Global Mormon Growth Brings Challenges

PROVO, Utah (AP) — Every Wednesday, hundreds of young Mormon men and

women not far removed from high school arrive on the campus of Brigham

Young University, where they are severed from family and text-messaging

and entrusted with the very future of their faith.

Sequestered in

classrooms for 14 hours a day, these missionaries-in-training are

taught to boil down core doctrines to make them understandable and

consistent, whether their audience is in Utah or Uganda.

But

increasingly, classroom conversations at the Mormon church's flagship

Missionary Training Center have centered not just on winning new

believers but on keeping them — a topic looming as a critical challenge

for whoever is picked to succeed church president and prophet Gordon B.

Hinckley, who died Sunday at 97.

Although retaining members is a

challenge for all evangelizing faiths, the Mormon church appears to

have a particularly poor retention rate in some countries.

The

foreign retention rate is critical to the future of the Mormon church.

An American-born denomination, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day

Saints now boasts more members abroad than at home — about 55 percent

of the world's 13 million Mormons live outside the U.S., according to

church figures.

The Mormons are working hard to maintain

doctrinal integrity and still compete in the spiritual marketplace for

converts. The effort is playing out at the Missionary Training Center,