Into the Future

With all the church's power and reach, there are difficulties ahead. In the past 50 years church membership has mushroomed from 1 million members in 1950 to nearly 13 million members today. But LDS growth seems to be slowing. In the late 1980s annual growth rates were more than 5 percent each year, but between 2000 and 2005 the rate dropped to less than 3 percent. The slowdown may be in part because in 2002 the church raised the standards for young men and women who want to serve full-time missions, including toughened screening for "moral worthiness." The number of full-time missionaries dropped from a high of 62,000 in 2002 to some 53,000 in December 2006, the last time figures were released. In 1989 the average LDS missionary baptized eight people (and six to six and a half annually throughout the 1990s). From 2000 to 2004 this number had fallen to four and a half—and is only now spiking back up to the 1990 levels.

In 2000 the church reached the important milestone of having more members outside the United States than within it, with members in more than 176 nations. It's now often described as a  "global church," but in truth it's really more a hemispheric one: 84 percent of church members live in North and South America. Church policy has been to go only where missionaries are welcome, but President Monson could make worldwide church expansion part of his mandate. As an apostle he spent nearly two decades in Eastern Europe on diplomatic assignments, trying to persuade governments to allow LDS missionaries to proselytize. He helped establish the first "stake" in Eastern Europe in 1982 and oversaw the building of a temple in Freiberg, Germany, in 1985.

Creating converts isn't the same as keeping them, though—an issue in all religions that proselytize. Sociologist Armand Mauss estimates that 50 percent of LDS converts within the United States stop attending within a year of conversion, and 75 percent of foreign converts fail to attend after a year. The church disputes these numbers, but leaders do acknowledge that retention has been a problem, particularly in Latin America. The Mormon church consists almost entirely of volunteer leaders, from nursery school teachers to bishops. This practice has benefits: new members are immediately given a "calling," or a job to perform within the church, which gives them an incentive to stay. But in some areas leaders are presiding over entire congregations of new members. How does a bishop counsel a member who is struggling with his new faith when the bishop himself has been a member for only a year?

The global growth is likely, at some point, to make diversity an issue. At current growth rates, Spanish will one day surpass English as the most common language spoken by Latter-day Saints. There are more than a million members in Mexico alone. The church is growing more diverse within the United States, too, as it makes a conscious effort to expand its presence in cities like Los Angeles, New York, Miami, Chicago, Houston and Detroit. Within the United States there are more than 800 congregations that conduct services in foreign languages, from Spanish to Navajo, Samoan to Haitian Creole. But church leadership—at least at the very top—remains homogeneous. There has never been a nonwhite apostle or prophet. Until 1978 blacks were not permitted to hold the priesthood, a requirement for most leadership positions. (Women still cannot be ordained.) In 2004, after two apostles died within weeks of each other—creating two openings—some Mormons hoped a non-Caucasian would be chosen; a white American and a German man were named. With a new vacancy now in the Quorum of the 12, might a Hispanic or a black apostle finally be ordained? Or will there continue to be two spheres: a leadership that is very much tied to the Rocky Mountain West and a broader membership that is increasingly international? "I hope some day to see a Hispanic or a black African called to the Quorum of the Twelve," says Marcus Martins, who converted to Mormonism in 1972 and became the first black full-time LDS missionary. "But I don't expect, even if the next apostle is out of Ghana or Nigeria, that there will be any significant changes in church policy or administration. Our belief is that the role of those men is to testify of Jesus Christ to the people. They're not set up to be a representative body."

For their part, church leaders would rather focus on what ties church members together rather than what sets them apart, citing a scripture in Ephesians about fellow citizens with the Saints. The new prophet's job will be to see his fellow Saints onto a safe path through their broadening world.

© 2008