How the Manti LDS Temple Mural Restorers Look Like Joseph Smith; new congregations growing in Africa, declining in the US

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Discovering truth in art

Like the teenage Joseph Smith, the preservationists who restored the beautiful murals in the renovated and rededicated Manti Temple were searching for the truth.

“The truth is what the artist wanted to show us,” Peter Schoenmann, co-director of the Chicago-based PARMA Conservation (Preservation and Recovery of Masterpieces of Art), said in a press release. “It’s very simple: there are several obscuring layers that can cloud the truth, and a conservator’s job is to preserve only the original.”

So these art experts spent weeks finding the right chemical mixtures and then worked to remove the various varnishes that had been applied to each of the murals over the years to finally reveal their inherent shine.

“It is a privilege to work here,” said Elizabeth Kendall, owner and co-director of PARMA in the press release. “We have discovered something that has been hidden for decades.”

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

• The Creation Room, painted by Sanpete County’s own CCA Christensen in the late 1800s, posed the biggest challenge.

“We found at least four different types of overpaint, as well as a coating that is very difficult to remove,” Kendall explains. “He was an exceptional artist and people didn’t see that until we took away all the other renovations that had happened over the decades.”

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

“It’s the plaster wall itself that’s cracking,” Schoenmann said. “Then it is transposed and transferred to the canvas and the canvas splits. We must be surgical in everything we do to make a crack repair appear invisible or disappear.”

Using “small brushes,” Kendall added, “we only paint exactly where the crack is.”

• Minerva Teichert’s 1947 World Room masterpiece, Manti’s most celebrated and striking mural, proved the easiest to refresh.

It actually needed to be cleaned, Kendall said, but that was no small job considering the artwork covers 4,000 square feet.

Thanks to this meticulous care, the ‘truths’ of all artists have now been restored and revealed once again.

Looking for truth? Restore truth? Reveal truth? For devout Latter-day Saints, that sounds a lot like the groundbreaking story of Church founder Joseph Smith.

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Ups and downs in municipalities

While Church membership grew by nearly 253,000 last year to more than 17.2 million worldwide, the addition of wards and branches, rather than raw membership numbers, is often seen as a better barometer of growth.

On that note, independent researcher Matt Martinich pointed out these interesting tidbits about the church’s expansion in his blog at ldschurchgrowth.blogspot.com:

• Of the sixteen countries that added the most neighborhoods or municipalities in 2023, twelve were in Africa, led by Nigeria (+41 units), the Democratic Republic of Congo (+20) and Ghana (+17).

• Outside Africa, the Philippines achieved another 24 units, followed by Mexico (+13), Ecuador (+10) and Peru (+5).

• On the other hand, the US saw a net decrease of 21 municipalities, followed by Russia (-12) and the United Kingdom (-10).

“The United States has now been the country with the largest net decline in congregations for the entire world for two years in a row,” Martinich noted, even as the country saw a “net increase of 105,774 members (to 6,868,793) between the end of 2021 and the end 2023,” and created twelve additional stakes (or clusters of congregations) last year.

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

Despite all this, Martinich concluded, “there is no evidence from examination of these statistics that the church in the United States has experienced a decline in membership activity or conversion rates over the past decade, given the stability in the ratio between members and municipalities.’

From The Tribune

• The Church’s top female leaders have moved up the pecking order of the hierarchy over the years.

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

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