schisms within the largest denominations and from the rise of non-denominational congregations.
In all measures, the LDS Church was much closer to the top of the positive indices than the middle or bottom – and there was not a significant difference in how the numbers were calculated among the denominations, broadly speaking.
I just did some quick checking for more updated articles, and they all reinforce what I found when I did more exhaustive research.
Having said all of that, I have holy envy of various various practices in many denominations. I would love to see lots of things changed about our culture and how we worship. As I said, all is NOT well in Zion. However, in the context of how other denominations are doing (not just mega-churches, even though some of them are struggling mightily), the LDS Church is being studied by lots of people to see what they can replicate in order to retain and engage members more actively.
Roadrunner wrote: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.You say that like it’s a bad thing. As little respect as those of us raised in non-LDS Boy Scout troops have for the Eagle-Scout-whether-you-earn-it-or-not that the Church troops turn out, I can’t imagine how pathetic the implementation of Girl Scouts would be. Probably a GoFundMe page instead of cookie sales.
NightSG wrote:
You say that like it’s a bad thing. As little respect as those of us raised in non-LDS Boy Scout troops have for the Eagle-Scout-whether-you-earn-it-or-not that the Church troops turn out, I can’t imagine how pathetic the implementation of Girl Scouts would be. Probably a GoFundMe page instead of cookie sales.*snort*
The particular church I’m talking about isn’t a mega-church; it’s about the size of one of our stake centers. We don’t really get the mega-churches around here. And I have no idea what their activity levels are like. I do know that they do a way better job of interacting with the community than my LDS ward does, as evidenced by the fact that quite a few Mormon families utilize their sports programs.
I think if I could pick ONE aspect of mainstream Protestantism to implement into Mormonism, it would be their attitude towards children. Background checks, volunteers who ACTUALLY volunteered, bright and welcoming rooms, sports programs, halfway decent Scouting, etc. I feel like in the LDS church we like the IDEA of children, but we do a lousy job of engaging the ACTUAL small human beings that we produce on a regular basis.
Joni wrote:[quote=”small human beings that we produce on a regular basis.
Joni – In my ward there are several “overly large” human beings
Joni wrote:I think if I could pick ONE aspect of mainstream Protestantism to implement into Mormonism, it would be their attitude towards children. Background checks, volunteers who ACTUALLY volunteered, bright and welcoming rooms, sports programs, halfway decent Scouting, etc. I feel like in the LDS church we like the IDEA of children, but we do a lousy job of engaging the ACTUAL small human beings that we produce on a regular basis.
*This*
We offer nothing until a child turns 8, then we offer either “hit or miss” boy scouts or “hit or miss” activity days. We only really start to engage the young people at 12.
As someone that has visited a number of churches – nothing blows me away like a welcoming and well run kids program.
As a primary teacher last year (2014) I actually refused to have my class memorize anything. I know that some kids might get a thrill from passing off the Articles of Faith but I think it demotivates the rest.
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