One of the unique things about the Mormon Church is that members are “assigned” geographically to a congregation, and exceptions to ward assignment are rarely successful. When boundaries change, it can be very disruptive to regularly attending members, forcing them away from long-term friendships into a ward where they don’t know people. But it also creates an opportunity for the new ward to make attempts to reactivate those who are new to their ward but unknown to them, who may not have been actively attending the prior ward due to various reasons. Do ward boundary changes net an increase in attendance or a decrease?
First of all, reactivation is not generally the aim of a boundary realignment. It’s often done for other reasons: driving distances, attrition or growth that make congregation size sub-optimal, or outsize age distribution (e.g. all retirement age people, no youth or primary, or too many kids to staff the callings to support).
When I was growing up, there was a boundary change that I don’t think my parents have ever gotten over. They were extremely angry about it since it increased the drive times for the people being merged into an existing larger ward by 20 minutes or more each way. My dad had also been in branch leadership of the unit that was being dissolved. I was too young to really understand what was going on, but I heard about that boundary change for the next decade. At the time, nobody would sell land to the Church due to the prejudice against Mormons in the area. We had previously (as a branch) been meeting in the Oddfellows Hall which was graciously offered by that group.
At the time we were forced back into that larger more distant ward, we still had a break between the meetings which meant that the longer drive times had to be driven twice per Sunday. As a result, a lot of the families in the ward invited the traveling families over between meetings, which is one way I gained a lot of friends in that ward, people I’m still Facebook friends with. In a fairly short amount of time, the ward was deemed way too big, and our branch was split off again, but we still held meetings in that building. The change to a three hour block made it much more feasible.
About 6 years ago, we went through a boundary change that was very difficult for me. I really disliked the new ward which was much older and more conservative (and brought it up a lot). Racist and homophobic comments were tolerated. The Gospel Doctrine classes were incurious and boring. The Relief Society lessons were possibly even worse. Only six families were brought in from my existing ward at the time, only one of which were our friends, but there were also families brought in from another ward, people we didn’t know at all. We really only knew the six families from our direct neighborhood. We made some friends, but our closest friends we had known for over a decade, raising our kids together, were all assigned elsewhere.
We moved during the pandemic which is clearly not a time to make new friends. We were assigned to the Primary, which is also out of sight / out of mind, but the new ward was (again, IMO) probably the worst one I’ve ever been in as far as political dog-whistles, conservative fear-mongering, Trumpiness, leader worship, obedience-focus, and lack of content that is at all interesting or thoughtful. I can’t say how much of that is ward-specific vs. just how the Church is now (or how much I hear it now–maybe it’s me).
So they’ve got another boundary change. Another bunch of people who are probably just like the last set of people, people I didn’t know and probably was never really going to know since Church relationships are usually superficial anyway. By contrast, I’m visiting my hometown and will get together with my childhood Church friends, the few who still live there (none of whom remain in the Church). I can’t wait to see them! But I don’t think it’s really possible to make these types of lifelong friendships at my age, that transcend the Church.
- What’s the worst ward boundary change you’ve been through? The best?
- Do you think on the whole these boundary changes are a net positive or negative for the church members?
- Do you think the Church loses more active members or gains more through these changes?
Discuss.
Wheat & Tares 
When my two youngest kids were still at home we moved to a new state and new ward. We noticed right away that the new ward was very short on youth and my kids were very unhappy about it. Meanwhile, we were aware of another ward with boundaries adjacent to ours which had a much more vibrant youth population. So we really considered transferring.
I shared my concerns with our bishop and the other bishop. I was told by both of them (same stake) that the stake president would never sign off on this. And I wondered to myself, what does this really mean? We were so new, it wasn’t like we were walking away from relationships or callings or any other strong link.
What I was told was very simple: we were welcome to attend any ward any time as “visitors”. But if we wanted callings (which in my previous sick life I thought was important) and wanted my son to advance in the priesthood (from Teacher to Priest), we would need to attend the ward that corresponded to our Church records.
The Church only has as much power as we give it and back then we gave it a lot so we stayed with the original ward and it was not a good experience for any of us. I put the interests of the Church ahead of my family members and yes my kids really missed out.
There are good reasons for the ward assignment system we have and I can see the obvious downside to ward shopping, but it doesn’t always work out for individuals.
I don’t know that I’ve ever had a good experience with a ward boundary realignment. Two I particularly didn’t enjoy had parallel effects on me and then decades later on my kids. For the first, I was a teen living in Utah Valley. Our ward hadn’t changed boundaries for I think the close to a decade we had lived there. One day the stake presidency announced that they were tinkering with ward boundaries to accommodate new growth. I was relieved to find that my best friends were still in my ward, but still sad that my ward that had always felt pretty stable had suddenly shifted, and I have never felt as much stability and comfort in a ward since. The second experience was similar for my teen sons, when the ward we had lived in ever since we had lived in our city one day had a big chunk whacked off in the process of creating a fourth ward out of three. My sons were really sad to lose friends, although they were just getting near old enough to drive, and they ended up being better able to maintain friendships than they had feared.
Really, I totally understand the Church’s need to realign boundaries at times. What I find frustrating about the process, though, is how utterly opaque it is. A few men gather in a room and look at some maps and consider some possibilities, and then they come out and dictate to the rest of us how things are going to go. There’s no input from women or from the rank and file generally. I mean, I realize that this is totally in line with the Mormon norm of top-down control, and obedient members whose only job is to shut up and go along, but this is a *bad* norm!
I think that once you’ve been LDS Red-pilled, it’s really hard to like any ward. The leader worship and insistence that we have it all gives you constant internal strife. It’d be like going to a campaign event for a republican when you’re a libertarian and only partially agree on some issues.
In fairness, before being red-pilled, I probably wouldn’t have liked sitting in a room with myself either at church. That’s why I don’t base this on ward but my new circumstances in life.
We moved to a new ward when I was 8. About 2 years later a part of the ward was carved off to form a brand new ward that included chunks of the ward we’d moved out of 2 years earlier. For me it was great. I knew almost everyone in the new ward, and there was a really great group of people around my age. That was the group I did all of the youth activities with and came of age with. I have really great memories of that ward and the people from that ward, many of whom are Facebook friends, and many of whom are now out of the church, similar to your experience. Things got reshuffled again while I was on my mission. My youngest siblings remember a very different ward than I do, and the new ward always felt unfamiliar to me every time I came back to visit.
I think boundary changes are a net positive for the church. In some situations for some people they can be hard, but overall I think keeping wards at the right size and blend of people is a desirable objective. I think geographic boundaries, particularly outside the Mormon corridor, often have the effect of putting people together who wouldn’t otherwise socialize. I know that’s been the case for me and it’s been a source of personal growth. But there are limits. Church shouldn’t be too comfortable, but too uncomfortable, such as the situation you describe in your current ward, is also undesirable. That tends to happen when there is a supermajority of people who get too comfortable expressing their views as if they are the only legitimate ones, such that nobody harboring alternative views feels comfortable speaking up. This is where I think it’s important that designers of boundaries try to draw them to cut across demographics, which can sometimes alleviate this particular problem but isn”t guaranteed to. I once lived in a ward with a lot of need that was right next to the wealthiest and oldest ward in the stake. The leadership in the needy ward (I was one of them) were all exhausted. How much better for everyone it would have been to have split the wards along the opposite axis. I see evidence that my current stake has attempted to do that, and I think it’s the right approach.
I have to wonder how the boundary changing experience would be different if even one woman was allowed to participate at any level.
When I was a teen, the boundaries of two wards were realigned to create a third ward. I went from being one of 18 girls my age to being one of three. The other two had been in a different ward before the change, were not my friends, and were semi-active. I made it work by becoming friends with the girls slightly younger than I. One is still a good friend many decades later. So not a great experience, but also not horrible. I learned valuable lessons about making life work when faced with challenges.
I have seen net activation work when in a ward that honestly had too few active members to be fully functional. Lots of members on paper doesn’t always mean lots of people in the pews on Sunday. We really needed people, which was beneficial for many on both sides of the activity equation.
As an adult, I struggle with the fact that the only factors that seem to matter in boundary changes are total number of ward members and number of Melchizedek Priesthood holders. After one boundary change, my ward ended up with only one person who could play the organ. She was then called as Relief Society president. I totally supported that calling for her as I think it’s important that members with musical ability get to do something besides music, but it was difficult for a while in that ward. (Maybe that is why the institutional Church is slowly dropping music from our worship?)
I grew up in a suburban California ward that had been in existence for years before I was born, and its boundaries remained unchanged for my entire time in it, even long after I moved away to go to college. The stakes had been reorganized around it once or twice, but the ward itself remained untouched. That is, until just last year, when it was finally consolidated with 2 adjacent wards to create one geographically large ward. I’m a nuanced member now and tend to be pretty negative about all things related to the COJCOLDS, and I do experience a little schadenfreude when I hear news that point to North American shrinkage in the Church–but this felt different, almost like a gut punch. To me in my formative years, that ward WAS the whole Church as far as I was concerned, regardless of what group of old men happened to be nominally in charge in SLC. To see it disappear after nearly 50 years of intact boundaries is indicative to me as to how dire the future is for the Church. People I know who still live in the area say that local leaders gave no specific reason for the realignment (multiple other wards and stakes in the area were consolidated at the same time), though the elephant in the room (obvious to everyone with functioning eyeballs) is that activity and membership in that region have been in rapid decline for years, but with no correlating decline in overall human population there.
About 7 years ago, in a different part of the U.S., I lived through a massive multi-stake realignment, that saw our thriving ward broken up and redrawn. It broke up some very well established social connections, many of whom tried to maintain them even though they now went to separate wards (this practice was discouraged by our local leaders). The new ward we went to never really felt connected in the same way. The worst part of the whole process was that all of the members were blindsided by the change, and given very little advance notice, and it was totally opaque in how it came about. Obviously, there had to have been meetings about it for months, but none of us rank-and-file members were even allowed to know they were happening at all. The whole process was carried out with no input from the people who would most be affected by it. By contrast, when our local public school district anticipated making small realignments to attendance boundaries in conjunction with proposed construction of a new middle school, it was a years-long process that consisted of publicly-released demographic studies, multiple public comment periods, and special school board meetings in an attempt to give the public as much say in the process as possible.
As a deacon, I was in a ward far, far away from the Mormon Corridor that actually bad a booming youth program (30+ active deacons). I had great friends in the ward. When the ward was split, while some of my friends ended up in the other ward, I still had plenty of friends in my ward, so it wasn’t really a difficult transition for me.
Contrast that with the effect a ward split had on some of my kids when they were in high school. We’ve lived in our house for over 25 years. When we first arrived, the newly constructed homes were full of children, and the primary and youth programs were very large. However, by the time our kids were in high school, the neighborhood was starting to age a bit, so the youth programs were much smaller. For some reason, the stake presidency felt a neighboring ward was deficient in something (Melchizedek priesthood holders? Youth? I don’t know, it was never explained to the members.), and they decided to carve out a very small slice of our ward–maybe 8 active families–and move them into this neighboring ward.
You wouldn’t think this would make a huge difference, but that slice literally contained *all* of the church friends of two of my high school aged kids. In fact, that slice contained almost all of the active youth of the same gender plus or minus two years of age of my two kids. In other words, this change decimated the youth program experience for my two kids. I went and talked to my bishop about it, and he shared my concerns but said there was nothing he could do. I noted how our ward’s youth program had been obliterated, and he agreed. I suggested that perhaps the two wards’ youth programs should combine to make them more vibrant and active. I was told that was an interesting idea, but nothing ever happened–the Church just doesn’t work that way.
I suspect that the stake presidency looked at the youth numbers pre- and post-split, and the numbers made sense to them “on paper” (active kids who were listed as active because their family shows up to sacrament meeting once a quarter), but they never consulted with ward youth leaders or parents because, had they done so, they would have understood that the numbers they saw on paper and the numbers of the kids actually showing up for youth activities were vastly different. Both of my high school aged kids, who had previously loved going to their youth activities, just stopped going because they were the only kids their age there, and they just ended up “hanging out” with their youth leaders, which isn’t something they considered to be worth their while. One of my kids is still actively participating in the Church despite all of this, but my other kid has stepped away from the Church. I think there is a reasonably good chance that my inactive kid would still be participating in the Church if this particular ward split had never happened–having at least a few good friends in the ward is really pretty important when you’re in high school.
Now in the deep south, our tiny ward building (no pews!) is 3 miles away. The nearest other units’ buildings are 79 miles west, 79 miles north, 32 miles east, and 75 miles south. Sure, a big ward would be awesome. But I’m not driving that far regularly. Mutual would be a huge burden if we go east, and impossible if we go any other direction. I would expect any unit consolidation to result in lower attendance, including my own.
Another thought–
My mom’s ward and stake were substantially realigned a few years ago (pre-covid). The new boundaries didn’t readily make much sense to her, so she earnestly asked her old bishop, a close family friend, what the criteria were for deciding how to draw the new wards. He explained that the area authorities used a map of where Melchizedek Priesthood holders (i.e. adult male members) lived in the area and drew boundaries to evenly distribute them among the new wards. Though a very conservative, traditionalist “follow the brethren” TBM, my mom is also a widow who lives alone, and she was quick to comment on the fact that she and people like her would be completely invisible to such a process. She actually called it sexist, a word I have otherwise never heard her say out loud in a Church context. I don’t disagree with her.
Over 40 years ago in Illinois, our ward was being split. The ward clerk came to me apologetic, saying he had tried to get us in the good ward, but he wasn’t able to gerrymander the boundaries enough to include us. I told him it was right, we were going into the best ward anyway.
That’s been my attitude ever since, I’m going to end up in the best ward.
Even when some have complained, I’ve always found new friends and positive experiences in ward boundary changes, even when I’ve had to drive farther to attend meetings.
Jack Hughes, yes! I’ve never been involved in a realignment process, but the criterion I’ve always heard is where the tithe-paying Melchizedeck Priesthood holders lived. It seems like a double whammy, to show that it’s only the men who count, and that it’s the money the Church cares about in the end. I don’t think those are always 100% true, but it sure is a telling criterion!
I would love to have a large number of wards split out from the current ward structure. To me, the ideal sacrament meeting would have <50 members in attendance so that true relationships could be fostered. When the attendance gets to 100, split. This would require creative thinking on how to staff youth programs, primaries, etc., but creative sharing between wards (i.e Wards 1 + 2 meet together for Primary on Sunday, Wards 1,2,3,4 meet weekly for Youth Activity) would make it much better. If you've ever had the chance to worship in a small branch somewhere cut off from the rest of the world, you'll appreciate the camaraderie that such an intimate congregation can generate. Bigger is not better.
The unit realignment process completely ignores vital community relationships. Anyone who goes through the process can likely attest to the many welfare problems that spring up when normal members are suddenly stripped out of the ward community because of where they live. When it happens, you hear comments like:
“Oh, Sister Jones knew the Smith’s well and brought the Smith children to Primary, but now she is gone. The kids have disappeared.”
So many other friendships that people rely on for emotional support and understanding instantly vanish. People can and do fall through the cracks when these long-term relationships are negated. I have even seen people try to transfer their memberships to other wards so they can continue to minister to their needy friends and keep their own temple recommends. The answer has always been to force adults to stay in their assigned ward. However, such tensions do testify to the value and importance of that special charitable soul and friend. We all hope we have one or more of those in our lives.
In my parents ward in the Moridor our family had many friends but were never part of the STOP group. The ward was eventually split and we were put into a ward where we didn’t know anyone. That was the best thing that could have happened as my parents were then placed into youth callings and were able to meaningfully serve with their kids.
In contrast, in my current ward outside of Utah, all of the youth go to the same high school and were great friends with each other. The ward was split and placed half of the youth into a ward that attended a different high school and brought a completely different high school into our new ward. The kids never really meshed and the active youth groups became smaller and smaller as the kids gradually stopped coming. We were told that this high school problem was explained to the brethren when the split was being planned but all were assured that it was what the Lord wanted.
We’ve been involved in four different wards in the past eleven years without ever moving from our neighborhood. I won’t bore with the details but we all suffered from this. Two of my four kids in particular finally gave up on ever having church friends and all of their friends are not members of our faith. You can probably guess how much they care about attending church without any connections.
Because the last iteration was particularly horrible, this topic comes up a lot in Mormon water cooler moments, including when neighbors not of our faith community are present. Our neighbors could not believe that we are assigned where to worship. This is just not a thing among any of the 15+ faith traditions our neighbors attend. I think they viewed our location assignment as really infantilizing. Because it is.
Despite a number of boundary changes, we’ve lived in the same ward for over 25 years. That being said, I’ve seen branches based on ethnic/language needs arbitrarily closed. There was also a branch that was the ugly stepchild of the area, being traded between stakes before finally being closed
Old Man, the last boundary change we experienced moved a small group into a different ward. That group included an older couple my husband had home taught for years. It was not a good change for them. Our response is that we are still their ministering people. I’m pretty sure the ward they actually live in does not support them in any way, though I honestly can’t tell if that’s because the new ward neglects them or the couple doesn’t welcome people from the new ward. But it ultimately doesn’t matter because we still care about and for them. Of course, it helps that we live about 3 blocks from them and know their bishop well, so it’s all easily handled on a personal basis.
Back in the late ‘90s when I was a teenager, the two wards in my small town in rural Washington were recombined after 10-odd years apart. Overall it was rejoicing across the board—especially among the teens of both wards, who all attended the same high school and same seminary classes, but strangely went to different wards. The leadership of both wards were also relieved to not have staffing problems anymore. While a few folks felt a little guilt that they hadn’t been able to make the new ward work or sufficiently grow the church in our town or whatever, most members couldn’t have cared less. Ward realignment in this case was a definite positive.
By contrast: back in the ‘90s, L. Tom Perry went down to Puerto Rico (where I served my mission in the 2000s), and downgraded multiple stakes back down to districts. His stated rationale was that this “great pruning” would lead to greater future growth. You can probably guess this didn’t happen. I of course didn’t know the state of the church in PR before Perry’s visit, whether those cuts were truly necessary or not; but I can you what it was like when I got there, and at a bare minimum, the “pruning” had not been good for local morale. The PR membership was still talking morosely about the stake massacre years later, and enthusiasm to help the missionaries was tepid. Overall, I suspect realignment there was a net negative, and was my first exposure to the idea that the GAs sometimes don’t know what they’re doing.
Unless the church changes geographically determined ward participation, or unless it starts ordaining women, or unless it starts allowing women without the priesthood to serve in callings that presently only men can fill, then there are always going to be boundary changes, and those boundary changes are always going to negatively affect somebody. And that sucks, but it really is unavoidable unless they change something that right now is considered fundamental. There were two boundary changes that happened while I was a bishop. I learned (as some commenters have already pointed out) that the real problem is that tithe-paying priesthood holders trump any and all other metrics when they are drawing the new boundaries. That is a church requirement, not an option. The result is that I have a youth group in my ward that is split between 3 to 5 different high schools, depending on the year, and the group itself is meager compared to neighboring wards.
I could go on and on about the negative effects of the tithe-paying priesthood holder requirement, but I mention the youth aspect because protection of the youth and the youth’s continued activity in the church are paid incessant lip-service by the Church, but it is apparently not important enough to weigh at least as heavily as money and male-ness. The reason the tithing/priesthood metric trumps all else is because if you do not have enough tithe-paying priesthood holders in a ward then you cannot staff the positions that only “worthy” men are allowed to hold (bishopric; EQ; WML; YM leadership; even sunday school president). So, because of the male/priesthood requirement, and the inflexibility of the geographical attendance requirement, boundaries are what they are, everything else be damned. This is a perfect example of a systemic misogynistic problem that severely and negatively affects the day-to-day lives of the general membership of the church (see basically any of the comments to the OP). The problem is baked-in. Thing is, most members aren’t in a position to know the dots well enough to connect them.
For those who are hoping for any of that to change soon (or ever), may God bless you in your journey.
It irks me that so many church members let arbitrary ward boundaries define the limits to their friendships. It’s letting some stake president’s convenience 10+ years ago define one’s social circle today. Sure, Sunday meetings increase the odds of randomly bumping into those residing in just one particular location. But if that Sunday meeting is one’s main social outlet, one needs to get our more. Yes, it takes some additional effort. Non-ward-defined get-togethers aren’t organized by an EQ or RS. But do it anyway. (And recall that someone stuck wearing ward-boundary social blinders probably isn’t your type anyway). A non-ward-based social activity might also be more comfortable to friends not of our faith. Or start simple. Attend another ward’s EQ or RS as well as your own. Just say you like the friends there too and came to say hello. And finally, shame on any ward council that tries to disguise its own social discomfort over combining social activities with another ward by saying it’s “not building ward unity”.
About 12 years ago my parents’ ward was dissolved and the members were split and combined with two different wards. It was a disaster. It went so badly that after a few years they put the old ward back together and stuck it in a new stake. I’ve lived in my home for 8 years and the boundaries have changed three times, but the changes have been good, and the boundaries have been stable for about 5 years now.
Pagan, I get your point, but I don’t think shaming people for having a hard time connecting with people when they’re divided away by a boundary realignment is fair or kind. Connecting with friends as an adult is hard for many (most?) people, and we need all the supports we can get. When a ward boundary change removes one of them, it just makes it that much harder to continue a friendship. Not impossible of course. But harder. It sounds like you might be a more outgoing person who isn’t so deterred by having that support removed, but the same isn’t true for all of us.
I have experienced boundary changes in several states around the US. For the changes made in Utah, I can totally understand Pagans viewpoint… people who literally share a backyard wall can find a way to maintain friendships outside of the ward. On the other hand, when my east coast ward went from 1.2 hours in one direction to 1.75 hours in the opposite direction it simply was not a feasible thing to maintain the same level of relationships built. During one change, our ward added 5 square miles which included 4 active families with kids going to 5 high schools. We were only there a year after that, but the youth program was rough, especially when each ward was supposed to offer seminary, those kids had to get up SOO EARLY!
I feel as though boundary changes in the Mormon corridor are viewed as just as hard as those outside, but really they don’t compare. Similarly you get people who drive hours each month to go minister vs my Utah experience of not having “time” to go 6 doors down. Different worlds that most people don’t understand and put their own bias on as judgements when it is apples to oranges.
Pagan,
I don’t think you are not factoring in that the friendships that develop in ministerial capacities are inherently different. We worship alongside each other. We are called to suffer and serve with people. Grabbing a meal with someone does not replace that.
Yes, the metric is tithe paying Melchizedek priesthood holders. For years I’ve been experimenting with the mteric… I pay tithing for our family under my membership record, not my husband’s. Dunno if it works, but so far it seems to be keeping him out of leadership roles….
Several years ago when I was serving as RS President, our stake leadership developed a plan for ward boundary changes, but before submitting it to SLC, called in RS, YW, and Primary Presidents to get their opinion of the new boundaries being considered. We had different views of the recommendations. The men listened and revised their plans. Made a huge difference for the better. I know there is improved decision making when women have a seat at the table, and wish for the day when it becomes the norm.
When we were taking the missionary discussions, one of the first sacrament meetings we attended was a reorganization of ward boundaries. My father commented that he just did not understand why people were crying about having to go to church with another group of people. It was an interesting introduction to the way the Church works.
The entire geographical division/assignment of members to wards is not just a factor with realigning boundaries. Twelve years ago, my mother-in-law moved out of our house (oh blessed day) into a condo in another ward. In her late 70s at the time, she had moved to Utah after living her entire life in California. She had finally (after five years with us) grown comfortable in our ward, had friends, and did not dread going to church each week. When she moved, she went to the bishop and asked if she could keep attending our ward–her condo being only ten miles away…but, of course, in a completely different stake. He told her no without even a second thought. She went back several times and got the same answer; the final time, she called him an “effing hypocrite” and stormed out of his office…and did not attend church for nearly two years after that. I get the potential problem of ward shopping from an institutional perspective, but the lack of flexibility can be quite problematic given the problems associated with leadership roulette and other circumstances (e.g. work schedules, unique family situations) that call for such flexibility.
On a personal level, I hate it when our ward moves from my preferred 9:00am start time to the egregiously terrible 1:30pm start time. It totally interferes with my Sunday nap, not to mention that the later time is right in the middle of the games during the NFL season. Because of my employment at BYU, I cannot simply “visit” another ward on anything approaching a regular basis without risking my temple recommend/job. I am always tempted to just rent a room in the home of someone in the ward that meets earlier…
Small potatoes. Imagine having to move from Palmyra to Kirtland–and from Kirtland to Independence–and from Independence to Far West–and from Far West to Nauvoo–and from Nauvoo to Salt Lake–and from Salt Lake to some distant region within the larger of realm of Deseret. Surely we can endure a shift in the boundaries of our ward or stake for the sake of the Kingdom.
Jack, I concur on the small potatoes. Your examples are all big potatoes, as moving is always a big thing and one’s ward will clearly change when one moves from one location to another. But most of this discussion is about ward changes when someone doesn’t move–the boundaries changes, but the house stays the same.
But small potatoes isn’t a green light (to mix metaphors) to ignore people’s real issues–real to them, even if summarily dismissed by others. Sometimes the potatoes are small, but if they’re mine, they’re important to me because they’re the only potatoes that I have. And if they’re important to an individual, then maybe they need to be important to a priesthood leader, who leads not by fiat and command but by love, persuasion, long suffering, kindness, gentleness, and meekness to help the person understand.
I wonder if this is more of a problem in Zion than in the mission field. Out where I live, we have a manageable number of people whose records are officially outside the ward boundary lines–you can see the dots on the ward map at lds.org. Sometimes a person has an ex-spouse in the geographic ward, so he/she and family attend another ward, with permission. I’m aware of an elderly lady who was in a ward and near the boundary but her children, sister, and good friends lived on the other side of the boundary, and they allowed to be a member of the other ward until her death. My sister and her family attend the ward where she lived for decades, although they live in another ward; her husband is not a member but occasionally attends. Local leaders approved her membership in the non-geographic ward because the family friends network might help the husband should he think about joining the church one day.
In another case in another state, a young man (20s) was attending a ward with a good friend, and he joined the church and he became a member of his friend’s ward, although he lived in another ward. That ward also had a strong and active YSA group, and YSA was pretty much dead in what was his geographic ward. He didn’t even know that he lived in another ward. Both wards were in the same stake. The missionaries taught every lesson at his friend’s apartment. Bishop didn’t want the man baptized in his ward because he didn’t live there, but ward mission leader and stake president agreed that he could be a member of the friend’s ward since that is where the support network was and the man was shy and timid. About a year later, as the man was looking at getting endowed, the bishop told him that he needed to start attending what was actually his home ward, where he didn’t know a soul, where the YSA program was defunct, and where the chapel was actually about 10 miles farther from his house. He asked to keep attending the same ward, and the bishop, supported now by the stake president, told him no, and he went to the other ward for a few Sundays and soon quit coming to church because he knew no one and, sadly, no one even tried to welcome this man in. Was he right to quit coming to church? No, because his job is to do what he’s told (?), but were the local leaders right? Maybe not, because leaders aren’t supposed to place stumbling blocks before their people, and ward boundaries were a stumbling block for this man. What grave disorder does making a few rare exceptions cause? This man’s potatoes might have seemed very small to the bishop and stake president, but to that man they were the only potatoes he had. We both know that he could have gone to the new ward where he could have blossomed and thrived, but he didn’t know that, and he didn’t have the faith to believe that moving to the other ward was in his best interest.
I’d rather have a person attend a ward of his choice than not attend at all. Ward boundaries can help the church administer its programs, but people should be ministered to, not administered.
@Jack, having the boundaries slightly shifted as I mentioned in my previous comment was actually small potatoes to my wife and me. However, as I mentioned above, it was big potatoes to my two high-school aged kids. It’s really hard for high school aged kids to participate in the Church if they have absolutely no one else their age attending Sunday meetings or the youth activities. That’s big potatoes to them. Looking back, I wish that I had also just “transferred” my family into the other ward (even though we weren’t quite in the boundaries), at least until my kids were comfortable attending that ward, and then perhaps my wife and I could have returned to our assigned ward while our kids mostly attended the other ward until they graduated from high school.
At the special meeting to announce the split, the only reason given for the boundary change by the stake president was “inspiration”. That is, of course, a lie. There was apparently a deficiency in the neighboring ward that he felt needed addressing, but he didn’t talk about that. He also did not consult with the YM/YW leaders in the two wards to really understand the effect of the split would have on the youth (because I asked them if they had been consulted). Presumably, the reason that the youth leaders weren’t consulted is because news of the pending ward split would have gotten out to the whole ward before the final announcement of the split was made.
The way I would have liked to have seen the process occur is for the stake president to come to each of the potentially affected wards, state the problem he is trying to address, and then ask for feedback from the members for the next month or so before making any decisions on how to proceed. Instead, the way the Church operates is for the stake president to work in secrecy behind the scenes so that he can then surprise the stake with his final and unalterable decision that he attributes purely to “inspiration”. I know, at least in this case (because one of the stake president’s counselors complained to me about this) that the stake presidency received *a ton* of negative feedback about the ward boundary changes for months and months after the change occurred. I just wonder if perhaps things might have been better if the stake president had received this feedback in an open process *before* the change rather receiving all of this feedback *after* the change when his hands are tied to reverse himself since he’s already claimed that his decision was “inspired”. In many (most) cases, these boundary realignments are not “inspired” for “the sake of the Kingdom”. No, they are purely cold, calculated, generally uninspired business decisions based on hard numbers. As others have mentioned, the key (and possibly only) metric considered may be active (or even tithe paying) Melchizedek priesthood holders. Perhaps they should also include metrics like “number of youth in each age category actually regularly attending activities” or even something as shocking as “women”. But again, a lot of these potential problems would likely come to light before a final decision was made if it was presented to the membership *before* a final decision is made.
@Joni The reason that women are not involved anywhere in this calculus, is that it is based on active priesthood members. A certain number is required for any unit configuration. Whether that serves the needs of other members is irrelevant. Of course women, the “work horses” of the church are expected to make do, make it work. For the first time in my 63 years, I found a ward split/merger during the Pandemic to be just intolerable. Like many after the lockdown, I wondered if I could force myself back and this new ward did not help. I can’t resist teaching adult Sunday School–forever Gospel Doctrine to me, so I’m back. At least one Sunday a month.
Boundaries seem fairly porous in my neck of the woods. A family living literally just around the corner from us attend the branch in a nearby town rather than the ward in our city, and have done so for longer than we’ve been living in the city. (We’d been living here for years before we even knew there were members living around the corner.) That branch and our ward have more recently been combining youth activities. I don’t know the history. Further, one extended family in the ward had a falling out with ward leadership before the pandemic and decamped en masse to that branch.. This in stark contrast to my previous stake where anyone wanting to escape difficult ward leadership literally moved house, to the other side of the stake and county.
Here in California, there are no more ward splits. It is all recombining splits done years ago that didn’t work. In my town, we went from four English, two Spanish and a Samoan branch to now just two English and One Spanish ward. Everybody is happy to have a bigger ward and their friends back!
Thanks for your responses, Georgis and mountainclimber479.
The irony of the small potatoes vs big potatoes metaphor is that the early saints endured the big potatoes. That said, I’m certainly in favor of exceptions–and we see tons of flexibility in the singles wards (for example) where my children attend. Even so, I’m always a little suspicious when I here these kinds of stories–not that they’re not true–but because there are always some folks who are not happy with these kinds of changes for one reason or another–no matter how inspired or “un” the changes are. And that has a tendency to cast a shadow over the more legitimate concerns voiced by some of the members–IMO. Sadly, even the most orthodox Latter-day Saints can be a rather gainsaying people at times.
For those who are referring to the “big potatoes” sacrifices of early church members who had to sell everything and move to stay with the Church vs. the “small potatoes” sacrifices related to ward boundary changes, I will just remind everyone that when the Saints moved west (the biggest potatoes possible?), only roughly 40% of them followed Brigham Young. The rest either left the Church, stayed put, or followed other leaders who disagreed with Young. This argument reminds me of those posts when people say “When we were kids we never wore seatbelts, we drank from the hose, and we played outside unsupervised until dark, and we’re fine!” Yes, we did and we are, but also the ones who died due to not wearing seatbelts don’t have facebook accounts.
There is also the phenomenon of high demand religions having higher retention than low demand religions which appears to support the idea that the bigger the ask, the better the fealty. I’m sure this is somewhat true because the more you sacrifice for a belief, the more your reasoning is motivated to defend your sacrifice. But, as a wise friend pointed out, sometimes we aren’t so much a “high demand” religion as a “wrong demand” religion. The demands we make need to, at least on some level, not feel so obviously arbitrary and inconvenient that they make compliance difficult for a large number of people.
Big potatoes, small potatoes….doesn’t matter. I covenanted to help/do what I can to make life better for all. Not downplay their struggles because those struggles don’t seem significant to me.
Mosiah 18
8 And it came to pass that he said unto them: Behold, here are the waters of Mormon (for thus were they called) and now, as ye are desirous to come into the fold of God, and to be called his people, and are willing to bear one another’s burdens, that they may be light;
9 Yea, and are willing to mourn with those that mourn; yea, and comfort those that stand in need of comfort,
Matthew 25:40
And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
On my mission in Ireland in the 1960s there was one branch in Belfast. Had there been 2 the attendance could have doubled.
At the time there was a shooting, and bombing war between the Catholics and the Protestants, and suburbs were either catholic or protestant. In catholic suburbs the kerbstones were painted alternately green and white, in protestant suburbs were red white and blue.
When someone joined the church the became a catholic Mormon, or protestant Mormon, because they still lived in a catholic or protestant suburb. The groups did not fraternise with the enemy. If a catholic was seen with a protestant their house would likely be fire bombed, with them in it.
So the catholic mormons could not be seen with the protestant mormons, without risking death for their families.
The American mission presidents could not see that 2 small branches would solve the problem, one of each. If a branch president were a protestant Mormon, protestant mormons came to church.
The baseball programme had been through so the branch had 500 or 600 members with 40 or 50 attending.
Big potatoes?
Compare a ward boundary change with a school boundary change or school closing. With schools, there are public meetings, tears, anger, and sometimes outright protests. We don’t see that with the ward boundary change but it doesn’t mean the feelings aren’t the same, they are just suppressed.
I think it’s interesting that we fight the change with schools but with the church, we accept it and sometimes even brag about it. I lived in a Ward for a couple of years and would listen to people say how they’d lived in the ward for 20 years or so, been in 5 wards and two stakes, and never even moved but were crying because a charter school their kids were going to closed down a week before school started and they had to find another school. (I won’t comment on how they could have gone to the local public school all along but….)
As for living in the best ward or a ward being too conservative or not conservative enough, it’s just the egocentric nature of people to think wherever they are is the best and anything thing different than themselves is extreme whichever way it goes, left or right. You can always have fun testing this out by getting up and bearing your testimony about a ward you visited at one time that was really the best ward you’ve ever seen.
It is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, not The Church of Latter-day Saints who BTW happen to believe in Jesus Christ. We did not come in to this life to have all things comfortable and easy. We have the work of Jesus Christ to accomplish as we learn to grow to become more like him. That requires constant change in ourselves. It allows us to accomplish what we agreed to accomplish before we were born. Few of us are told what that work is specifically while in mortality. But you can rest assured that the changes in our lives have very much to do with what we committed to do.
In the Sermon on the mount we were told to “be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father in Heaven is perfect. If you will study that sermon more closely, you will find that the perfection spoken of here is to learn to love. Our choice to love or not to love is the only attribute we have complete control over. You will also note that that love is not restricted to only those who love us or who have the same political ideas as we do.
Rejoice in the opportunity you have been given get out of your comfort zone and practice what you preach. No one said it would be easy. Jesus’s atonement was not easy for Him. He was surprised at its difficulty and even asked that He might have it taken away‐-“nevertheless Thy will be done.”