DiscussMormonism.com

Visiting friends in the Dakotas we heard of their branch woes. Seems their water and sewer can freeze up in the winter and all who attend have to drive to a gas station a mile or so away to use the bathroom facilities. lds-inc won't pay to have the water & sewer lines dug deeper. Apparently some of the members are not too happy with the situation, knowing it will probably repeat itself in coming winters.

Then when conference and meetings are broadcast they don't get it at their building and have to drive 90-120 miles away to a larger town to watch it in a ward building.

They have Stake speakers who don't show up - and at times don't even call to let someone know they will not be there.

The lds-inc folk rented a section of an old building and spent over $40,000 fixing up the few rooms on a leased building when they could have purchased the whole thing for $11,000. Who in lds-inc makes stupid decisions like that?

They said some of the other small branches are in similar situations but without the frozen pipe problems.
It appears the leadership just doesn't care about the few, just the ninety and nine.

Joseph wrote:It appears the leadership just doesn't care about the few, just the ninety and nine.

How much tithing do they pay?

Hey, if they have the LDS Church mostly out of their business, then in some ways they are downright lucky. They could always do their business in 5 gallon buckets and deliver them to the stake center periodically.

The friend lives in North Dakota and spring there is going along pretty nice. Really green and the farmers are just getting into the fields. It is very rural with big family farms. Not much in corporate farming where he lives. Maybe one reason they don't get much support is because they are on the edge of an Indian Reservation?

A nice visit with him and some relatives in the area. Lots of Lutherans and Catholics there. Their branch has not even had missionaries for about 15 years so it looks like they are pretty much forgotten. Maybe it is a good thing so they don't bother their neighbors with missionary stuff?

In my experience, these things can get fixed with an activist stake president. There are clearly anomalies in the system. In one town in France where I served, the church was paying to rent a nice house for all of 0-10 members on a Sunday.