LDS chapters are turning outward to combat infant mortality and help immigrants

The Hyde Park Second Ward choir is hardly a typical Latter-day Saint congregation choir.

First of all, there is a lot of clapping – during and after the songs. Furthermore, most members are not part of Chicago’s Hyde Park Second Ward itself. In fact, they are not even members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Some are Pentecostals, some Baptists, some Seventh-day Adventists.

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

With a little help from a Facebook ad, it worked. Today, the choir sings regularly for Latter-day Saints and non-Latter-day Saints, including at other churches in the city. When not performing, members share daily uplifting messages via the group text chain, throw birthday parties for each other and help fellow choir members with car maintenance and job searches.

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

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

Some efforts are more grassroots; others are initiated from above. But doubling church buildings as English Language Learning Locationsas in Utah, or reception centers for immigrantsAs in Arizona and Nevada, it operates only with the support of members and missionaries who live and serve in those areas.

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

Other meetings in the Chicago ward include early morning yoga taught by the female Relief Society president, a summer camp for immigrant children supported by the branch’s youth, and an annual Halloween haunted house that has averaged 5,000 visitors in recent years had.

“I’ve never been to the church building and there was no one there,” said Alyssa Calder Hulme, Randy’s wife, “except when we were the first people to go to yoga there at 5 a.m.”

On Sundays, instead of rushing to the door as Church meetings end, ward members gather together—on the grass when it’s nice outside, inside when it’s not—and share a meal prepared by volunteers , while the kids run around while the adults chat.

If you visit on Saturday, you might discover another faith group celebrating a holiday in the Latter-day Saints building. That’s because the church building has become a space that 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 arriving each week that, Alyssa said, the lay leadership has given up on confirming them during sacrament meeting. Around 2019, the neighborhood split, creating two Hyde Park communities. According to Randy, the meeting the Hulmes are attending is already bursting at the seams, thanks to all the new additions.

“We do some things that are atypical,” Alyssa said, “but it brings people closer to Christ and we support people’s basic needs for food, community and child care.”

Memphis: A Joint Effort Against Child Mortality

For nearly two years, Latter-day Saints in Memphis, Tennessee, have been working with the city’s NAACP chapter to reduce infant mortality in the area. historically one of the highest in the countrythrough a program known as MyBaby4Me.

The ongoing project was free to the public and aimed at new and expectant parents. It started as a conversation between regional leaders of the NAACP and Latter-day Saints. Since then, it has grown into an ongoing service supported by Latter-day Saint volunteers with backgrounds in medicine, social work, and related fields.

Other church members, including youth, have become involved by providing meals and child care for parents attending classes on nutrition and newborn safety. Some sew blankets and burp cloths, while others outfit their expectant parents with baby clothes, cribs, car seats and other essentials.

Last December, the program hosted a Christmas party hosted by the neighborhood, which came together to provide the food, decorations and gifts.

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

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

Another testament to their success, the program is expanding to Nashville and Little Rock, Arkansas.

At the same time, the expanding and impactful project to unite behind has given Latter-day Saints a common purpose.

A particularly moving experience for Lynn came after he and Joell completed a presentation on MyBaby4Me to an area chapter about the program’s progress and needs.

Lynn became emotional at the memory and said a man from the audience came up to the couple and said he couldn’t come often, but that he had received a witness during the presentation that he had to help. “And so I’ll help whatever I can,” Lynn remembered him saying.

The former Latter-day Saint missionary said the experience was one of many “powerful times where we really felt like this was out of our hands.”