Saturday, December 8, 2018
Updated Country Profile - Poland
Click here to access the updated Reaching the Nations country profile for Poland. The Church in Poland has maintained a full-time missionary proselytizing force for approximately three decades, yet there remain only 1,983 members and 12 branches in the country as of year-end 2017. Active membership in Poland appears to be approximately 300-350 as of the mid-2010s. A lack of diversity and pluralism in Polish society has posed a significant obstacle for effective missionary work and sustained church growth. Poles have appeared more receptive to joining the Church abroad than within their native homeland, and the number of Polish Latter-day Saints worldwide appears significantly larger than the number of Polish members in Poland. Jehovah's Witnesses have by far been the most successful nontraditional Christian group to become established in Poland with approximately 118,00 active members. However, Witnesses have reported major problems in the 2010s as the number of Witness congregations declined from 1,814 to 1,294 in only seven years. Other nontraditional Christian groups have either reported stagnant growth or decline in recent years, likely due to increasing secularism among youth and young adults and emigration.
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9 comments:
Those are sobering numbers for Poland. I guess there are many cultural factors to consider. The non-alcohol policy I would guess makes a difference. Again, not sure how JWs deal with that. Poles are traditionally very Catholic and nationalist, and sometimes seems like a part of their survival ethos. They have been brutalized so much by atheist, Protestant, and Orthodox neighbors. Their history and demography have been turned inside out.
I had a roommate sent there, a bit eccentric, which other former elders with him attested to. That was in the 1990s.
Hopefully more growth will occur there with more effort and faith.
Thanks for this report, Matt! One of my friends from my high school graduating class served his mission in Poland. I haven't talked with him much recently, but I remember how excited he was to go. I also know that areas of the world in which most people are devout Catholics can present a challenge for the Church's expansion, but I have also heard a time or two about how some Catholics have been converted to the gospel through the efforts of missionaries and members. It is surely interesting to consider such things.
I grew to love former Catholics in Chile who joined the Church of Jesus Christ LDS. Thousands and thousands have joined. Chile is unique in some ways, having elected a somewhat extreme socialist Salvador Allende in 1970. Communists were prevalent there, too. Apart from seculars and atheists, Chile had large Protestant Evangelical movements going since the early 1900s, like Assemblies of God. Seventh Day Adventists are notable, and Jehovah's Witnesses. That said, Chile is still a Catholic nation.
Also, German waves of immigrants arriving since the 1800s may be as much Protestant as Catholic, I'm not sure.
There are numbers of Jews and increasingly Muslims. Recent immigration from Haiti tend to Catholic, but I have heard and read reports of some of these Haitians investigating and joining the Church of Jesus Christ. Not sure how far south into Chile the Haitians are settling; I have seen as far as Linares in the 7th Region.
I served in Poland 1990-92. The Catholic people are wonderfully, but the situation is different from Catholic Chile. Under Communism, the Catholic Church was the resistance. In other communist countries, the churches were all but destroyed. Not in Poland. There is a lot of loyalty mixed up in that. To be Polish is to be Catholic. It’s something I admire greatly about the Poles. One day that country will open wide up. The current mission president is a native Pole and I’m sure is doing a great job. (I taught him and his sister in Primary as a missionary. It was just the two of them) I see progress. The major challenge once people are converted is emigration, though. I know more Poles from my mission that are now living in the states than still are in Poland. But you can’t really blame them. I would have done the same thing, most likely.
Currently there are Wikipedia articles on every operating and many of the announced temples. There is currently an attempt to delete the article on the Kinshsa Democratic Republic of the Congo Temple. I hope I have mobilized enough additional sources to save it, but if people can find additional sources or better incorporate the ones there it would help.
Considering the article on the Chicago Temple does not address why it was closed and renovated so soon after it was first built, I think there is work to do in expanding these articles.
We also need someone who understands how to update Wikipedia charts. I tried to add in on the List of temples of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints page information on the second rededication of the Mexico City Temple, but was unable to do it.
The article The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is in severe need of update. It still lists membership as of year end 2014, when it was about two thirds year-end 2017. There were only two instead of three missions then. Even better updates would speak more of the places the Church has reached, and its recent reach into new areas, but still not having reached most of the country.
On another note I have created an article on Norman Kamosi, who is one of the key figures in building the temple. Brother Kamosi is a native of the DR Congo whose father was a teacher for the American Baptist Church missions in the country. His father at some point managed to move into the largely Belgian area of Kinshsa, and Kamosi received his graduate educaton in Belgian. He was an executive at Air Congo and a member of the Parliament of Zaire.
Thus he fled the country when Laurent Kabile came to power in a coup. He and his family ended up coming to Washington, DC. He joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints there. He was a branch president in inner-city DC. One of the missionaries who taught him came from the family that is big in Westland Construction, the Utah based construction contrator that had the contract for building the Kinshsa Temple if I understand things correctly. They convinced Brother Kamosi to go back to Kinshsa and work on government relations and other key functions.
Jeffrey M. Bradshaw who recently returned from being president of the Kinshasa DR Congo mission presented at the FAIRMormon conference in August a large set of ideas about Congo and the temple. Here is his one that mentions Norman Kamosi https://www.fairmormon.org/blog/tag/norman-kamosi
Yes, DeeAnn, you state clearly what I was trying to describe about what I call the "Polish ethos". They have to cling to who they are to be a people, to exist. That is cool about you teaching the current mission president and wife!
Orson Scott Card wrote a prequel about Ender's dad, from a devoted Polish Catholic family that has like 9 kids, breaking sci-fi scenario of 2 kids per family. I think Card collected on this Polish exceptional identity.
Just a quick reminder to both Matt, and Rick's ChurchofJesusChristTemples.org site (if anyone can inform Rick in Pocatello, ID) that the Stake listed here as 2018 #54 "Pachuca México Heroes" was changed to "México City Los Heroes Tecamac" stake on Classic LDS Maps site :
https://classic.lds.org/maps/#ll=19.625684,-99.013557&z=13&m=google.road&layers=stakecenter&q=Mexico%20City%20Los%20Heroes%Tecamac%20Stake&find=stake:2123762
Thank you.
John Pack Lambert, thank you for the heads-up here that articles about the temples of the Church are beginning to be subjected to the same deletion nominations as has been the case for so many articles about General Authorities of the Church. While I have previously tried to clarify that not everyone participating in such discussions have an ax to grind against the Church, its' leaders, or articles covering Church-related subjects, I acknowledge that some have acted in a less-than-above-board manner in such discussions, and there may be some degree of bias on the part of several of them. In view of the medical ordeal I experienced within the last month, it has been a while since I logged on to Wikipedia. I wish there were more editors who were more concerned about offering help to bring such articles into greater harmony with the current guidelines, or who would be willing to help suggest, craft, and implement new guidelines that would serve as an exception to articles about the Church, but unless something has changed in that regard since I last logged on to Wikipedia over a month ago, then it will certainly be harder to find sufficient grounds to verify and prove beyond doubt that there is bias. I still have one or two routes available to me once I am able to get back to Wikipedia, so I will see what I can do at that time.
Chris, you might be able to let Rick know this information yourself. On the Church of Jesus Christ Temples website, if you go to the very bottom of the main page, under the "About" section, the third underlined link says "Contact", which, if clicked, sends you to a page on which you can fill out and submit such information. I share this to help you and anyone else who has questions or comments about the content on that site. Generally, replies are sent very quickly after such messages are received.
In the meantime, I wanted to thank Matt again for his ongoing reports, for allowing our conversations to be so wide-ranging and all-encompassing, and for giving me permission to share the latest from my blog, and I want to also apologize to anyone who is offended or bothered by my doing so. As my recovery from my recent hospitalization continues, I have been able to post the latest Church news and temple developments as comments on previous posts or on a few brand-new posts I have done. I have also described the projects which will be published there by the end of this year. The address of my blog follows below. My thanks again to you all and to Matt.
http://stokessoundsoff.blogspot.com
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