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I first attended General Conference in October 1999, when I was 17 years old. It was the last conference that was held in the Tabernacle. I remember feeling a little bit miffed that there were only two female speakers for the entire conference. It just seemed to me that, with 26-28 sermons being delivered, women ought to give more than 7.4% of them, y'know? I asked about the low number of female speakers and the man I asked laughed and said, "They used to give less than that!" Like that makes it all better.

There was one year (2003 I think) where women gave 3 talks, but other than that, the pattern of two female speakers per conference has held. Until the April 2017 Conference this past weekend, where only one sermon out of 27 was delivered by a woman (Primary General President Joy D. Jones on Sunday morning).

I'm not really sure what to say about that other than it's disappointing.

(In case you were wondering, out of eight opening/closing prayers offered, one was offered by a woman.)

I wonder what would happen if they portioned half the time to women and LDS women's issues... I bet the culture of the Church would change quickly and radically. Honestly, you'd probably have a massive drop off of interest from the men and thus families would exit in droves.

- Doc

One only has to spend a few moments watching conference to understand why the younger generation is leaving in droves. How do 20 something kids relate to anyone standing at those podiums and sitting behind?

A church desperately seeking answers to membership loss can't see the problem sitting right in front of them every conference.

Fence Sitter wrote:One only has to spend a few moments watching conference to understand why the younger generation is leaving in droves. How do 20 something kids relate to anyone standing at those podiums and sitting behind?

A church desperately seeking answers to membership loss can't see the problem sitting right in front of them every conference.

They could pull a Joel Osteen and juice up the Conference Center. Maybe some laser light shows? And replace the temple movie with VR. Replace the brethren with CGI superheroes. But what can we do about the tedious, banal, recycled scripts?

It's going to be a small, anachronistic group that talks big and is always living in the past or the distant future. One of hundreds of such.

The Church has always had an isolationist and an Us-v-Them mentality. It worked right up until mass communications and the Internet came into existence. They really could control much of their members' lives through fear, coercion, and social branding.

But, think of the Church as Sears right now. They have a lot of Big Box stores that cost a lot of money to operate. The problem is the Internet has made going to those Big Box stores irrelevant. The opportunity to adapt to reality was about 20 years ago, but the old men just couldn't wrap their minds around it. Sears is going tits up and the Church is listing hard. What do?

GenX, for the most part, made the transition to the Internet Age. Millennials were basically born into it. Gen Z knows nothing but access to it. What does all this mean? It means constant connectivity to other people who will then shape your values, determine you thinking, and influence how you spend your life (and more importantly, to the Church, how you spend your money).

The Church simply can't go FLDS or the Amish and isolate themselves. They're too enmeshed in the world and they need to make money to stay relevant, as all corporations do. We're seeing them take a hard left while dog whistling their older members. But the real challenge is becoming relevant to the very people who aren't acculturated to being Mormon because the acculturation has taken place through the Internet. By the a kid hits 14 if you haven't gotten to them first they're gone. They're going to be a citizen of the world.

I actually have some solutions to this problem. But I know for a fact this board is read and ideas are taken and implemented. For example, we started with the whole inoculation thing here way before the Church started talking about inoculation. That was a weird one to watch happen. So, unless the corporation wants to bring me in and pay me as a consultant I'll just stand by and let them go the way of Sears culturally. Who knows? Maybe turning into a real estate company with roots in a religious movement is the way they ultimately see themselves going. That's up to them.

- Doc

Fence Sitter wrote:One only has to spend a few moments watching conference to understand why the younger generation is leaving in droves.

I seem to recall reading somewhere, isn't retention among young women even worse than retention among young men?

If 17-year-old me (young Gen X / old millennial) was bothered by this stuff in the late 90s, I can't imagine the reaction among young millennials & digital natives.

This was the first General Conference since Hillary Clinton's defeat and the Women's March. It would have been a good time to reaffirm that women are valued and wanted.

One female.
Zero black man or woman.

The stats show the "women are equal" rhetoric to be hollow, dishonest.

zerinus wrote:You should blame Jesus for that. He never called any women to be his Apostles (or seventies even).

The twelve apostles were types for the sons of Israel; he didn't call non-Jews as apostles, either. There is a female apostle later, in Romans 16:7.

The gender of the seventy-two is never specified. I believe there was an early church source (Origen, maybe) that claimed Junia of Romans 16:7 was one of the seventy-two, but I don't have time to hunt down the reference right now.