Yeah, but he’s the head of their church. I think all religions are pretty much equally stupid but if that’s what they want to be called, who am I to say otherwise?
Because “Member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints” is much more tedious to say or write than “Mormon?” What if the next leader after this one kicks the bucket in around 15 minutes decides that the name should be “Bookie Woopie Aggle Baggle Shoodoopy Kafangle Madangle Grhplxmqrx Zlvvvtzq”, and any abbreviation is blasphemy? Would you try to use that, or would you say “to hell with that.”
Hey… The Book Of Common Prayer, Nonconformist etc. 
Not that I disagree with you: I think the Mormon/LSD church has a problem with the cult thing that is different from the problems of the RC or SB churches. But for me, “any Protestant context” includes CE ministers being turfed because they would not follow or insisted on following the legislated forms.
A few possibilities come to mind:
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First off, the stated reason was basically to give members more time with their families on Sunday. Family time is a big emphasis with the Church. In the General Conference talk announcing the change, Elder Cook said “The purposes … include … strengthening individuals and families …”
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I’m sure it makes it a bit easier for many investigators with only 2 hours of church meetings on Sundays instead of 3.
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It’ll probably save money on building construction costs too (I imagine we can easily get 4+ wards into a building on a Sunday where the norm is 3 right now).
Odd that my dad didn’t think of that. Perhaps he slept through the talk. I’ve gotten the impression that he sleeps through a lot of the ‘sit there and have people talk at you’ church stuff.
The really, really boring meeting’s the same length, though. After that it’s just scattering to other, age/rank specific meetings which I wouldn’t expect an investigator to attend at all.
I confess I find it hard to believe that the mormon church is actually expanding. As of the last time I read about it it was contracting, largely due to people getting on the internet and learning actual facts about its early history. Raw membership numbers might have remained level, because you’re pretty much a member until death or excommunication, but I had the impression that attendance was down.
Sacrament Meeting is actually getting ~15 minutes shorter in January.
I doubt that there are good statistics available on the subject beyond maybe the occasional ward / stake attendance numbers that got leaked. I suspect your impression is largely based off a few anecdotes, but if you have seen hard data somewhere, I’d be curious to know the source.
Many Lutheran, Methodist and Presbyterian and Episcopalians don’t seem to have a problem with it.
I hadn’t heard that. (As noted, my source possibly slept through it.) Wonder if shortening the meeting’ll help anything. Or hurt anything, I suppose.
Well, my dad was stake membership clerk for a while and at one point he mentioned that he’d both seen a drop in attendance happening in our stake and that he’d observed it in the attendance numbers for the wider area. He also noted (rather critically) that this discrepancy between attendance numbers and membership numbers was basically being covered up, for how often it conspicuously wasn’t being mentioned - only membership was announced, never active membership.
But in any case that’s still a local sample from a number of years ago - my impression that it’s happening churchwide nowadays is mostly an extrapolation from my dad’s experience that’s probably fallacious/unjustified in a few different ways.
We’ll see when it happens. I don’t call black people negros and I will try to use the term that these people prefer. Honestly, it’s the only choice for decent people.
:dubious:
I think it’s indecent that some nutty old kook is trying to mess with the cultural identity of an entire church, and I think it’s fair to call him nutty because of what he’s doing. You realize that he’s not just trying to wipe out “Mormon”, right? He’s trying to wipe out all abbreviations of the ridiculously long name - except ones that declare that it’s the only true church and all the others are, by implication, false.
“Mormon” and “LDS” aren’t offensive terms, his crazy ideas notwithstanding. I’ll call mormons mormons - and so far the mormons haven’t minded. If anything the ones I’ve spoken to seem bemused by the whole affair. (They’d be less bemused by me calling the kook a kook, but it remains a fact that they haven’t all absorbed his peculiar ideas, at least not yet.)
Are they going to give up lds.org and mormon.org in favor of thechurchofjesuschristoflatter-daysaints.org? Seems like they would have to, and without redirecting either, because that would encourage the use of the nicknames.
Members who want to remove their names and those of their minor children (baptized or not) from the church’s rolls entirely do so through Quitmormon; thousands have done so in the last few years, especially after the November Policy and the excommunication of Sam Young for the Protect LDS Children movementas reported nationwide.
Yes, numbers are down; in Ogden a few wards were just combined due to diminishing numbers in that area. And they just redid their temple.
I don’t honestly know if attendance numbers are up or down, but this anecdote is insufficient data to make a sweeping statement like “Yes, numbers are down”. My ward was split not too long ago. That’s one (now two) wards out of 30,000+, hardly enough for making broad analysis. However, if you think combining wards is evidence of diminishing attendance, presumably you’d accept that splitting wards is evidence of increased attendance, right?
In 2000, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints had 25,915 wards and branches. In 2017, it was 30,506. Draw from that whatever conclusions you will.
In the comments on this Salt Lake Tribune article fellating the Mormon Tabernacle Chior, there is mention of a guy who owned that URL (minus the dash) as a personal site for years has suddenly gone dark–he has possibly sold or given the URL to the Church.
Nutty old kook is literally the foundation of every religion on the planet. I simply don’t have time to figure out which are the cool religions for you people and will simply go with whatever their leader says is their preferred nomenclature.
Well there is an interpretation at the stake presidency and ward bishop level etc…
The Chart of Callings is a good reference but a lay ministry and a bishop who is also the “Judge in Israel” and thus has control over temple recommends, admonishment, probation etc… seems to have a bit of latitude there in my experience.
As a 4th generation gentile who grew up in the land of Zion I only heard about complaints of inconsistencies though. I was trusted and external and unfortunately heard a lot of gossip due to the fact. So take my claims with a huge dose of salt.
Maybe, but most religions are much more decentralized and “bottom-up”, and those that aren’t - like the Catholic Church - have so many layers of tradition and bureaucracy that radical changes are almost impossible (for better or for worse).
For instance, the most orthodox corners of my own religion, Judaism, are in fact dominated by cults (or “courts”, in the royal rather than legal sense) ruled by nutty old kooks - but each court has its own kook, and they don’t always play well together.
If Google or Adobe can’t even stop us from turning their brands into verbs, these guys have no chance.
And in this instance I understand that the further one goes from Utah the less inclined the adherents are to make the changes asked of them; on Sunday the women of this church were ‘invited’ (told) to get off social media for 10 days in order to concentrate on their family and their church, for example. But from the looks of it, outside Utah it seems the ladies are taking that as a suggestion, just as the youths did this summer when they were similarly ‘invited to fast’ from social media.
It really depends on the person or organization. If some local church wants to be called “The One and Only True Church in the United States of America, Founded by a Wonderful Prophet and Always Meets in Nice, White Buildings,” and gets offended if you abbreviate it TOaOTCiUSoAFbaWPaAMiNWB, then tough luck. Remember, the Mormons don’t want to be called LDS, either. You got to spell it out.
Or if Scientologists suddenly realize that they they’ve got bad press and want to be known as “World Peace,” then it ain’t gonna happen. Do you remember Aum Shinrikyo? That’s the religion which used sarin gas in the Tokyo subways. They want to be known by Aleph now.
It’s just silliness and an attempt to manipulate people, led by some out-of-touch, elderly white guys parading around in the ultimate echo chamber. They just spend an estimated $20 million dollars producing a full-length, slick PR flick, a pseudo “documentary” which THEY labeled “Meet the Mormons.”
http://meetthemormons.com/#/filter-all/page-1
They pushed members to buy tickets to invite friends and family. This wasn’t the last century, it was four years ago. What’s more, the website is still active, with the information that it can be seen at Temple Square and various visitor centers.
Now, Nelson guilts members into believing that their eternal salvation will depend on stopping any reference to themselves by a name embraced by 180 years of prophets, or Satan wins.
It’s the absolute ridiculousness of the change. We were taught that God cares about the tiniest details and spent countless hours in pursuit of endlessly moving goalposts.
As missionaries, we carried around a rulebook “The Handbook of Instructions,” in which prescribed and proscribed activities were outlined in minute details. Half court basketball was completely acceptable to the Almighty Lord as a physical activity, enabling young men to exercise regularly and remain healthy, making us better servants, but full court basketball was clearly forbidden as something which God himself personally frowned upon.
The name of the church has an interesting history. “Mormon” comes from the Book of Mormon, a fictitious record of fictitious people, created by a conman and financed by a gullible farmer who hocked his property for the endeavor.
In the Book of Mormon, the only name acceptable name of God’s one and only true church is clearly set by Jesus himself. Hence the LDS church started off as “The Church of Christ.” This moniker was used by Smith and his cohorts until their various nefarious activities resulted in them fleeing for the frontier of Ohio in the early 1830s and to escape consequencies of their activities, they reestablished the brand as “The Church of Latter Day Saints.”
This was great until Smith and his co-conspirators set up an illegal bank, defrauding many, many of his followers, again forcing him to flee into the night to Missouri, bordering Indian land. There, to escape justice again, they rebranded the church once more, to its present name, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.