Thursday, March 15, 2012

District Discontinued in Colombia

A district was recently discontinued in Colombia. The Girardot Colombia District was discontinued and consolidated with the neighboring Ibague Colombia District. As part of the merger of the two districts, the Church closed two of the five branches in the city of Ibague and one of the two branches in Girardot. There are now seven branches in the Ibague Colombia District.

The recent growth trends for the Church in Colombia have been mixed. Some areas have had new branches and wards organized or branches mature into stakes, such as in southern Bogota where a new stake was organized at the end of 2011. In other areas such as Ibague and Girardot, steady congregational decline has occurred. However, there has not appeared to be any cities that have closed to missionary work within the past couple years and a couple cities were recently opened to missionary work for the first time in northern Colombia. The creation of a fifth mission in July may be prompted by renewed efforts to expand national outreach into the scores of cities with over 20,000 inhabitants. The new mission may also provide more resources to address convert retention and member reactivation struggles.

There are now 29 stakes and 11 districts in Colombia.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Wow - I don't think it can be all that bad if branches mature into stakes ;)

From where is the information about the new Mission by the way? It would be great to see it being created, but really, there are other countries in my opinion that could use more outreach and have not really a substential or only very small Missionary force (Senegal, Angola, Namibia, Kazakhstan, Indonesia, India, ...).

CAN said...

Pascal, the information on the new missions of the Church for 2012 can be found here: http://www.lds.org/church/news/new-missions-created-2012?lang=eng