Cities Without A LDS Church Presence: Tonga

There are no villages or cities without a congregation in Tonga with over 1,000 inhabitants. On the above map, yellow and green squares indicate stakes and districts.

Purpose and Introduction

Most of the people of the world do not have access to Church representatives or worship services in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Besides countries that do not have an official Church presence with millions of inhabitants, nations like India and Nigeria have vast areas not penetrated by the Gospel yet have the Church established elsewhere. I will provide lists of cities from around the world by country with over 100,000 people that do not have missionaries or at least one congregation in them. For countries where the Church has been well established, I will provide a list of the 10 largest cities which do not have the Church's presence in them. In some countries, data is not available for villages and cities below a certain population. In that case, I will not be able to generate a list of at least 10 cities. Some of the city populations might be out of date due to the difficulty of gathering data from unstable areas of the world. The majority of the data I will use to compile these lists can be found at http://www.citypopulation.de/cities.html . If you have any information about a city opening for missionary work or receiving its first branch, please leave your comment with the corresponding country.

Countries listed in capital letters do not have a current congregations of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints or missionaries from the Church in any of the cities in the country.

Cites Defined

A problem I have come across making these lists is that many cities without an organized Church unit or missionaries are not far away from cities which do have a congregation or missionaries. I have addressed this problem by considering cities in developed countries over 10 miles away from any other city with a Church unit as not having the presence of the Church in it. Granted many strong members can reside in these cities along with missionaries visiting them, but I want to articulate the opportunity for people not in the Church to attend Church meetings and learn about the Gospel. If people live over 10 miles away from a meetinghouse or where missionaries work and reside, it makes it much less likely and more difficult for them to join the Church. As for developing or undeveloped countries, I have used a buffer of five miles instead of 10 miles since many travel on foot or bicycle to attend Church meetings.

Cities Without A LDS Church Presence

Thursday, August 21, 2008

Tonga

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