I have heard enough to know that the Church is very careful with its funds, and continues to seek to find ways to save here and there. Count this as only hearsay, but I once complained about the fact that the new buildings often only have one bathroom (I am not a fan of circling the square buildings to find the one!), and it was pointed out to me how much bathrooms cost.

So perhaps, we all end up sacrificing here and there, perhaps without realizing it, for a bigger picture. Maybe our buildings aren’t as lovely as we would want, or don’t have all the facilities we want. Maybe not having individualized organizations meant we lost something along the way. But what have we gained? How many temples have we built with money that might have been spent elsewhere, for example? How many buildings are in remote places because we don’t have multiple song books strewn across organizations (to use an example given above)?

Call me a Pollyanna, but seeing correlation in this light suddenly makes it not something that took away autonomy, but brought a measure of unity — all organizations working together, trying not to duplicate efforts, etc, and that unity is exciting to me to think about. (Makes me think to Pres. Eyring’s most recent talk, too.) Sure, a correlated organization can have its frustrations, and sometimes it increases some time and effort in ways that weren’t there before, but this discussion has helped me look at it in a different way.

I imagine there will be other procedural changes in the future as well, some that may at first hurt or frustrate a bit, or may not make sense, or may disrupt our comfort zones or even beloved, what to us is traditional, ways of doing things. This discussion has increased my desire to go with the flow, and trust that there are often things I don’t see or understand, even in the seemingly business-only decisions. I’m not so naive that I don’t realize that mistakes are surely made along the way — we are all human, right? But…maybe there’s more inspiration in the procedural process than sometimes we might think.

Just maybe.

I grew up on the fringes of the Church in the Midwest, where all of my relatives still lived in Utah. My relatives had more “culture”, but we lacked nothing of substantive value. My wife grew up on SLC’s East Bench (ironically enough, after having moved there from the Midwest).

What did my relatives and my wife have growing up that I didn’t? Primarily, the social aspects of Church membership, a Church on every corner, general familiarity with their beliefs in their social circles. But it wasn’t like we lacked for anything “important” in Ohio.

Church organization as it was 30 or 40 years ago (or even 15-20) doesn’t scale well. I was a missionary branch president when the US had a standardized budgetary process — and the rest of the world didn’t. It was terrible trying to get people barely able to find food for their families to have to donate money for gas and light for the chapel. Those branches would never have “benefitted” from the riches that the RS in the 1960s would have amassed. The organization of the Church today scales just fine.

It’s not hard to retain youth from a strictly statistical standpoint when there are no other options except open rebellion. I was raised in a small, rural Utah town – and church activity was pretty much the only activity choice for those who weren’t out to thumb their noses at everyone else. Now that the membership is spread out across the world, and a higher and higher percent of the kids have plenty of competing options, it’s no wonder the activity rate among them has dropped a bit. We still do better overall, however, than many (if not most) other denominations.

The young adult activity rate, otoh, was just as low back then as it is now – when the youth leave home and are on their own, subject to all the pressures of independent life “in the world” without mommy and daddy and with LOTS of other options. The interesting thing to me is that the activity rate rises significantly after age 30 – I believe when the newness of non-church life wears off and full adult responsibilities start to weigh on many of those who had been inactive. Generally speaking, it is true that “when (the formerly active youth) are old they do not depart from it” – even if they do depart for a while during their early adulthood.

Summary:

We all long for “the good old days” – and we all tend to exaggerate just how good they were in comparison to our current, “new” days.

If you are interested in a direct comparison to the Southern Baptist Convention (and a fascinating look at how some in that group are trying to address skewed reporting of “activity rates”), check out the following – and make sure to read the articles linked in it:

Something the Southern Baptist Convention Can Learn From the Mormons

Now that I’m an adult, and now that I’ve lived in places where the Church is smaller and more scattered, and especially since I’ve come to know members from all over the world, I can’t imagine what a nightmare it would be to try to duplicate my childhood church on a world scale. The expense to members, in time as well as money, the logistical problem of translating all those materials and shipping them around the world, and adapting them to cultures where, say, colors meant something different symbolically, or where the German-style beehives of Utah made no sense culturally — all that gives me the heebie jeebies.

Those of us who grew up in the church in those days *have* lost something, in an ethnic or cultural sense, and I’m nostalgic about the old days. But we haven’t lost anything that truly matters as far as the gospel goes. Take the individuality of chapel architecture as a single example — yes, we’ve lost architectural beauty and individuality, but as far as the gospel goes, does it really matter how the bricks are piled up around us? If the Saints in Utah and Idaho sacrificed something in that regard, it was so that the Saints in Rumania and Argentina and Mongolia could have any buildings at all. I feel the same way about the rest of the cultural baggage that we streamlined. It was nice, it was familiar, it was nurturing, it served a purpose, but it wasn’t an absolutely essential purpose.

Maybe as we get more used to the international nature of the church, we will gradually develop a new Mormon culture that restores some of what we left behind, but in a new way, a way that serves international conditions. It took a couple of generations for the old Mormon culture to develop; I’m not surprised that it’s taking a few generations for a new culture to emerge.

My 2 cents. I don’t have any knowledge of how youth retention rates now and then compare, nor any opinion on whether a correlated church culture has any effect on that retention.

Something else I want to ask people, those who have been kind enough to answer me: I read people like Claudia Bushman saying the church lost something between their childhood and now, that they loved growing up in the church, and their children and grandchildren don’t. Is that your experience as well? Is it true that we’re not retaining youth as well as we once did? Is the main difference correlation and streamlining, or is that an unrelated phenomenon?

Is a messy, competitive system really bad? Is a centrally planned one really more efficient? I’m thinking of communism vs. capitalism. Is that a fruitful analogy to make, or is there no valid comparison?

I can definitely see where the messy way was more difficult to control. Is control the most important feature we gained?

I may sound as though I know the answers, but I don’t. I’m trying to decide what I think about this.

Women in this Church must not forget that they have rights which men do not possess. They have their own field, their own duties, their own privileges.

Was there more on what these are? Just curious.