A recent article explained actions the church is taking to deal with attrition in northern Europe by consolidating struggling wards into larger wards to spread out the leadership responsibilities. To those who served missions in these areas, these changes are disappointing. The church has always struggled in these areas of the world. Some have observed that the solution seems more typical for a US stake. Local and personalized plays better in the towns of Europe where megachurches and Costcos are not the cultural norm. The article points out the downside of the changes, in particular to missionary work:
At the same time the abolition of Church units is also contraction: in Europe it erases the Mormon presence in city after city and reduces the Church’s visibility. It is therefore also an admission of failure: all those cities that were “opened” decades ago, with dedicatory prayers, promises and prophecies, did not make it.
He points out that the shift is toward multi-generational families rather than converts because retention among converts is low.
It explains why consolidation aims at creating more opportunities for teenagers and young single adults, children of Mormon families, to meet weekly, find a partner in the church, marry and produce the next generation. Moreover, an older Mormon generation always puts a significant amount of pressure on the younger generations to remain active. The expectations of (great)-grandparents and parents to see children baptized, advance in the priesthood, go on missions, and marry in the temple are powerful leverages to stay in the Church, even if the younger generations may lack the deep convictions of their progenitors.
In an Ensign article about the Culture of the Gospel, Elder Oaks said:
As we seek to establish the Church in Africa and other nations, we must have third- and fourth-generation faithful Latter-day Saint families in our leadership and membership. Faithful Latter-day Saints who move to another country weaken the Church in their homeland. Of course the Church does not forbid its members from moving from one place to another to better themselves, but it has been many years since the Church has encouraged such emigration.
This implies that wards are struggling in other areas because members have migrated to the US in some cases which is no longer encouraged. Consolidating wards might help alleviate some of the issues that drive members (or their children) to migrate. Most of the European converts I know who moved to Utah did so either 1) to attend BYU so they could more easily find a Mormon spouse, or 2) because they found a Mormon spouse. If it will help the ratios, I’m willing to move to Europe to even things out; however, my own days on the marriage market are long over.
The desire for third- and fourth-generation families (aka “multi-generation” families) is a recent drumbeat we are hearing from church headquarters. Elder Bednar also talked about it in the recent push for Sabbath observance. His talk is discussed in Rebecca J’s excellent post at By Common Consent here.
“The basic purpose of all we teach and all that we do in the church is to make available the priesthood authority and gospel ordinances and covenants that enable a man and woman and their children to be sealed together and happy at home. Period. Exclamation point. End of sentence. That’s it. . . in the savior’s restored church on the earth today, multi-generational families are a primary source of spiritual strength and continuity. A young seedling develops into a mature tree and produces seeds that fall to forest floor. As conditions are right, the new seeds germinate, begin to grow and the cycle is renewed.”
I’m not crazy about this thinking for several reasons. First of all, I’m second generation, so clearly not good enough by this measure–I’m not the “source of spiritual strength and continuity,” so I must be, by default, a drain on it (?). I’m reminded of the justification to add wives to church leaders because they had “believing blood” while men without such status were left to shift for themselves (to say nothing of the chattel status of the women). Elitism is antithetical to the gospel in which all are equal before God, but we seem to be very human in our persistence in identifying and rewarding the “elites” in our congregations.
Additionally, it feels like we are confusing correlation and causation. We don’t know how to create multi-generational families or why some children leave and others do not. For those who have children leaving, it feels a whole lot like victim blaming. Parents who are already wounded often have kids who have left due to things outside the parents’ control (in no particular order): the church’s misguided culture wars, congregations’ ignorant comments, Biblical literalism, the white-washed correlated lessons that a quick google search reveals to be fictional, or the emphasis on obeying leaders rather than having a personal relationship with God and seeking one’s happiness within the gospel.
This focus is bad for a few reasons: 1) we don’t actually know how to “create” multi-gen families, 2) what used to work doesn’t any more, 3) the most stalwart obey-at-all-cost parents will eat their young in defense of the church (withholding inheritances, etc.). That just results in familial estrangement and resentment, not multi-gen congregations. It’s like a doctor telling you to lose weight without diagnosing any potential factors: genetics, diet, exercise, psychological motives for eating, social habits, your actual BMI, etc. That kind of panacea results in eating disorders, serial dieting, and other unhealthy outcomes; it also usually doesn’t change what a person weighs. The simplistic idea that Sabbath observance is the key to keeping kids in the church is no more a panacea than skipping pancakes. It’s not a bad idea, but you can still get fat without eating pancakes.
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.
From another discussion forum, “Reuben” notes that if we are focused on multi-generational families, we are over-reliant on cultural belonging and not enough on actual conversion.
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.
It feels like a vote of no confidence in the gospel’s ability to transform lives without the blackmail of familial pressure to bolster it.
Another issue with this focus on multi-generational families is that convert families are often part-member families, and European culture prizes family time, including extended family members. The article also points out cultural difficulties that come with increased travel times due to the consolidation that put pressure on interfaith relationships within families. While local members were told that the maximum travel time would only be 45 minutes, that was assuming that each person would have access to a car, not at all a given in European cities where many ride bikes or rely on public transportation.
In Europe, as in many other parts of the world where converts form the bulk, we have numerous single members and part-member families. In the best case scenario, the husband or wife accepts the half-day Sunday absence of the partner. But when the absence extends to a couple of hours more, and to more travel costs, it becomes troublesome. Similar difficulties develop with parents and grand-parents who aren’t members: the consolidation abolishes or disturbs traditions of joined Sunday afternoons. In such families often a delicate balance had been achieved as to time management between church and family, but the extra requirements may lead to breaking points. None of this bothers the multigenerational Mormon family.
The author also notes that multi-generational families tend to focus inward, choosing stake leadership from their own ranks, molding the lessons and talks to suit their interests, and underutilizing marginalized groups:
They form dynasties of “birthright members” who know each other well but who, especially among their younger generations, often seem to have little or no interest in converts, foreigners, divorcees, singles and single parents.
Simply put, we do not improve retention by focusing on multi-gen families, but by giving responsibility to converts and relying on them. Making it clear they are second class is only going to result in further problems with retention, including among the next generations we are so focused on keeping.
Some additional observations from other discussion groups:
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? – “Doubting Tom”
From “Holy Cow” a former missionary who served 18 months in the stake in question:
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.
“SamBee” agrees with this assessment, that the Americentric church misunderstands Europe:
They’ve used completely the wrong models in Europe – boundaries drawn by outsiders, complete neglect of the countryside, misunderstanding of the Irish situation etc.
Conclusions
I had a few initial thoughts after reading the article:
1) My US stake 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. That’s just my business experience speaking, so I hope it’s not the case.
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 (let alone the US) that are generally all to the left of the US’s left. Many church leaders seem 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. A focus on multi-gen families has serious negative downstream impacts where these families are the only ones viewed as “leadership” potential.
Discuss.
Wheat & Tares 
Hawkgrrrl, as always a well researched post that has given me a lot to think about. And I agree with the sentiments shared both by yourself and by those you quoted that a better approach would be to have a pro-growth organization rather than a “don’t bleed the the member’s we have. My heart goes out to those who have been hurt by these decisions.
I commented quite extensively over on the original post. Thanks for drawing in these additional aspects.
“Faithful Latter-day Saints who move to another country weaken the Church in their homeland. Of course the Church does not forbid its members from moving from one place to another to better themselves, but it has been many years since the Church has encouraged such emigration.”
It’s a global world… I can think of many members where at least one child, sometimes two have married someone they met at BYU, having attended university there, or someone they met while on their mission. Some of them are now in the US. We have members from wider Europe here, married to Brits, and Americans married to Brits here as well (so movement isn’t all one way). My sister married a local boy she’d grown up with at church, but they’ve lived in Holland, Scotland and have spent ten years now in Australia. Marrying locally doesn’t ensure local employment opportunities. And the greater the level of education the greater the mobility. My husband and I met while we were at university. He’s Japanese. He’s certainly met his fair share of members who think he should be in Japan (and not have married me, but a Japanese girl instead and be strengthening the church there – thanks for that folks!) But here he is strengthening the church in Britain, in spite of those attitudes, and it isn’t like we don’t need him here.
My heart goes out to those Belgian & Dutch members. It’s one thing consolidating units as has happened here, when there had been several units in a city, it’s a whole other game closing down cities. Heck, there’s a fair few optional stake activities we don’t attend because they’re over in the next city and adding in the journey time makes it not worth the effort and time that would be involved. To impose that on people on a several times a week basis for their ward and branch meetings is not a good idea. Even where there is access to a car, are those making the decisions even thinking about fuel costs, which are considerably higher in Britain and Europe than the US?
May comment further later…
Every member a missionary is the answer! Eighteen year old missionaries plus female missionaries are the answer! Now multigenerational families are the answer! Yet the growth the rate continues to slow and the trend predicts growth will soon become negative (if it isn’t already).
These (n0n) “solutions” are the result of egocentric head-in-the-sand thinking that by sleight of mind shifts the blame from Salt Lake headquarters to the local units while obscuring the blatant fact that the LDS product is being overwhelmingly rejected by the marketplace in spite of LDS HeartSell(tm) emotional manipulation.
The problem isn’t the sales force or the members the problem is the 1950s Salt Lake style wrapper the gospel is still sold and delivered in by our dynasty old blood blind guide leadership.
Rather cynical view of the situation from both this post and the referenced articles. What is interesting to me is that this sort of thing goes on throughout the Church in a constant basis in the US. It also wasn’t that long ago the same thing occurred in the Philippines and Chile, led by Apostles Oaks and Holland, respectively.
My own observation:
1. Consolidation is not really that unusual. In the Silicon Valley, where I came from, they lost two entire Stakes and probably 20 or 25 Wards over the last thirty years after tremendous growth in the area since the late 1950’s.. Our old Ward, that we attended for 17 years, was recently consolidated and it’s name changed after being in existence since 1971.
2. Missionary Work has always been difficult in Europe according to missionaries I have known who have served there. Gaining zero, one or two converts over a two year period was not unusual.
3. The Church inadvertently sacrificed stability and growth in Europe in the 1800’s by having families emigrate to the US. Had many of those people stayed, this may not occurred let’s not forget there were more members in the UK than lived in Nauvoo at that time.
4. The WW activity rate is only about 30%, what do you expect?
5. Some have a knee jerk reaction to blame the Church, but it is really member’s own choice to attend or not attend. Either you value agency or you don’t.
6. Let’s face it, who can resist a good beer?
Jeff,
You have a great point in #6 above!
But 72% of the youth are leaving! 72%!!! And only 1 in 4 convert baptisms stay! If these two statistics are true, membership has to be in decline, how could it possibably be growing? Europe is just a small but specific piece of a much larger problem. Yes it’s the member’s choice to attend or not attend and a large and growing portion are choosing not to! So what’s wrong with these people who are choosing to leave? Do they have some kind of contagious disease? Or is it possible the church has fossilized to the point of being out of touch?
“Some have a knee jerk reaction to blame the Church, but it is really member’s own choice to attend or not attend. Either you value agency or you don’t.”
It’s really much more complex than the quoted comment. E.g., one European convert I taught remained active and committed as a single sister for about 10 years. Then she was seriously ill, bed-bound for about a year during which it was not her choice not to attend. During that time she was cared for by non-member extended family and by local public health employees of the state. Also during that time she was visited by her bishop and by her home teachers exactly never. Perhaps they were overwhelmed with a very large number of non-participating members in a ward with a large geographical area. [There were also other issues in that ward.] Upon recovery she exercised her valued agency not to go back to participating in a ward that did not value her or her faith in Christ . This was not a knee jerk reaction.
Individuals’ stories and Church experience vary widely. No one need shift “the blame from Salt Lake headquarters to the local units.” There is plenty to go around among headquarters, local units, and individuals.
It’s like that here in my part of Canada. Decisions made by people that don’t live or didn’t grow up here. Every single Stake President we’ve had moved after they were done, except one who is waiting until his kid is done high school and then he’ll be gone. Can you even guess the inactivity rate? If something isn’t accessible, then who cares? We have a ward that serves the poorer part of town but it’s over an hour to get to by bus and an hour back, who has the time and money for that? Plus, the new Temple is in an area that has no bus service at all and they are building a new chapel there. It all looks nice and beautiful but how can you get there if you don’t have a car?
Correlation seemed like a necessary, inspired idea at the time, as a way to manage growth and streamline operations. But now the chickens are coming home to roost. All the local autonomy and decision making has been squeezed out of the hinterlands, and centralized planning from SL is simply not up to the task anymore.
This is a sticky problem that’s not dissimilar to the one with whether or not to have non-English speaking branches in predominately English-speaking areas in the US. I remember one GA saying something to the effect that one group of leaders decides the best thing to do is incorporate these non-English speakers into the local wards and discontinue the branches, and then the next group of leaders decides the best way to serve these communities is to create branches speaking their languages. I’ve seen the oscillation, and everybody seems to have their strong opinions, but I haven’t seen a clear win, except in the cases of a few larger, robust non-English speaking branches.
I do believe that the multi-generational members form the backbone of the wards I’ve lived in. They don’t necessarily fill all the leadership positions, but they’re “trained” to participate and serve more. Or, maybe I should say, they seem to think it’s normal to give more to the ward than they get. I’d venture that most people most of the time don’t go to church because they’re excited about doing it at that given moment — they do it because they feel it pays off over the long term, not the short term. I think you’re more likely to put up with short term boredom/frustration if you’ve been trained as a kid.
“Some have a knee jerk reaction to blame the Church, but it is really member’s own choice to attend or not attend. Either you value agency or you don’t.”
This comment was referring to people who comment on this blog, who tend to be negative about the Church in just about any situation.
Splitting wards was also done in the past and that also was painful.
I think home study seminary with monthly meetings at a stake level and weekly meetings during sunday school time would be better suited to a European situation where participation is limited in early morning seminary due to transport and studies, this would immediately lighten the burden on members and limit the elitism that now operates with early morning seminary which becomes a club with membership only for those priveleged to either have seminary in their own homes because they are the largest ward family or close enough to school. This creates a clique that excludes those who can’t participate, who then are left by the wayside for their testimony to die of neglect. The solution is inclusion of our youth.
handlewithcare, I do so agree with you on the seminary issue. I’ve seen far too many youth who can’t cope with daily early morning seminary be treated as second class or not part of the in group by those youth who can cope. The way a statistical correlation between early morning seminary and success in school and church for youth is then used to further drive an emphasis on pushing early morning seminary drives me wild, when it is the expectation that youth complete early morning seminary that looks from the outside to be doing much of the damage to those who leave.
Further to my first comment on membership mobility internationally. I can think of three couples we knew from over 20 years ago now in Britain, who are now in Utah, where one partner is employed by the church no less, either at BYU or more recently the Church History Dept. – our last Bishop was pretty much headhunted by the church on account of his experience working for the British Library, so I think the Elder Oaks statement really cannot be tenable.
I think there may be an unwitting and perhaps unrecognised division between the often university educated, often also younger, more mobile members who move with career progression, and the longer time more local members who have lived in a place for decades, and very often were the converts who formed the bedrock of the developing church in its early days in an area. It may well be a wider societal issue as well, as the group who stay in one place will likely feel a greater sense of community built up over many years than the more mobile group. It is often the younger married mobile group that are put in leadership positions however… So the issue may not wholly be Church HQ attitudes. Maybe there is a degree of consultation, but who are they consulting if so?
One thing these concerns has brought back to mind is the phrase “mission field,” used to refer to places where Latter-day Saints are an insignificant fraction of the population and seldom encounter one another except at church. You can find numerous blog conversations where someone used the phrase and then others took offense at the phrase and its sense that some stakes and wards are not fully developed nor as functional as most of the units in Utah.
Another thing these concerns have provided is an understanding for the future that whenever someone touts European transit as a model that the United States should look to, it needs to be understood that a large part of the model is to do without transportation options and confine oneself to walking, maybe biking, or stay home. (“Maybe biking” because my understanding is that some parts of Europe have wonderful bicycling options, but other parts only offer narrow roadways with high lethality for cyclists.)
A third thing that comes to mind is the irony that the three-hour block was designed with the mission field in mind, places where the latter-day saints are spread out and traveling to the ward meetinghouse takes some effort for nearly everyone, enough that eliminating repeated trips to church was more valuable than each Sunday meeting having its own character and giving them each elbow room and plenty of time between for people to not get tired of sitting at church for three hours straight. The change to the three-hour block was not done to benefit Utah saints.
John Mansfield – I recall that the 3 hour block was a solution for those of us who had to travel long distances to get to church (so we didn’t have to do it twice in one day both ways), but another thing to consider is SHORTENING THE THREE HOUR BLOCK. I feel like I only raise this suggestion about half a dozen times a year, but it should be quite obvious that 3 hours becomes 4-5 hours pretty quickly in some areas of the church if you have a long commute or adverse weather conditions. So, while this was a solution FOR the “mission field,” it still isn’t ideal for those living with it. This new European consolidation has some benefits, primarily to the church (rather than the members), but it also has the drawbacks listed.
As Henry Kissinger said, “Every solution is a ticket to a new problem.” It seems that most of our solutions are partial ones, though, designed to slightly modify a beloved model or program that works like clockwork in Utah, but doesn’t fit every geography or culture equally. I’m sure that Early Morning Seminary would be seen as a “mission field” solution, too, but it’s obvious that it’s a halfway solution that creates serious impacts to students and their families while still leaving Utah families in a position of relative ease (due to time release seminary).
Early morning seminary is a great program for many in the US plus some other parts of the world. In my youth plus adult years in areas that had early morning seminary I have seen it work well in suburban areas of large and smaller cities, plus smaller locales with a single ward. All of these areas had commonality with each other: 2-4 public high schools served all or most of the ward near the church building. Clustering of saints with youth in neighborhoods near the church when the distance to the next building was great. This usually meant that only 1 or 2 high schools had most of the members attending. I have not noticed a separation of the kids into in group/out group by seminary attendance, most of the non-attenders either lived far away and took home or weekend seminary or they dropped out after attending for a while due to lack of motivation or other family/personal issues. If the seminary attendance correlated to family wealth or future college plans, then there might be some more division of youth social groups.
I would look for more seminary on the Pathway model, with mostly on-line participation, to be implemented in areas with large travel barriers. Most places could have the stake sponsor an on-line class in order to get many students participating. Individual stakes could start this up already.
There is one correlation I have seen with those who graduate from early morning seminary. Pretty much all youth who have the academic ability to get into BYU have graduated from early morning seminary unless they lived far away from where it is taught. They do not all apply or get accepted, but high academic performance does correlate. For college bound, but not elite students, it is random if they graduate.
What an interesting examination of the church in Europe.
I certainly agree that church leaders should be willing to adapt their programs and plans to local conditions.
One example I have seen of this is a branch I visited in New Hampshire. Some of their members lived up near the Canadian border, an hour and a half away. These members were expected to show up at church only on Fast Sundays. It sounds like a great compromise when your first priority is cutting travel time. It may not be so great, however, if you’re 15 and you just want to hang out with the other teenagers at church.
As for creating multi-generational loyalties to the church, this is nothing more than the age-old task of transmitting religious values to the next generation. Mormons aren’t the only people engaged in this task. And yes, we do know how to do it. Author Vern Bengston published his 35-year multigenerational study in his book, Families and Faith: How Religion is Passed Down Across Generations.
Among his findings:
— He defines “high” transmission of religious faith — children staying within the family faith — somewhere in the 60% range. That seems a little low to me. Mormons generally exceed that rate
— Marrying within the faith, attending religious services, praying and reading religious texts at home are standard tools in all faiths.
— Parental modeling of religious practice is important but . . .
— not nearly as important as warm, close parent-child relationships
— non-religious parents transmit their values pretty much the same way.
To say “First of all, I’m second generation, so clearly not good enough by this measure–I’m not the “source of spiritual strength and continuity,” so I must be, by default, a drain on it (?)” sounds a little whiny. Building multigenerational Mormons is a goal, a process. Of course you’re valuable. There are no third generations without second generations. At best, the whole idea is to equip the rising generation with the tools for a good life.
It does look like the church made a choice between strengthening their base and increasing converts. Like many of you, I hope they listen to the locals better.
So more on the seminary issue, my kids did/do online seminary. But I have to be a strong-willed parent for that to happen, because the pressure to have everyone do early morning rather than online isn’t going away, and in fact last year there was yet again a big push to have all those beginning seminary to go the early morning route. It seems if you want your kids to do it online you really have to be prepared to make a nuisance of yourself and assemble all your arguments in advance, because CES are still very loath to trust families to make sensible decisions for themselves. You have to be prepared to say if they can’t do it online then they won’t do it, and have them believe you.
One family in our ward did pull their kids out of early morning seminary, and did home study with them at home themselves when it was clear early morning seminary was making at least one of their kids ill and they couldn’t get admitted to the online class. CES initially refused to allow them to graduate that year (the final year for the older kid), and only back-tracked when it became clear that such an attitude resulted in the younger child refusing to enroll the following year because what was the point. The younger child was then permitted to join the online class, and credit for both children was retroactively sorted out. This meant the older child was finally awarded his graduation certificate after he returned from his mission just last year. The way CES sometimes comport themselves is outrageous.
The way it is organised in my ward currently the early morning class meet with the online students midweek before the youth activity for the weekly contact lesson (so that’s a plus for the early morning students – one early morning they don’t have because it’s evening instead), which helps keep all the youth part of a single group, and avoid early morning cliques. It seems to work well so far as I can tell.
el oso, so far as I can tell of course you will see a correlation. It stands to reason that a student who cannot cope with early morning seminary and school will drop seminary first. And I can say from my own experience that the year I had to take early morning (my final year) rather than do home study my school grades suffered. Yet CES try to persuade our children that it is BECAUSE they are doing early morning seminary they are getting good grades at school – the kids who dropped out didn’t find that to be true… Further I have one sibling who did seminary, was student president in the final year failed to get the grades needed for university, whilst another sibling didn’t do seminary and got into one of the top universities here…
Rant over…
(Parenthetically, I had to love E Bednar’s “training graphic.” Is that like “training wheels”? As a professional corporate trainer in a past life, I’d have been embarrassed to put anything so patently obvious in an actual graphic. Maybe for brand-new converts? In Mutual? Really, people get married and have babies, like in a cycle?)
All of this makes me wonder where we’ll be in places like my home, in, say, 20 years. I was thinking about this because my daughter is at EFY this week. The Church rents out a Lutheran college campus in southern Minnesota for one of the Midwestern regional sessions. It’s the only one within a reasonable distance (an hour or two) of the Twin Cities; Nauvoo is six hours from us and Independence is 8. Last night my wife and I were speculating that they may have to find a way to offer additional sessions to meet demand in the future – and then I found myself wondering if they will, after all. 8 or 9 years ago when my oldest kids were going, they made a point of telling us to register early and there was always a waiting list. If there was that kind of pressure these last couple of years, I didn’t notice it. I don’t know what the actual numbers are, but I suspect we’re having a falling off in youth interest in these things. That bodes an inevitable contraction, at some point, in our area – or at least a move to smaller wards and ward structures.
The culture war on youth seems to be taking its toll. And I do mean the “LDS culture’s” war on youth.
A couple of other thoughts, like I’m not already thinking enough:
Kevin Barney says; Correlation seemed like a necessary, inspired idea at the time, as a way to manage growth and streamline operations. But now the chickens are coming home to roost. All the local autonomy and decision making has been squeezed out of the hinterlands, and centralized planning from SL is simply not up to the task anymore.
Substitute “Moscow” for “SL” and you have a pretty good capsule description of the collapse of the Soviet economy and society. Let us take warning.
Seminary is as much a game of roulette as leadership, and is often influenced by it in a variety of ways. Our early-morning seminary combines two wards and is currently divided; half meets in the church and half at the home of a member at the eastern end of our ward. This would be fine, except that the division reinforces the cliques that divide our youth, between the two high schools (intra-district rivals) and more importantly, between the economically less-advantaged families who get their kids to the church, and whose kids go to the more diverse, less affluent school (many of whom are from the less affluent ward), and the children of the more affluent families in my ward, whose kids go to seminary in their own home or a few blocks away, and who attend the cake-eating, lily-white high school. It was done so that they could “get to school on time,” which is total nonsense since they have a half-hour or more to make the 15-minute drive to their school; students at that school survived seminary for many a year with nary a tardy before someone came up with this numb-witted plan. It was a terrible decision to allow it, and it’s a terrible decision to continue it, and every time I hear someone lament about cliques among the youth I want to scream.
In addition, the seminary teacher at the church has a great deal of difficulty handling thoughtful (and sometimes challenging in all senses) questions by students who use the Net, have gay friends, are aware of the real world, and don’t buy Primary answers anymore. One of those kids is my youngest daughter, who will be home-seminaried by me next year (Heaven help us both) to keep her out of the clutches of a woman who has no business being in a classroom with teenagers.
But, our stake president – a good man – is also the grandson of the first stake president of the Twin Cities area, his counselors are wealthy businessmen, the High Council is weighted toward the affluent end of the stake, and while I don’t believe this is intentional, it’s baked into the leadership gene pool here.
“Yet CES try to persuade our children that it is BECAUSE they are doing early morning seminary they are getting good grades at school – the kids who dropped out didn’t find that to be true”
Wasn’t true in our ward–or in our family. My youngest failed to graduate from seminary because he refused to do the make-up work for tardiness. Mind you, he was picking up other kids and driving them to seminary. He also graduated 2nd in his high school class and recently graduated from one of the top public universities in 3 1/2 years. (My older children graduated from early morning seminary in a different state where tardiness was not tracked). I myself was denied a seminary graduation certificate, having attended release time seminary in UT, because I was scheduled to work when the seminary graduation program took place. My mother tried to get it for me and was denied.
Too often authoritarians and authoritarian followers in our church culture are applying a cookie cutter approach and discarding some awesome people because they don’t fit the mold.
The fact is, early morning seminary does disadvantage some. There ought to be more flexibility.
I liked this from the Times and Seasons post cited above on the European closures:
I am reminded that Joseph Smith once asked the body of the Saints in conference to reject Sidney Rigdon as 1st Counselor in the First Presidency, and when he was sustained over Joseph’s objection, Rigdon retained his position. According to a contemporary account in the (original) Times and Seasons, Joseph “expressed entire willingness to have [him] retain his station.” A far cry from the “my way or highway” method that seems to have become our norm.
Hawkgrrrrl, if the problem is that lengthy travel adds a couple hours to any church meeting, then fewer meetings would be a better way of dealing with that than shorter meetings, perhaps attending one or two Sundays a month. I wouldn’t mind driving an hour or two to church each way, but if I had a three hour drive each way, I might stay home every other week.
It is funny how the mindset about long drives varies. In Nevada and other western states, including 400 miles of driving in your plans for weekend fun is a normal, frequent thing. In other places, doing something like that surprises the neighbors.
Kevin, there were dissenting voices to Harold B. Lee’s effort to extend Correlation far beyond its original vision (coordinating curriculum). David O. McKay, in the context of what Lee was promoting, made the offhand comment, “We can’t run the Church like a business.” Well, he was sure wrong, because we that’s exactly what we’ve done. And it has caused all the problems McKay worried about.
John Mansfield: “In Nevada and other western states, including 400 miles of driving in your plans for weekend fun is a normal, frequent thing.” Well, I live in AZ, and that doesn’t sound like casual fun to me. Do we have to do it to get anywhere? Sure. But that’s the difference: there aren’t towns of note between here and there.
Even so, the issues in Europe are very different from these regional US issues. We all drive. Most of them don’t. These changes go against local culture. It would be better (possibly) to have much smaller branches rather than consolidating like this. Or perhaps they could do smaller local branches 3 weeks a month but do a larger one once a month. The point is, without local input or local understanding, solutions aren’t going to have buy in or make good sense to locals, and that means the church declines in these areas.
JM: “In Nevada and other western states, including 400 miles of driving in your plans for weekend fun is a normal, frequent thing.”
With fuel prices like these I think that’d be a lot less likely: http://www.theaa.com/driving-advice/driving-costs/fuel-prices – the p is pence not pound, so yes that is £1.16 per litre, so about £4.40 ($5.60) per US gallon.
I loved science classes in Jr high and I also read every book on religion in the house. I was surprised and disappointed when I took my first seminary class in the 9th grade in the heart of Utah. It was nothing more than the same fluff we get in Sunday school. I was mighty arrogant then but I honestly don’t think the seminary teacher had anything to teach me at all. I took all 4 years of seminary during the 7th hour slot and also took athletics during the same 7th hour slot. I slipped out of seminary and went to track or basketball practice almost every day and got 100% on the easy tests.
In college at a state school in Utah, I knew if I wanted to take a serious class on a religious topic, to find a LDS professor in any related department except seminary, Classes on literature , history, philosophy, etc and go in after class and ask questions. I signed up for 4-5 institute classes every quarter and dropped them if nothing ever happened on the dating front. I generally finished one class and graduated with a rather ridiculous GPA that included maybe 75% F grades and the rest A grades. I dated one girl once I met in an institute class in four years.
I don’t understand home school seminary or on line seminary. It is entirely a socialization process. It is not educational. Be part of the Mormon tribe. They have little to nothing to actually teach you. I suppose it could function as a dating service and probably does for some, but that was not my experience.
Hedgehog,
For most high schoolers, early morning seminary is not an undue burden around here. It requires waking up an hour earlier than normal, plus some extra driving by parents. I am sure that some of the drop-outs are when kids are working late at night, but others are disinterest. There are others who miss some time due to morning extra-curricular activities during part of the school year, but they usually can do reasonable make-up work. Teachers go out of their way to accommodate the extra-curricular students. The best teachers around here seem to be those that take the kids as they are. If the kids are late and miss half the class, the teacher’s outlook is that at least they attended for half the class.
New Iconoclast,
On ward demographics, you make a good point. I have uniformly seen the opposite in my experience. Yes, I have seen wards divided along high school boundaries, but this was always in areas where there were not large economic differences between the schools. I have on multiple occasions seen ward boundaries change when some families in one ward feel excluded or on the outside looking in. Multiple stakes have redone boundaries to chop up the premier high school into several wards with lower middle class or even ghetto areas part of “rich” wards. A clique in seminary among the youth got another boundary change through with the family of the Stake President moving away from close friends into another ward.
el oso, to be clear I don’t have a problem with the seminary teachers in the ward or indeed the stake for the online class. They are doing it as a calling and really care about the youth. My beef is with the CES coordinators who are employees, who dictate to the wards and stakes how things are to be done and what will or won’t be allowed.
Oso, The best teachers around here seem to be those that take the kids as they are. If the kids are late and miss half the class, the teacher’s outlook is that at least they attended for half the class.
I love seminary teachers like this, but under the new system of a couple of years ago, they are expressly in violation of the “rules,” and when one of Hedge’s Section 121 CES dictators comes along, they’ll be replaced with someone more, um, compliant.
I would love to see boundaries rearranged to force the oblivious affluent to deal with the rest of the Church. I am so happy to hear that it sometimes works that way, and in fact, in parts of the Twin Cities, things like that have happened. We just have a bit of an issue in our stake, with the cake-eaters.
“I would love to see boundaries rearranged to force the oblivious affluent to deal with the rest of the Church.”
When the affluent have to deal with the rest of the church, the rest of the church also has to deal with the affluent. I live in a stake that includes a lot of wealth, a couple billionaires and dozens at the Mitt Romney level of wealth. Those I’ve known are mostly fine people who serve diligently in callings and show up on Saturdays to clean the church, but there is sometimes a sense that they don’t need the church for anything other than strictly religious purposes, as they can fill all their other needs better elsewhere. There is a lot to be said for clustering them together so the rest of the stake can carry on in a normal fashion meeting the desires and needs of people of average and modest means.
Seems odd that a post about European church strength morphs into a bitch about seminary. But, then again, that’s the way things go around here.
Jeff that would be because it is a poor fit, imposed from the outside and local leaders get very little say. It represents the problems described in the OP pretty well.
@John Mansfield-I’ve thought a lot about that subject, Church and sources of validation. I think wealthy people and certaintly others maybe don’t get all that fulfilled at Church, or seek to, and they get validated elsewhere. At work they are the big thing but at Church they are brother or sister so and so and no one is getting paid to listen to them. They get validation elsewhere. Some I think are fine with it and some maybe not. I also think some people don’t get validated at work or at home so they throw themselves heavy into church and want recognition. I had a Bishop like that. His wife was nagging him constantly and to get away from her he threw himself into the work that him and the YSA became so unbalanced and he needed to be rewarded for all the time he spent in his calling, some kind of a payoff, he wasn’t getting it at home. I had a Stake President that used to be the CEO of a national company and then he got fired, now he works in management and isn’t the stake president or CEO anymore.His talks in stake conf. were all about him and what GAs he’s met or books he was reading, it was crazy honestly. He is serving now in the mission presidency and he is front and center in all the missionary zone conf. pictures, he seems to want to be recognized. I think he wanted to be a GA but that didn’t work out so he’ll take the next best thing. With a new Temple coming here in Canada, if he isn’t called into the Presidency, he’ll move elsewhere I suspect. Ego is a crazy thing to deal with.
“The way things go around here” = people reading the post and making salient comments using relevant examples? I don’t think I can agree with you there, Jeff.
I have seen firsthand the cost of a lot of the reasons being given for consolidation in Europe, and I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad idea in theory to try this as a way to shore up the activity among active members (the devil, as several people have pointed out, is in the details of the application of the policy, which appears to be creating all sorts of unnecessary headache.) But I can’t help but agree with a lot of the other commenters here that it’s missing the core problem, which is that Mormonism doesn’t know how to speak to Europeans in a way that will assist us to create growing congregations. [2]
Some of these consolidation choices, as well hard-line policies on a variety of other issues that might seem to beg for flexibility, begin to make sense if Mormonism is a civilizational religion, like Catholicism. I just got back from a vacation in Rome, and spending all that time looking at Catholic churches and considering Catholic history, it occurred to me that Catholicism isn’t just a church, it’s not just a state [1], it’s a civilization. I don’t think I ever realized the degree to which that was true until I was in Rome and tried to understand, for example, why the Catholic church resisted so vehemently all the changes to the European order from about the French Revolution on. It took until Vatican II (almost 200 years!) for Catholicism to begin to adjust to its new role as a religion instead of the basis of civilization in Europe.
Similarly, I think Mormonism is conceived of by a lot of Utah-centric folks as a civilization religion, which brings the attendant issues that Catholicism endured . Like Vatican II, we might have to reconceive what Mormonism is for in order to properly deal with European (and North American!) decline. What is the Church for: building Mormon culture (civilizational model), nourishing individual spiritual growth (individualist religion), or preaching a specific set of theological tenets (ideological proponent)? I don’t really know, but what we choose will make a difference.
Christian history is interesting on this point, and although perhaps the situations are too different to draw direct comparisons, I will anyway. Looking at Christianity’s willingness to adopt Roman and Hellenic culture into its liturgy, theology, and structure made the religion very flexible in the fourth and fifth centuries, and allowed it to largely take over Mediterranean civilization. Catholicism’s unwillingness to adapt to East Asian culture during the age of European colonization, for example, made growth there much more difficult. (East Asian attempts at spreading Catholicism didn’t adapt Confucian or Buddhist traditions into their local liturgy the way early Christianity was very happy to adapt iconography, Platonic philosophy, and the trappings of Roman Imperial power.) Catholicism’s inability to adapt to changing civilizational conditions in Europe probably contributed to its loss of authority both through the Reformation and subsequent modernization.
I’m sure smarter people than I have thought about religions as civilization, but I kind of came to it on my own so I’m floundering about. Any pointers about who’s written on that line of thought would be appreciated.
[1] You can quibble with me on the quasi-state-status of the Catholic Church, but roll with me on this one for now.
[2] There’s an assumption here that growing congregations are what we want, which I don’t think should be taken for granted. Actually, maybe the period of Mormon growth is over and now it’s time for the Church to accept a new paradigm more like Judaism of defenders of the covenant and move away from proselytizing — a stance which makes “multi-generational Mormonism” make more sense. I really, really don’t think that paradigm given Mormonism’s particular theology and mission, but it’s worth discussing.
Shoring up activity isn’t a bad idea, no. Doing it in such a way (one that reflects a walk-to-the chapel majority Wasatch Front culture, or at least an automobile-based US/Canada culture) that actually reduces the incentive for activity isn’t such a great idea.
When the Church first started building chapels in Minnesota, the plans came from Utah and were therefore Delivered From On High. They also failed to provide adequate insulation for water pipes, in light of a climate with real winters. Despite ample warning by local members that disaster would ensue, the Church built the Utah plan.
Disaster, to no Minnesotan’s great surprise, ensued.
After repairing substantial water damage to a few early chapels, something was learned about Minnesota winter – in 1960 – that my ancestors could have told you prior to 1860. It’s not that the institutional Church can’t learn. It’s just that they have to be hit over the head pretty hard with it sometimes.
I think Jeff S might still be smarting a little after we got spanked for hijacking the “women’s roles” post into a discussion of priesthood rankings. We deserved that spanking richly, and I apologize for my part in that hijacking. I do think, however, that seminary (like chapel design, and a few other examples), as Hedge points out, can be good examples of ways in which the specific needs of local areas and local members are insufficiently considered when decisions are made. I think of it as the “God’s Toothpaste” problem; you have a church led by prophets and it’s too easy to make the mistake of thinking that everything the church does has been revealed by God in the Celestial Room of the SLC Temple.
I tend to agree with jstricklan, in part – I don’t know about “hunkering down and defending the covenant,” but I think we might have to re-think our assumptions about growth. President Hinckley tried to prepare us for this.
Angela C.
My family and I live in Lviv, Ukraine, and our church block got shortened to two hours recently (in the last six months or so). It’s been great. We’re still adjusting, it’s hard to remember that we don’t have much time between for socializing, but we have added an optional 20 minute block after second hour for choir practice, and an optional 20 minute block after that for self-reliance classes or other classes that sometimes occur in place of Sunday School. As someone who serves in multiple callings, this has been a great blessing to us here, and really, with other meetings, we still end up being at the church for 3-4 hours every Sunday.