When LDS wards look outward: How these congregations are engaging meaningfully with their communities

The Hyde Park Second Ward’s choir is hardly your typical Latter-day Saint congregation choir.

For one, there’s often clapping — during and after songs. For another, most of its members aren’t part of Chicago’s Hyde Park Second Ward itself. In fact, they’re not even members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Some are Pentecostal, others Baptist, a few Seventh-day Adventist.

That’s by design, said choir leader Randy Hulme. Under the leadership of the ward’s current bishop, the aim became to create a choir that reflects and serves the larger community.

Thanks to a little help from a Facebook ad, it worked. Today, the choir regularly sings for Latter-day Saint and non-Latter-day Saint audiences, including in other churches around the city. When they’re not performing, the members share daily uplifting messages via the group text chain, throw birthday parties for one another and help fellow choir members with car maintenance and job searches.

“The choir is just one part of a larger effort,” Hulme said, by local Latter-day Saint leadership to turn the congregation and its facilities outward, creating a bustling community hub open to all.

In doing so, the congregation joins a growing list of other Latter-day Saint outposts finding ways beyond the occasional blood drive or food drive to address their communities’ specific needs through sustained outreach.

Some efforts are more grassroot; others are initiated from above. But doubling church meetinghouses as English language learning locations, as in Utah, or immigrant welcome centers, as in Arizona and Nevada, only works with the support of members and missionaries living and serving in those areas.

Chicago: ‘Bringing people closer to Christ’ with yoga, child care

Other gatherings in the Chicago ward include early morning yoga taught by the women’s Relief Society president, a summer camp for children of immigrants supported by the congregation’s youth and an annual Halloween haunted house that has averaged 5,000 visitors the past few years.

“I have never gone to the church building and had no one there,” Alyssa Calder Hulme, Randy’s wife, said, “except when we were the first people to get there for yoga at like 5 a.m.”

On Sundays, rather than rush for the door the moment the church meetings end, ward members gather — on the grass if it’s nice outside, indoors when it’s not — and share a volunteer-prepared meal, with kids running around as adults chat.

Visit on a Saturday and one may discover another faith group celebrating a holiday within the Latter-day Saint building. That’s because the meetinghouse has become a space immigrant communities can use for their own events.

At each of these community events, leaders enforce a strict ban on proselytizing, even for missionaries.

And yet, the area has become a hotbed of missionary activity, with so many new converts added each week that, Alyssa said, the lay leadership has given up trying to confirm them during sacrament meeting. Around 2019, the ward split, creating two Hyde Park congregations. The one the Hulmes attend is, Randy said, “already bursting at the seams,” thanks to all the new additions.

“We’re doing some things that are atypical,” Alyssa said, “but it’s bringing people closer to Christ and we are supporting people’s fundamental needs for food, community and child care.”

Memphis: A united effort against infant mortality

For almost two years now, Latter-day Saints in Memphis, Tennessee, have been working alongside the city’s NAACP branch to lower the area’s infant mortality rate, historically one of the highest in the country, through a program known as MyBaby4Me.

Free to the public and geared toward new and expectant parents, the ongoing project began as a conversation between regional NAACP and Latter-day Saint leaders. It has since evolved into an ongoing service supported by Latter-day Saint volunteers with backgrounds in medicine, social work and related fields.

Other church members, including young people, have gotten involved, providing meals and child care for the parents attending classes on nutrition and newborn safety. Some sew blankets and burp cloths while others work to outfit parents-to-be with baby clothes, cribs, car seats and other essentials.

Last December, the program hosted a Christmas party staged by the ward, which came together to provide the food, decorations and presents.

“Our goal was to have one wrapped present for each child,” said Joell Archibald, a missionary who, along with her husband, Lynn, helped launch the program. “But many received several.”

The impact is clear and growing. Within the 18 months the Archibalds were involved, class sizes swelled from zero to 20 or more. All told, they worked with 100 women during their tenure and saw 21 healthy full-term babies born.

Further proof of their success: The program is expanding into Nashville and Little Rock, Arkansas.

At the same time, having an ever-growing and impactful project to rally around has given area Latter-day Saints a common cause.

One particularly moving experience for Lynn came after he and Joell finished a presentation on MyBaby4Me for a ward in the area on the program’s progress and needs.

Becoming emotional at the memory, Lynn said a man from the audience came up to the couple and said that he couldn’t come often, but that he’d received a witness during the presentation that he needed to help. “And so I will help all that I can,” Lynn recalled him saying.

The former Latter-day Saint missionary said the experience was one of many “powerful times that we really felt like this was not particularly in our hands.”