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| Thursday, June 20, 2013 |
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Our ward is in the center of a large city. We have, usually, around 450 members and something like 350 ‘families,’ which means that the average family has 1.3 members, which practically means that a huge majority of the members are singles, with only a handful of married couples and families with children. This is way over 65% single, though I’m sure we are averaged out by suburban wards that have relatively few single members. Our sacrament meeting attendance has been within one or two points of 22% for forty years. The few families dominate the leadership, though many of the single members have callings and are the majority of attenders. Our stake does the somewhat strange thing of keeping only the records of active YSA in the stake’s singles ward. Thus, we have the anomalous situation of having something like 125 inactive YSA on our records, with no active ones. Difficult circumstance for any attempt at activation. I know of no public data source, though visiting authorities often make comments that lead me to believe the figures are known. |
I think it depends on where you are. My ward and the wards around me have very few single adults. My ward is almost entirely married adults and their children. We run about 85% activity. For example yesterday I taught a class of of 20 13 year olds in SS and 18 of them lived with both of their birth parents and the other 2 live with their grandparents. My previous stake that was mostly in the city limits of Chicago was probably similar to the 65% that you are describing. Large US cities have huge numbers of single adults and unmarried parents. It would not be possible for the 65% number to be true church wide in the US based on all the data I have see n over the years. I am not sure what the real numbers would be but I would suspect somewhere around 35-40% if you include everybody over 18 in the numbers. My understanding is that a slim majority of adults US wide are married. Given our high marriage rates I think we would probably be slightly more then a slim majority. |
#1–I think keeping YSA records in their homewards if their less active is pretty common practice. Our ward gets records for freshmen students living in dorms on campus. On the other hand, at one of my BYU wards we got sent records for a supposedly single young adult who was less-active; turned out she was living with her boyfriend. IMO, living in the dorms should automatically belong to YSA ward. Otherwise, though, it’s safer to just have them be in their homeward, although certainly the singles ward should be working with the YSA ward in reactivation. Chances are though, that unless these YSA have been contacted recently, the vast majority of them have moved. We cut the number of YSA in our ward in half just by checking up on them and finding out that half of them had moved out of the ward boundaries. Our numbers for the percentage of members who attended church meetings jumped quite a bit after we did that… |
Our current ward is almost exactly 50%, with the remainder split about evenly between couples who’s kids are no longer at home and young marrieds. Most of the primary classes have about 3 – 4 kids each but there are only 6 active youth, 4 YM and 2 YW. There are more women currently pregnant in our ward than men who attend Elder’s Quorum on an average week. The ward that I attended when I was in college was about half established families and half students. While I was there, the EQ President, the RS President, the YW President, Ward Mission Leader and a counselor in the Bishopric were all single. It was an awesome set-up. There was a critical mass of YSA to have a regular program, the ward benefited from the energy of the students, the students had opportunities to have real impact in their callings and HT/VT assignments. I served in a unit with a similar make-up while I was on my mission. A few stable families and a whole lot of YSAs who had real responsibilities. The years after my mission, most of those YSA’s went on missions themselves, returned home and married each other. That unit area will be the first stake in that particular part of the world, whereas the other branch that I served in is just barely split into two branches. |
Our stake, largely composed of suburban Californians with overcrowded, good public schools, had a similar statistic quoted two years ago, and I’m sure it hasn’t changed significantly. Either 60% or 66% don’t exactly remember. We also have the rule that singles wards keep records only for active singles currently attending their wards. |
I don’t know if this helps, but you might consider that half of each married couple who doesn”t divorce will be single in their widowhood which can last 5, 10, 20+ years. This is the case with many of our ward singles. |
Another factor to consider is that totally inactive singles don’t inform the church when they get married. So they are incorrectly listed as single on the rosters. |
Our Canadian Stake has about 3000+ members about 1/3 of which are active. Of all those members about 1/3 are singles, including YSA’s and Singles-most of which are inactive. The singles program here is probably 80% of people over 50 with the rest being under 50. I can think of 4 active people in the singles that are 30-40yrs of age-3 of whom are um challenged… |
