Mormon Church Reorganizes Management to Handle Growth

The Mormon Church announced Saturday a reorganization of the faith’s middle management to accommodate the rapid growth of the church, which is now approaching 10 million members.

Since becoming president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in March 1995, Gordon B. Hinckley has stressed that managing the growth of the 167-year-old religion, which has more members abroad than in the United States, is the leadership’s greatest challenge.

At the opening session of the church’s 167th Annual General Conference, Hinckley announced that the 134 men called “area authorities” will become church officers and members of the Seventy, a body that manages the church’s affairs.

The new church officers, called area authority Seventies, will be divided into three new sections, or quorums of the Seventy. The presidents of the church’s 23 areas or divisions are drawn from the original two quorums.

“With these respective quorums in place, we have established a pattern under which the church may grow to any size with an organization of area presidencies and area authority Seventies, chosen and working across the world according to need,” Hinckley said.

Statistics released Saturday put church membership at 9,694,549 at the end of 1996. The church’s missionary force grew to 52,938, compared with 48,631 at the end of 1995, and there were 321,385 convert baptisms in 1996.

Hinckley said the new church officers wouldn’t have the status of full-time general church officer--reserved for members of the First and Second Quorums of the Seventy, the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, the Presiding Bishopric and the First Presidency.

“They will continue with their present [non-church] employment, reside in their own homes and serve on a church-service basis,” he said.

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Hinckley also spoke of plans to erect a building north of Temple Square that will have a seating capacity four times greater than the approximately 6,000-seat Tabernacle.

He said groundbreaking is scheduled for July 24, the 150th anniversary of the Mormon pioneers’ arrival in the Salt Lake Valley.

Hinckley said the Mormon Tabernacle Choir would continue to air its weekly broadcasts from the Tabernacle, but the new building will be used for the faith’s twice-a-year general conferences.

He also announced that property had been acquired in Albuquerque, N.M., and in Campinas, Brazil, for construction of new temples.