As a whole, mission reunions are a decades-old tradition accompanying the LDS Church's general conference weekends. However, the likelihood of each individual reunion having such a long shelf life is small.

Stories about mission reunions are as varied as the stories shared during the social gathering composed of returned missionaries who served several years together in the same assigned area. The greatest participation comes in the first years after missionaries and their respective mission president return home.

As an early 1980s missionary in Chile and more recently as Texas Houston mission president (2005-08), Travis Steward has seen both sides of a mission reunion. "My feeling is you've had a real bonding experience with a group of special people in your life and you want to get back to that," he said.

His reunion tonight is one of the 340 recently listed in the Deseret News and on the deseretnews.com/reunions Web site. A total that seems considerable, it is actually eight fewer than the number of current missions of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Deseret News reunion notices published 50 years ago totaled 80-plus reunions; the church had 47 missions then.

Held anywhere from meetinghouses and residences to campus locations and restaurants, a reunion is identified by the mission name and generally specified by a single president and his three-year service tenure. More reunions are becoming "combo" affairs — combining several consecutive presidents or combining several regional reunions into a single-country gathering.

This week's listings show the tapering of reunion frequency. Some 160 of the 340 publicized were for missionaries who served in the past decade, another 50-plus during the 1990s. It drops into the 20s each for those from the '70s and '80s.

However, some reunions still hold strong — some 50 reunions had time periods ranging from the 1940s through the 1960s; another dozen stated an "  'all' time span," with no specific range.

Returned mission presidents and reunion organizers contacted by the Deseret News said reunion longevity faces a number of challenges — and not necessarily the advent of social networking, such as e-mails, texting and Web sites like Facebook and Myspace. In fact, social networking is used increasingly for contact, invitations and RSVPs, with the year-round Deseret News reunion site and mission-alumni sites such as mission .net also key.

Rather, a primary challenge is the changing demographics of the missionaries and mission presidents over the years.