To be fair Rotherham has a very high Muslim populace. What ward do you consider neighboring cityworker? Sheffield 1? I'm intrigued, are there any signs of defection from your family?
Hamster on a Wheel Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Wowsers, imported leadership in England?! Ouch > that's gotta sting.
Yep, happens quite a lot I understand, they're just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic......
The thing that gets me though is that members have to attend their own geographically assigned wards even where it causes them great inconvenience and a different one would be more convenient, but tscc can assign members to attend a different ward when it suits them to do so.
My experience of 2 wards at opposite ends of the UK are that they are haemorrhaging members under 40. The ones that are still active aren't willing to give up their lives for the Church and would be considered social members, or they have doubts. I've seen attendance drop from 120 to less than 60 before I left, this was a newly built ward as well. They've already adjusted the boundary with the neighbouring ward to booster the numbers, they wouldn't have had any priesthood leadership otherwise. As usual new bishop called is a tyrant. One of his first moves was to make the closed ward Facebook group such that all posts had to be approved by admin. Him in other words. No surprise its going down the saw by really.
I wonder where they will send the Rotherham members as it's quite a journey to near by ones! When I was on my mission Hyde ward was a booming ward held up as an example to all! How times change!
These tipping points are an interesting experiment. Once a ward is dissolved, I'm assuming that the remaining members won't want to travel but so far for church. Will they remain home? Will that hasten the decline? I would think so.
When they pulled missionary support from a Northern European mission, loads of branches died on the vine and lots of members left the rolls because it was too far to drive to the nearest operating branch or ward.
Jehovah's Witnesses have five congregations, churches, in Rotherham ! And seventeen churches in Sheffield including a mandarin speaking one, a Persian speaking one , a Slovak and French one too! If they can maintain five units in Rotherham but the Mormon church has none things are really in the toilet!
From what I am given to understand from a JW friend, JW units are generally much smaller than lds though, at least in the UK. An average role call reveals between 80 and 120 on the books for a particular Kingdom Hall. And like LdS that doesn't mean all attend.
From the 2017 Jehovah's witnesses yearbook there are 138,000 active Jehovah's witnesses in Britain! They only count those actively going door to door! That works out on average 80 ACTIVE MEMBERS PER CONGREGATION! So Rotherham would have at least 400 active Witnesses with more attending , children etc and Sheffield would have 1,360 active Witnesses! From my experience of the Mormon church in Sheffield about a 1,000 more active Witnesses than Mormons!
JWs shut down to all information from external sources. Ask them about the Mormon couplet of in the world but not of the world and they'll get almost apoplectic with rage that "true believers" have no place to be in the world, that's not what Jesus taught etc etc.
If the LDS church suddenly tried to enforce such a drastic change I'm sure it would create more leavers than ever before. Take my mother in law (please someone?!) She is too busy to study anything more than what she has too. She's 20 years in in a high paying (6 figure salary in UK) role, she's not incapaincapable of research. I'm imagi when she retires if she doesn't get swamped with callings she will leave too.
Perhaps another reason the JWs are more successful (relatively speaking) is that they are selling the bible (even if they have an idiosyncratic view of it ;-).
The PR for the bible has been going on for millennia. Also it is (to a large extent) what it purports to be: a collection of myths legends and oral traditions from Iron Age Judea plus a mix of first-century myths, legends and, possibly, oral traditions written down decades after the claimed events. Selling the BOM is much more difficult because it's a fake - and a pretty poor one, at that. Even harder in Europe, where the American setting must be a hindrance in many cases.
But even the JWs aren't doing very well considering that overall UK population is about 63 million...
Tom in Paris
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 01/18/2017 01:24PM by Soft Machine.