living in "the mission field"

Yesterday in church, we had a speaker from the stake who announced some of our ward stats. Houston is very cleverly divided into stakes that are shaped like pizza slices. This makes it so that driving from one end of the stake to the other is quite a drive, but it also makes it so that each stake need only have part of the downtown area. Our ward is the inside tip of our pizza slice, so we drive a ways to go to stake meetings, and we're the inside tip, downtown, or "red-headed step-child" ward of the stake. (quote from a long time member of the Melbourne ward) Suburban wards tend to be more ideal.
The stats: 623 members -- 93 avg. attendance at Sacrament meeting
290 Relief society -- 30 avg. attendance at R.S.
I can't remember for sure, but I think... 170 prospective elders -- 1 attending.

This has been tooted in my ears since we joined the ward and there have been huge efforts made to "find the lost sheep". (lost sheep being people we have records for but never contacted) The heart of the problem is that we don't have a membership clerk. Which means, no matter how much work we do, if no one can update the computer records, the stats won't change. From my experience running around knocking on doors trying to find these people, only one in three actually still lives at the address on the record. It is more than likely that half of the people who moved have moved to a new location in the ward, but that is a whole new can of worms. I estimate stats closer to the truth would be 300 members -- 100 attending and suspicions of 100 more members living in the ward boundaries, but we have no contact info for them. Frankly, I don't think that we are half as bad as we sound, but we're not good at record keeping because we don't have enough Priesthood to go around. I think the stake would do a lot better to send someone down to sit and move membership records around every weekend, than send us speakers to inspire us with our stats. Which they are working on. I don't mean to criticize anyone. It's just an interesting situation, and I think I've finally been here long enough to understand what is really going on.
James and I spent a little time working yesterday. I really like going out and knocking doors, it makes me understand missions and missionaries a lot better. We've got a stack of church videos and I try to leave them with people as we go. I thought James and I were being excellent missionaries yesterday since we've been volunteering to give investigators rides to church and James actually had someone come! Investigators in general aren't "feeling well" when it comes time to go to meetings, so I was pleasantly surprised when he made it. I like living in 'the mission field' as they call it.