DrW wrote:Well, there you have it folks. Latest report from our correspondent on the scene in (Eastern) Europe.
Western Europe not far behind - if at all. In Ireland LDS make up about 0.1% of the population and estimates are that only about 20% of them are active.
What is there left to say?
I do like the stinketh part - appropriate Biblical touch (John 11:39).
For some reason, I'm reminded of my time in Bolivia, where the activity rate was somewhere between 10 and 20 percent. My wife and I served in Tarija, then a town of about 50,000 people, which had 4 branches. There was a relatively new chapel that houses 2 of the branches, but they had only built half of it, with the expectation the other half would be built as the membership required. The other 2 met in rented houses. Even then, on Sundays the buildings were virtually empty, with attendance at most around 25 to 30 people. Our branch had 250 members on the records, but when we went to church the first Sunday, we sat on the curb outside the church for almost an hour until an old woman and a teenage boy showed up. A half-hour later the branch president showed up and unlocked the gate. That was it in the branch: 3 active members out of 250, and the branch president didn't even live within the branch boundaries but had been pressed into service from another branch.
That was how it was all over Bolivia. Even in the large cities you could count on attendance being less than 50 people in an established ward. There were exceptions, usually in affluent areas, especially where there were Americans working for the church or for the US government. The ward near the US ambassador's residence was pretty well attended, as there were several American families associated with international aid and the US embassy. When I was in Cochabamba, our ward was pretty good-sized, with the head of the airport administration, some faculty and staff at the university, and of course our mission president and his American counselor. Only once was I assigned to a ward in a typically impoverished area where attendance was good. That was in a slum in La Paz where the ward met in a rented adobe house with a dirt floor. We probably had 80 people crammed in there, and they would open the windows and people would sit outside to be able to listen to sacrament meetings. But for the most part, attendance was very poor.
Imagine my complete shock when I was in the mission office and was shown the church's plans to build 52 new chapels across Bolivia, including 3 in Tarija. My only conclusion was they had adopted the "if you build it, they will come" program, as some studies have shown that religious groups are more successful when they have a visible presence in a community. So, even if you don't have any members, you build a chapel, and people notice it, especially since LDS chapels are often by far the nicest buildings in a given area.
But today, I'm told the activity rate is about the same as it was before, and the newer buildings stand as empty and unused as they were 30 years ago. A friend of mine visited the temple there and told me that it is almost entirely staffed by older missionary couples because they don't have enough endowed members to do it.
I think the reasons for the church's issues in Latin America are pretty simple: first, the focus of missionary work is numbers of baptisms, and missionaries rush through the discussions and baptize people who aren't committed and often don't even realize they've joined a church; second, as it is in Europe, the church is not a good fit for Latin America. I think what you call "Mormon craziness" (( assume you mean the more mystical elements of the church's story) actually plays well among some parts of Latin American society, but the regimented, corporate structure does not.
I'm not saying any of this to gloat or for schadenfreude. The church is what it is, and despite the emergence every few years of some new program for retention and reactivation, things don't improve because, culturally, the goals and means of meeting those goals never really change. Some of my Mormon friends and family are touting rapid growth in Africa, just as we were pointing to Latin America in the 1980s. I am not all that familiar with African culture, but my guess is that the same push for baptisms with little thought for retention will lead to similar results in Africa.