If you click on the picture, that’s my profile.
Well, it’s got some formatting issues, but I just cut and pasted some posts from the blog, and while it took a few weeks for it to get approved, no one asked for edits.
If it disappears, it is because I am trying to fix the formatting issues.
Ever since Utah announced it was leaving the Mountain West Conference to join the Pac10 there have been rumors swirling about what BYU would do. The three main options were to sit tight in the MWC, hope for an invite to the Big12, or go independent. Well the Big12 invite has not arrived so it appears BYU has taken its fate into its own hand and decided to go independent. Here are some links:
SLTrib saying it is a done deal
Deseret News calling it a done deal too
ESPN predicting it last night
CBS Sports
It does indeed look like a done deal. BYU football will reportedly go independent and all other BYU sports joining the WAC starting in the Fall of 2011. This is very similar the the arrangement Notre Dame has with the Big East.
Should be an interesting week for BYU sports fans. Stay tuned.
In the spirit of the 13th Article of Faith, I would like to spend some time looking at retention strategies in the Evangelical church, and especially those of Nelson Searcy as outlined in “Fusion: Turning First-Time Gests into Fully-Engaged Members of Your Church”
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Two years ago, we were told our ward was the top baptizing ward in the top baptizing stake in Texas. “Good Job!” we were told. “It’s because you are such a loving and welcoming ward.” We were told. We had 20+ baptisms. We retained 1 person.
As a very dedicated convert to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, one of my main concerns is seeing those who come into the church, like I did, not make it. We have lived in the ward we are in currently for 6 years, and have seen 60+ baptisms in that time, but only 4 (1 family, 1 lone man) that I know of are still regularly active. My wife and I sometimes refer to this situation as the “catch and release” program of the church.
Now there are, upon reflection, many different reasons for this abysmal statistic, but none of this is because of baseball baptisms or faking records. In other words, missionaries are not breaking the rules.
In order to capture some of the issues I’ve seen, I’m going to break our wards missionary work out into the 4 typical areas of missionary work. All these issues are anecdotal, but that is all that’s available to me at the time.
1. Finding- A lot of the people who are found by the missionaries in our area are either transient people or disabled. A large percent of them don’t have cars. These people are typically not member referrals.
2. Teaching- Many people who are taught do not completely understand the expectations the church has for its members (callings, service, visiting other members, etc.) Few members are available to take time off to meet investigators.
3. Baptizing- In conjunction with #2, Many people who are baptized, have had trouble fulfilling their commitments prior to baptism, especially the commitment to attend church regularly.
4. Retaining- People have complained about not feeling welcome at our church. Converts typically do not last long enough that being endowed ever becomes a concern. Most new members are brought in solely on the missionaries’ efforts, not through member referral. Home Teaching is poor.
Above, I have tried to assemble a quick sketch of the symptoms of the problem we are having.
And so I ask you, are you having the same problems in your area? And if so, what do you think is the root cause? Ie- What are we doing wrong and how do we repent of it?
In part two, I will talk about ways I think missionary/retention efforts are being done in other churches, and ask if we should borrow any of their ideas. First I just wanted to see how typical my anecdotal concerns are.
As far as I can tell our scriptures don’t say anything specifically relating to world population. But don’t worry because wikipedia does. Here are a couple of interesting graphs from the world population wiki:
My 40th birthday is coming up this Tuesday. These birthdays that end with a zero are landmarks so I figured I should post something. (Plus I realized I haven’t written very many posts here this year.)
I was 34 when I started this blog. That doesn’t seem all that long ago but in some important ways I am a different person now than I was then. That is the beauty and danger of digging into metaphysics and philosophy I think; when you tinker with the very core of your beliefs you are adjusting the lens through which you see the universe. Making changes to the lens through which you see the universe (sometimes called shifting paradigms) is interesting in that it may not have immediate and obvious consequences but it will inevitably have massive long term implications.
I’m reminded of this famous quote attributed to Henry David Thoreau:
For every thousand hacking at the leaves of evil, there is one striking at the root.
Currently our survey has 802 responses, but has only picked up about 10 a day for the past week or so. So this is my last pitch. Next week we will take the survey down and start analyzing the results, so if you have anyone you think might be interested in taking the survey, pitch it to them. We really would love to get more participation. Currently our confidence interval is something like +/- 4.5, and it would be great to tighten that up a bit. I guess this is my “Now go and get [others] to partake.” post…
Anyway, thanks to everyone who has taken the survey and to those who have invited friends to participate. It’s been a pretty awesome turn out up to this point, and the results we’ve gathered so far are really interesting. I’m really looking forward to sharing it with you.
To invite friends to take the survey, just pass them this link via whichever method you prefer:
Ok, so here is our new survey, which focuses on Mormon culture and beliefs. The triple focus of this survey is to measure faith commitment, church engagement, as well as cultural belief on a variety of topics. The survey is 60 questions in length, and so may take as long as 6 minutes to complete. Some of the questions, due to their connection with obscure doctrine, may seem offensive to you. If this is the case, we apologize in advance.
Our goal is to get 5000 responses to this survey, and we will attempt to share this survey via Facebook, this blog, and email invitations. As soon as we feel the responses are no longer coming in, we will prepare our findings and publish them.
To invite friends to take the survey, just pass them this link via whichever method you prefer:
http://www.surveygizmo.com/s/271583/lds-survey
Thanks for your participation and support.
I did it. I finally pulled the trigger. I have enrolled in a class at Mesa Community College. It is TEC 111, or “Clothing Construction”. I’ve been thinking about enrolling in a college class for quite a few years now, and I have actually enrolled several times both at ASU and MCC. Each time I chickened out, or decided that my schedule is too busy, or it’s too expensive, or it’s not really a class I want to waste my time on. This year things changed however, when the Feenster, the baby of our family, headed off to all day kindergarten, taking most of my excuses with her.
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Leader: Sin and Death separate us from God.
YM1: Even God sins, just look at the flood.
Leader: God doesn’t really sin, we’ll talk about it in a minute.
YM2: I thought was like the God before our God who did all that stuff.
Leader: There was no God before our God.
YM1: Yes there was, there were Gods the made him God.
Leader: Well it is possible there is an infinite regress of Gods, but…
YM1: Yeah, and Zeus was the First God.
Leader: [exasperated sigh]
Nelson Searcy’s new book for Evangelical churches on achieving rapid growth should be of interest to any Latter-day Saint. One of the stated purposes of our church has always been to “Proclaim the Gospel”. In order to effectively do this, one basic necessity is getting people to come to church. And that is what Searcy’s book is all about. In a very simple and deliberate fashion, Searcy reviews some of the things that have worked for his 8 year-old 1,200 member congregation in Manhattan, as well as in other “mega” churches like Mark Warren’s Saddleback Church. I found his suggestions simple and obvious, as in “that obviously would be good to do”.
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