Church Growth in Houston Matches the City’s Urban Spread

In April 1836, a greatly outnumbered force led by Sam Houston legitimized their cry of independence by routing the Mexican army and capturing General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna at San Jacinto. So in August, brothers Augustus and John Allen, New York land speculators, began advertising a boggy coastal plain—part of the new Republic of Texas—as a town. They called it Houston.

Audacious as they were, the brothers could never have imagined the major petrochemical, industrial, shipping, and aerospace center their town would become. Today, metropolitan Houston has a population of approximately three million. Its skyscrapers jut like giant pylons from the flat horizon.

As in many other places, the Church in Houston grew steadily, but slowly, for decades. Then, with the organization of a stake in the fall of 1953, it began to burgeon.

The original Houston Stake, with its 3,900 members, covered forty-eight counties of Texas and two parishes of Louisiana. Within those boundaries, there are now seventeen stakes with approximately 47,000 members. A large number of those members live in the Houston metropolitan area.

Leona Gibbons, a native of Texas, unknowingly married an inactive Latter-day Saint during World War II. But he became active in the Church again while they were living in Dallas in the late 1940s, and she was baptized. They have lived in Houston since 1951.

Her husband was called as bishop of the Houston First Ward on the day the stake was organized in 1953. Now they are members of the Maplewood First Ward, Houston Texas South Stake. Church growth in the area during the intervening years, she says, has been “spectacular.”

An active seventies program and dedicated missionaries bring many good people into the Church, she says. But members and leaders must work hard to help them continue growing in the gospel.

Bishop Herman Berges of the Pasadena Second Ward, Houston Texas East Stake, is one of those leaders. After returning home around midnight recently from a temple trip to Dallas, the 60-year-old Iowa native, a chemist turned data processor, followed his weekly custom of arising early Wednesday morning to attend seminary with the youth of his ward. He makes a point of attending as many youth activities as possible.

He and his wife are also strong supporters of the program for the deaf and hearing-impaired that their ward operates; it serves members of their stake and adjacent ones as well. Two sister missionaries hold regular classes for the deaf in the ward, and other ward members interpret lessons and services in sign. Bishop Berges’ wife, Arlene, has helped lead the way by trying to learn to sign and encouraging others to do it as well. She is a visiting teacher for one of the ward’s deaf sisters.

Many Houston-area members find opportunities to serve by sharing not only their testimonies and time, but also their Church experience.

Tall, sunburned Aubrey Chudleigh, a native Texan, is president of the Waller Branch, Houston Texas Stake, located in a farming community of 1,100, some thirty-five miles northwest of Houston. His past experience as a bishop, as a high priests group leader, and in other leadership positions has helped in running the small branch. So, too, has his wife’s experience in the auxiliaries. On Sunday, Laverne Chudleigh may find herself teaching a Relief Society lesson, helping with a Sunday School class, or preparing classroom materials.

Rudy Guajardo grew up in the lower Rio Grande Valley, along the border of Mexico, where he, his wife, and children joined the Church in 1970. Not long afterward, they moved to the Houston area; he now owns a construction business in Conroe, about forty minutes north of downtown Houston.

He had served as a high councilor in an urban area of Houston and as bishop of a large, well-staffed ward in the Conroe Texas Stake before being called as president of the small Conroe Second (Spanish-speaking) Branch. Many of its members are from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, or Nicaragua, in the U.S. because they fled their countries or needed to seek work elsewhere. Being branch president, Brother Guajardo says, is “a lonely call. It’s all the same, though—the fight for souls. The problems aren’t any different. Only the language is different,” he explains. “The Church is the Church, whether it’s in Japanese or English or Spanish.”

Correspondent: Elder Clovis Hill, former journalism teacher, now a full-time missionary with a public communications assignment in the Texas Houston Mission.