The Salt Lake Tribune ran an interesting series of articles starting Sunday and ending today. If current trends continue, so the series claims, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the longstanding majority religion in Utah, will be outnumbered in the state sometime around 2030. The series also highlights a few families in and out of the church and has some interesting things to say about worldwide LDS church statistics.

If you live in Utah or are otherwise interested in these issues, the series is worth a read.

* Avenues wards continue to lose members (July 24)
* Mormon portion of Utah population steadily shrinking (July 24)
* Mormons in the mix (July 25)
* LDS future may be divined from Grand County experience (July 25)
* Non-Mormon couple settle in LDS Rich County (July 25)
* Keeping members a challenge for LDS church (July 26)
* Unintended consequence of church’s ‘raising the bar’ (July 26)

A while ago I promised to write about my daily job responsibilities as a youth intern. As should be apparent from my lack of activity here, I’ve been quite busy after taking on the new position. I often joke that my job is one step above indentured servitude. I pretty much follow Pastor Chad around and do whatever he tells me to do.

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Since I’ve been inundated with blog spam in recent months, I’ve disabled commenting from unregistered users and opened up my blog so anyone can register. To register, either click the “log in” link in the comments section of any post or the “log in” link on the sidebar under “Administration”.

If any registered users start posting spam comments, they’ll have their account deleted. This should keep one step between me and the blog spammers, and hopefully annoy them enough that they’ll leave me alone.

I was really hoping this would also give users the ability to edit their own comments, but it doesn’t seem WordPress is smart enough to keep track of that. I’ve seen at least one hack along those lines that I’d like to investigate further, so stay tuned.

I’ve accepted a position at my church to serve as the full-time intern to the youth pastor. It’s a paid position lasting 10 weeks during the summer. I’ve been considering a career in full-time ministry for some time now and I’m excited for the opportunity to see what it’s like firsthand. I hope God will use this experience to show me whether or not this is what I should be doing for the rest of my life.

My current employer, ContentWatch, is keeping the door open for me to return in August when the internship ends. That’s a huge blessing and was the final straw for me in making the decision to do this. Janene is planning to quit her job at the end of the summer to start graduate school, so I’ll need good solid employment moving into the fall.

The internship will not pay as well as my current job, but we’ve had a few late wedding presents and other financial blessings this month. I’m confident the Lord will provide abundantly for us this summer. I’m truly grateful for all my blessings and hope to give back to the Lord this summer by serving Him and His people through this intership.