Volume 29, No. 1

Who would have dared to predict in 1830 that a tiny, radical circle of religious seekers around the Joseph and Lucy Smith family would be a church of 10 million only a few generations later…

More than ever before the LDS church seems to measure its milestones in terms of numbers. Almost every issue of the Church News and the En sign includes an article or a graphic that highlights…

To comprehend the potential emergence of Mormonism as a major religious force in the twenty-first century, it is essential to comprehend the missionary ideology and practices of the LDS church. For rank-and-file Latter-day Saints, this proposition seems simply axiomatic of their foundational faith in the restoration of Christ’s gospel and their divine man date to convert the world in anticipation of his second advent.

For those imbued with Mormonism, the most appropriate figure for talking about the word of God in the twenty-first century is Janus, the Roman god of beginnings and endings, presider over doors and gateways, and…

As a twenty-two-year-old convert of just a few years, I was called in June 1969 to preside over a small branch of the church in Belgium. In the tiny office of the old house serving…

Alongside Utrecht’s largest canal, the nineteenth-century Neo-Gothic Martinuschurch dominates the centuries-old waterfront houses. Far be neath its glistening spire, the little entrance square, with a statue of the warrior saint Martinus at the center, bristles…

From the Rio Grande to the Straits of Magellan the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is now taking part in a revolution that is radically transforming Latin America. As a result, the church…

With the assistance of her family, Marta Angelica Solizo forms and paints incredibly detailed ceramic Nativity scenes. A standard set con sists of fourteen pieces: three sheep, a bull, four donkeys laden with corn, squash,…

In April 1994 some sixty LDS professionals and business people from around Australia were invited to meet with the Pacific Area presidency in a Sydney conference unique to the Mormon church in this country. Quite…

For the earliest nineteenth-century LDS missionaries in the Pacific, a strong appeal of the British Crown colony of New Zealand was the high concentration of English-speaking settlers among whom they could proselyte. Elder Addison Pratt,…

“Since Japan as a nation has made such remarkable economic and technological progress, why is the church in Japan not also making comparable progress, but in fact is stagnant?” For some years now such a…

In recent years social scientists have found it theoretically useful to understand church growth or decline in the context of a “religious economy.”[1] In this conceptualization each society has a “religion industry” in the same…