After a more than a century-old relationship, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints will officially cut ties with the Boy Scouts of America.
The LDS Church announced it will develop and implement its own youth leadership program to serve members globally. The change affects hundreds of thousands of LDS boys across the United States, including in Idaho.
“It will be a little bump in the road, but long-term we'll be OK,” said Ore-Ida Council Scout Executive David Kemper.
The Ore-Ida Council oversees hundreds of troops and thousands of scouts from across Southwest Idaho and eastern Oregon.
“We have approximately 500 troops chartered to various chartered organizations, the LDS Church, community organizations, civic organizations,” Kemper said.
According to Kemper, about 80 percent of those 500 troops are chartered by the LDS Church - a sponsorship that will be ending in about a year-and-a-half as the church plans to move on with their own program.
“In 2019, we'll be organizing more troops, but we've still always had community organizations, which is the way most youth are served around the country," Kemper said. "It's just a little more predominate we're LDS-sponsored here, that will just change the demographics a little bit as we go forward in the future."
The LDS Church was one of the main scout recruiters in Southwest Idaho, until now. Troop 1 Assistant Scoutmaster Doug Fry says with the church's departure, recruiting new kids will be pivotal.
“If you start looking at states that aren't heavily influenced by one organization like that, you have to go out and recruit,” Fry said. “The blueprint is out there. So, we don't have to recreate the wheel or do anything like that."
One way the Boy Scouts is recruiting news kids into their program is by now allowing girls to become scouts.
“We're going to spin up a Girl Troop 1. We're going to continue to grow and recruit and stuff like that,” said Fry.
Boy Scouts is changing its name to Scouts BSA next year to help reflect their decision to include young women.
The LDS Church’s decision also doesn't mean every LDS teen or boy will leave the Scouts, and some will transfer to troops sponsored by a community organization.
“They'll start joining community troops and looking in those because they're not affiliated with one religious organization," Fry said. "We're affiliated with the American Legion, for example."
The LDS Church says the move is about creating its own youth program that can be used for its increasingly global membership.
Eagle Scout Kyle Patterson is looking forward to the possibilities of the church-sponsored program.
"I'm really excited to see the changes that are going to be coming, it sounds like it's going to be a more worldwide focus and approach to teaching some of the similar values as far as like service and becoming moral, and developing our character and giving us skills as well,” Patterson said.
He added that it will be interesting to see how his church can incorporate all the values he learned in Boy Scouts to a worldwide audience.
“To know that you're doing things that kids in Africa or Brazil or Mexico or Canada or anywhere are doing at the same time, I think will be really interesting,” Patterson said.