Latest from Mormon Land: Ups and downs of LDS wards; inside look at temple mural restoration

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Uncovering truth in art

Like the teenage Joseph Smith, the preservationists who restored the magnificent murals in the renovated and rededicated Manti Temple were on a quest for truth.

“The truth is what the artist intended us to see,” Peter Schoenmann, co-director of Chicago-based PARMA Conservation (Preservation and Recovery of Masterpieces of Art), said in a news release. “Plain and simple, there are different obscuring layers that can muddy the truth, and a conservator’s job is to conserve only the original.”

So, these art experts spent weeks finding the right chemical blends and then labored to remove the various varnishes that had been applied to each of the wall paintings through the years to, at last, unveil their inherent luster.

“It’s a privilege to work here,” Elizabeth Kendall, PARMA owner and co-director said in the release. “We’ve uncovered something that’s been covered for decades and decades.”

Here is what this elite team had to say about the pioneer-era temple’s three main murals:

• The Creation Room, painted by Sanpete County’s own C.C.A. Christensen in the late 19th century, posed the biggest challenge.

“We found at least four different types of over paint, as well as a coating that is very challenging to get off,” Kendall explained. “He was an exceptional artist and people didn’t see that until we took off all the other renovations that had occurred over the decades.”

• The Garden Room, done by Joseph Everett and Robert Shepherd in the early 1940s, was painted not on plaster but on canvas.

“The plaster wall itself is what cracks,” Schoenmann said. “Then it transposes and transfers to the canvas and the canvas splits. We have to be surgical in everything we do to make a crack repair look invisible or disappear.”

Using “teeny tiny brushes,” Kendall added, “we only paint precisely where the crack is.”

• Minerva Teichert’s 1947 World Room masterpiece, the most celebrated and salient of Manti’s murals, turned out to be the easiest to freshen up.

It basically needed to be cleaned, Kendall said, but that was no small task since the artwork spans 4,000 square feet.

Now, thanks to this meticulous care, the “truths” of all the artists have once again been restored and revealed.

Searching for truth? Restoring truth? Revealing truth? To devout Latter-day Saints, that sounds a lot like church founder Joseph Smith’s seminal story.

The latest ‘Mormon Land’ podcast: Where women stand?

Where do today’s general women’s leaders rank in the church hierarchy? Should and could it change?

Listen to the podcast.

Ups and downs in congregations

While the church’s rolls swelled by nearly 253,000 to top 17.2 million worldwide last year, the addition of wards and branches, rather than raw membership tallies, is often seen as a better barometer of growth.

On that score, independent researcher Matt Martinich pointed to these interesting tidbits about congregational expansion in his blog at ldschurchgrowth.blogspot.com:

• Of the 16 nations that added the most wards or branches in 2023, 12 were in Africa, led by Nigeria (up 41 units), the Democratic Republic of Congo (up 20) and Ghana (up 17).

• Outside of Africa, the Philippines netted 24 more units, followed by Mexico (up 13), Ecuador (up 10) and Peru (up five).

• On the downside, the U.S. saw a net decrease of 21 congregations, followed by Russia (down 12) and the United Kingdom (down 10).

“The United States has now had two years in a row when it ranked as the country with the largest net decrease in congregations for the entire world,” Martinich noted, even though it enjoyed a “net increase of 105,774 members [to 6,868,793] between year-end 2021 and year-end 2023,” and created 12 additional stakes (or clusters of congregations) last year.

• The average number of members per U.S. ward or branch ticked up last year to 471, not much higher than the 468 in 2018.

Despite all this, Martinich concluded, “there is no evidence from examining these statistics that the church in the United States has experienced worsening member activity or convert retention rates within the past decade, given the stability in the members-to-congregations ratio.”

From The Tribune

• The church’s top women’s leaders have slipped through the years in the hierarchy’s pecking order.

• From beards to tattoos, Pepsi to politics, mission service to Sunday sports, there is plenty in Latter-day Saint culture that gets mistaken — even by devout members — as Latter-day Saint doctrine. For starters, see columnist Gordon Monson’s list.

• For a sixth time, Tribune ace faith writer Peggy Fletcher Stack has been named the nation’s top religion reporter for midsize and small newspapers.