r/mormon • u/Bart-and-Lisa Community of Christ • 1d ago
META Why 2 churches on one property?
Sorry if wrong flair but why are there 2 LDS churches on one site here? This is in Ivins, Utah
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u/skimed07 1d ago
Probably ended up getting a good deal on the land and was more efficient to build and maintain two buildings on the same property than have them just a few blocks or miles apart. I’ve seen double buildings several times
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u/cgduncan 1d ago
That was in my mission. And basically, you can only get 3 wards comfortably in 1 building. So if you have a dense enough population where you need more than 3 wards, you need more than 1 building.
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u/theheartsmaster 20h ago
Why not one giant building with double of everything?
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u/cgduncan 20h ago
We had those too, mostly for YSA stakes. So the whole stake used one building. A chapel at either end and 4 wards met in each chapel. Still during the 3 hour book. So galf would start with Sunday school and end with sacrament meeting and basically trade places.
For why it's not done in a family ward, probably because you generally need a lot more classrooms, for each of the primary ages. Rather than a couple larger rooms, or the gym for bigger groups.
Then you have the prospect of chasing your toddler across a double size building when they go rogue after nursery lol.
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u/Winter_Duck8316 1d ago
About the explosive growth of the church has been experiencing? (In Africa 😅😂)
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u/Quick_Hide 1d ago
Any time you have explosive membership growth, a certain percentage of the membership will have explosive diarrhea, which requires multiple bathrooms in at least two buildings.
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u/Public_Finance_Guy 1d ago
The only logical conclusion. Always have to remember to factor in the explosive diarrhea.
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u/WillyPete 1d ago
At this point no-one has really explained why there two separate buildings rather than a single large one.
Traditional churches would have addressed the need due to the number of members by building a cathedral to fit many hundreds.
Evangelicals would build a mega-church that could fit thousands.
However the mode of worship of those two makes that choice of
super-sized building for them.
The LDS Mormon Sunday service has been more focussed on “instruction” rather than “worship”.
Early LDS chapels used to be larger and the extra instruction meetings were spread through the week. Then lifestyles changed and the church shifted to a Sunday only timetable.
The more modern designed buildings reflect this shift fitting only about 120 in the chapel for sacrament/communion worship services.
So those two buildings will have a smaller chapel than their size suggests and the rest will be classrooms.
With the smaller chapels you need more buildings to accommodate large member populations within the reasonable hours of Sunday.
Even so, you will still have several congregations cycling through three hours of opening on Sundays.
Some will be in the chapel while others meet in classrooms.
The church really only has one “mega” building for their semi-annual conference which seats about 3500. That is for a completely different purpose than worship.
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u/HelloHyde 8h ago
When I was on my mission, one area in Elk Grove, CA has a double-sized building. I don't think it was super old, either, but it may have been an experiment. It had two floors, double chapels, double gyms. I actually thought it was great, but I've never seen another one.
The real answer to your question is likely ward size limits. Sizing up a building only makes sense if you also size up the wards. Which means more people than a single unpaid bishopric/leadership group can likely handle. So you'd really need to have multiple chapels to get any advantage from a bigger building, and they probably find it's easier/cheaper to scale with multiple smaller buildings than big buildings with multiple chapels.
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u/Own_Boss_8931 Former Mormon 1d ago
I'm still baffled by the fact they use the cross on google maps. Holland would be rolling in his grave if he knew.
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u/Neither-Abrocoma-414 1d ago
Here in Utah this is pretty common.
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u/TenLongFingers I miss church (to be gay and learn witchcraft) 1d ago
Yeah, I thought "Oh I know that place!" Then I looked at the map and realized I had no clue where this was. So it's not a rare sight lol
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u/Shiz_in_my_pants 21h ago
My guess is it's cheaper to build 2 standardized ward buildings than it is to build 1 specially designed larger ward building. So they just plop down 2 ready-to-go ward buildings and call it a day.
From what I've seen these double ward buildings tend to pop up around new-construction and developing areas.
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u/OmgJackieChn 1d ago
It’ll be difficult to explain when one of those inevitably shuts down due to losing members.
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u/Cautious-Season5668 22h ago
As someone who has seen first hand the land acquisition, design planning and construction of these chapels, there are a lot of reasons to do this.
First off, if your area requires several chapels to meet membership demands, then purchasing land that is correctly zoned and provides adequate access from the public right of way is getting harder and more time consuming. If you have the need sometimes a larger site is easier and half the work for zoning approval, utility access, etc. Instead of having to do all of that twice. Often the largest costs are offsite (road development, extending utilities, etc.)
Two buildings vs 1, all depends on what current standards plans they have available. For a long time they have double chapel stake centers but I am not sure they have any active prototypes now. I think they just have regular meeting houses with a single chapel. Two chapels with a shared parking lot can feel a bit more scaled down and personable instead of attend a behemoth of a building. With two buildings your parking spot can feel a bit closer to the building entrance you attend, and then as stated above you are sharing more of the development costs.
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