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I assume some of you heard about the significant contraction of units in Europe (rumored to dismantle 800 of the some 1200 units). Today there is the perspective from someone living through it in Belgium.
http://www.timesandseasons.org/index.php/2017/05/consolidation-of-church-units-some-reflections/ ” class=”bbcode_url”> http://www.timesandseasons.org/index.php/2017/05/consolidation-of-church-units-some-reflections/ Really interesting article! To me, it’s a contraction of the church. It’s also interesting that there are reasons given for helping the members, which are the same as the ones given here in America when they split wards. I think the reasons are partly financial (why rent or build a building for only 25 active members??) just as they are in America (why build another building when you can stagger meeting times and maximize real estate utilization?). They mention that larger units mean more full-blown programs in Europe, but they seem not to care about how it stretches the members thin when a Ward gets big enough to split, to avoid having to build another building. Doesn’t bode well for the church in Europe, that’s for sure. And the issue of getting people to church will be a problem. I’d cut it back to maybe once a month, ask for the meetings to be broadcast, or use remote technologies to hold church services. Good luck with that, though; they are not that forward thinking…
I had seen such rumors on the internet and I remain unbelieving of the rumored magnitude. However, it is apparent that with activity levels and very slow growth in Europe that consolidation is necessary. There just aren’t enough active leaders to go around and run the church as it should be. You can call it contraction if you want, the end result is the same. I think the same thing is happening is Asia, particularly South Korea and Hong Kong. It needs to happen in Chile, and perhaps other places in South America as well. What would happen if the Church decided to consolidate Temple districts & close a temple because of lack of activity? For example the activity in the Helsinki (Finland) Temple, Copenhagen (Denmark) or the Ukraine (Russia)?
Very interesting article. Thanks.
DarkJedi wrote:
I had seen such rumors on the internet and I remain unbelieving of the rumored magnitude. However, it is apparent that with activity levels and very slow growth in Europe that consolidation is necessary. There just aren’t enough active leaders to go around and run the church as it should be. You can call it contraction if you want, the end result is the same. I think the same thing is happening is Asia, particularly South Korea and Hong Kong. It needs to happen in Chile, and perhaps other places in South America as well.
It would be interesting to see the reasoning for why this is all part of God’s plan among TBM Mormons…
Wow! Thanks for posting this article. This one hits close to home. I served my mission in this area, spent 18 months of my time in this stake. I particularly agree with Bro. DeCoo on this issue:
Quote:This procedure is thus set to make a drastic, surprise change, with expected contention being eluded preemptively, and thus inducing people to obedience. One former stake president from the Netherlands wrote me that such an approach is totally contrary to their national “poldercultuur” of consultation and deliberation: potential changes that affect everyone are proposed and discussed over a long period, assessed with a willingness to compromise, and then people slowly come to emerging consensus. All feel involved and respected. This stake president once had to close a unit and did so in polder-cultuur-mode: it worked much better.
Our top leaders, aside from Uchtdorf, do not understand the European mentality. Demanding strict, blind obedience just doesn’t fly with the staunchly independent and proud mentality of the Dutch people. What was once three missions, is not one mission. It looks like the same thing is now happening to stakes, wards, and branches. The comments from Rachel Whipple following the article give a good picture of how this actually impacts the members directly. In an area where membership is already struggling, making members travel farther (in a country where many use train and bikes for travel) to cram into an undersized building is not going to help the membership. It will further alienate people. Especially, after this was just shoved down their throats with little to no input from members. In many areas, members will go along with changes like this, but some cultures just don’t put up with being told what is best for them, with no opportunity to be a part of the decision making process. It’s a shame to see this. The church will continue to shrink in Europe, and decision made by our top leadership are contributing to the problem.
Ow. Super Ow. Someday, some one is going to figure out that Utah is not Zion. Until then Rachel weeps.
They’ve used completely the wrong models in Europe – boundaries drawn by outsiders, complete neglect of the countryside, misunderstanding of the Irish situation etc. A great point raised in the article discusses why there aren’t more converts. In Europe, many are converting to other religions or joining other social movements. The fact that the LDS Church refuses to shed some of it’s culture to embrace the culture where it is trying to spread prevents its own growth. This is the classic tendency to confuse the gospel with the culture. If the church could somehow be willing to adjust its culture to fit the local needs, yet still retain the important essences of the gospel, growth would be a natural result. It would be hard to shed some of these things, especially when multi-generational families have embraced them as a part of their own culture and identity. But if the church started to discuss the possibility of shedding (at least in certain areas) things like the 3-hour meeting block, home teaching or visiting teaching, mutual, etc. couldn’t they still maintain the core of the gospel, but tailor the delivery of that gospel to the locale rather than insisting on one-size-fits-all Mormonism that clearly doesn’t actually work for all?
Minyan Man wrote:
What would happen if the Church decided to consolidate Temple districts & close a temple because of lack of activity?For example the activity in the Helsinki (Finland) Temple, Copenhagen (Denmark) or the Ukraine (Russia)?
Very interesting article. Thanks.
Ooft! Don’t confuse Russia and the Ukraine. They were at war recently.
As someone who served in Europe, albeit a totally different part of Europe, this makes me sad. I saw the positive impacts to many people’s lives when they joined the church.
Quote:What is missing is a candid and thorough assessment of why the Church has not grown in those units that are now being closed. The usual explanations do not suffice — secularization, unwillingness to live a demanding religion, hedonism, immorality… These reasons are nonsense. They are excuses for failure.
That seems a little harsh. I do think those factors are part of the issue, but I get what the author is saying, that it’s complacent to just blame external factors that are beyond our control. Yet he doesn’t actually take a crack at what would reverse the trends.
I had a few thoughts after reading the article:
1) It’s interesting that my US ward just split up to make ward sizes smaller. If I were a wee bit more skeptical, I’d be thinking that one way to “cook the books” on the “growth” numbers we do is to make up for losses in Europe & elsewhere by shrinking US wards that can handle it more.
2) The more the church aligns with the far right in US politics (the culture wars) the less relevant we will be in places like Europe that are generally all to the left of the US’s left. And many church leaders have proven time and again that they don’t solve problems with a global perspective, often so focused on Utah’s unique demographic that they don’t fully grasp anything outside the mountain west.
3) As a missionary, it was frustrating that the families who most needed the church were the least embraced by the wards in many cases.
Aside from those thoughts, I think the author had some very good thoughts about why the church is shrinking.
Quote:Strong Mormon families with children (and with a car) tend to welcome the consolidation. They may gratefully accept the closure of their unit where they may have been the only “normal” family carrying the burden of a struggling branch for years.
I really dislike this multi-generational families thing that they are touting as a panacea. It feels, again, like a vote of no confidence in the gospel to transform lives without the blackmail of familial pressure to bolster it. Plus, I don’t think it continues to be true over time.
I hope the church at some point abandons its insistence on a universal church experience. There’s no good reason the church experience has to be identical in every place and culture. How much more meaningful could worship services be if they could embrace the localized cultures and still be true to core gospel values? Church attendance could be completely unique in Ireland vs Spain vs Ethiopia vs Utah, etc and still be teaching the same true things even if those things were experienced in slightly different ways. But alas! Correlation has so firmly sunk its ironclad jaws in that people have started to see the experience as the truth itself. I get the familiarity and comfort of the familiar routine being the same, especially when moving wards, but come on! We are a global church and there’s no reason this diversity shouldn’t be experienced and celebrated! There seems to be an assumption that faithful parents produce faithful children. We tend to be at most, three generations deep… some of our most TBM members – including ex-bishops – have no children active in the church. I think “faithful parents produce faithful children” worked better in pre-Internet days. It relies on parents’ worldviews being transmitted pretty much intact. This requires a good deal of isolation from competing worldviews and disconfirming facts. We need to update our worldviews, which is really hard and takes time, and think of our children more as potential converts than as hearts and minds that rightfully belong to the Church. Then, if we’re attracting and keeping external converts, we’ll naturally make internal converts.
SamBee wrote:
There seems to be an assumption that faithful parents produce faithful children. We tend to be at most, three generations deep… some of our most TBM members – including ex-bishops – have no children active in the church.
Reuben wrote:
I think “faithful parents produce faithful children” worked better in pre-Internet days. It relies on parents’ worldviews being transmitted pretty much intact. This requires a good deal of isolation from competing worldviews and disconfirming facts.We need to update our worldviews, which is really hard and takes time, and think of our children more as potential converts than as hearts and minds that rightfully belong to the Church. Then, if we’re attracting and keeping external converts, we’ll naturally make internal converts.
I fully agree with both comments
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