This past week, there is a rumor that the Church is going to start making smaller stakes. Some faithful are saying it’s a great plan to increase cohesion and deal with geographically sparse areas where the church is growing. Cynics are saying it’s a quick ploy to make it look like the church isn’t shrinking. Three weeks ago, a surprise stake conference was announced in my stake. (We’re not supposed to have another until Feb.) Yesterday, I attended the meeting. Despite our being a gigantic Utah County stake, no split was announced. (We could easily split into 3 stakes if 2000 is the new minimum.) So, it seems the Church plans to maintain things as usual, at least in Utah. While I suppose it is possible that the cynics could be correct, it doesn’t appear to me this is a ploy to artificially inflate growth. What say you?
Church of Jesus Christ, Church Policy, Criticism, History, Mormon Discussion
What’s the Hubbub Over Smaller Stakes?
Wheat & Tares 
Two thoughts. Having lived in a rural Midwest area where anything stake-related required a drive of over an hour each way, this could allow some US stakes to split for geographic reasons, and not just based on numbers exceeding a certain threshold. That’s a positive for the members. However, enabling this in more member dense urban areas could allow more stakes to be formed from existing membership. The church knows that many people watching it’s growth use the number of stakes and individual units as a bellwether for growth, and those numbers have essentially flatlined in the US in the past couple of years.
Second thought, no mention of active, tithe paying, recommend holding women. There could be 1000 of them in a town, but if the number of MP holders meeting the same criteria is only 15, it doesn’t justify a ward. Some women feel like second class citizens in the church and there isn’t any reasonable way to argue that they aren’t.
Ethan, they just changed that last week. Units are no longer counting active MP holders when forming units. They are now counting all active members. I was in a stake that called priesthood leadership from a neighboring unit because they were made up mostly of women & kids & real old farmers.
Well my mother’s stake in salt lake county is being redrawn based on this new criteria. So anecdotally it’s happening in mormonland.
I think the answer to your question is D all of the above.
Like Ethan, we’ve got a long drive to the stake center. 75 miles from building to building but much longer for some members. We’ve got units in three states. Our high councilman has mentioned having a three-hour drive to our ward.
I wonder, though, with the smaller stakes, how would they handle stake centers? Our building doesn’t have pews, and I expect the same from all the other wards/branches besides the stake center.
I saw today that the church’s website announced the changes, and the announcement suggested that the purpose was to create uniform worldwide standards. That raises the question of what the prior rules were and whether they were not uniform worldwide, but that of course was left unaddressed.
I see 3 possible things that could happen:
1. splitting stakes everywhere for the sole purpose of having more of them
2. getting areas where the church is new and growing to the point of having a stake faster
3. reducing the need to consolidate in places where the church is shrinking
The first point is the cynical one that church critics everywhere are expecting. I think it may happen to a degree but I think more likely the latter two things will happen. I was a missionary in Ukraine during the first year of the church there. Things were growing pretty fast at the time. We may well have got to a stake within 5 years under these rules, whereas it took more like a decade longer than that (if memory serves). For me this raises the question: does it matter to people’s church experience to be part of a stake rather than a district, or part of a nearby stake rather than a far away stake? For me personally I don’t see a lot of difference. On the other hand, it probably might matter to the stake leaders who would need to travel a lot. If this is for their benefit, great, let’s do it.
I live in a stake that was split 8 years ago, in my opinion needlessly. I suspect there was hope they would be splitting units by now, but that hasn’t happened, despite persistent rumors of it. I’d be curious whether those responsible for this believe it was worth it. We now have twice as many high councilors in my city, so there’s that, I guess.
I just the read the announcement. What I didn’t see was a reduction in the number of stake leaders needed to operate a stake. While I understand that the Church currently uses D&C 102:1 as justification for needing 12 high priests to serve on a stake high council, do we really need 12? (This seems like something just ripe for either a revelation or a downgrading of the scripture from commandment to policy.) Given that the stake president already has two counselors as well an executive secretary and multiple clerks, could they get away with having just six? Similarly, how many counselors and secretaries do the various stake presidencies really need? The argument against that I suppose is that there are often too many units for one leader to visit and provide leadership for. Would consolidation at the ward level, say three or four wards to a stake, make stake leaders’ jobs more manageable as well as providing a larger group to pull from for ward leadership callings?
You are right Not A Cougar, there will be more changes. Just like we ignore D&C 89 and 132 (and lots of others), it will be easy to ignore D&C 102. Just like we don’t need 12 High Counselors for a Stake court anymore, pretty soon you won’t need 12 high counselors for anything. It will be at the discretion of the SP, to have anywhere from zero to 12.
In my area we had 13 units in our stake spread out stake for the last 17 years. During that time some wards became very small and then big again. Sometimes there were lots of kids, other times very few. Sometimes we would be allowed to combine youth programs, other times they would say no.
Randomly this year they combined 4 average size wards into 2 humongous wards. I mean these wards open up the cultural hall to the back, fill it with chairs, and if you don’t come early you can’t get a seat. It’s like stake conference in a ward building.
They announced that they did this to make larger groups of youth because people are having less children and there are fewer young families in the area. They said the kids matter more than the adults. They also said it would save the stake presidency work. They said this was top down policy working with Salt Lake leaders.
Yeah, it should save alot of work in leadership because it’s so crowded you wouldn’t dare invite a friend (where would they sit?).
All the auxiliary meetings are crowded too. For me it feels too crowded to be there and make a comment. It’s overwhelming. Now many people have stopped coming because of the crowds. It feels like it doesn’t matter if you show up or not. There’s so many people there no one notices because you just can’t see the people you know well each time easily.
It certainly didn’t help my youth aged 17 and 18. They are overwhelmed by this too. They have stopped attending and so has my husband. Nobody notices or does anything about this with so many other youth to worry about.
I have been playing for the choir before church, which keeps me going. But it’s really really sad. I really miss our smaller ward. I think they made a terrible mistake combining wards.
Quotes are from the church website.
“Creating a stake now requires 2,000 total members in the stake.” It used to be 3,000. “In 2024, stakes will need 150 active, full-tithe-paying Melchizedek Priesthood holders capable of serving in leadership positions. They will also need a total of 500 participating adults.” In some areas of the Wasatch Front, two larger wards could produce one stake. Except that starting in January, “wards need 250 members and 20 active, full-tithe-paying Melchizedek Priesthood holders who are capable of serving in leadership positions. Each ward also will need 100 participating adults.” So two Wasatch Front Wards will now be 3-5 new wards.
This is a significant restructuring. All Wasatch Front units will tend to be smaller than in the past. It will likely occur over the next few years.
I can understand why the church wouldn’t want to appear to be shrinking, but the idea of making smaller stakes as some sort of attempt to pad the membership stats is pretty laughable. The church publishes all of its statistics in surprising detail. You can drill down into detailed church membership statistics for each country (and each state/province in the US/Canada).
If there is an effort to make some smaller stakes, I’d assume it’ll be in areas where existing parameters for a stake make units that are geographically burdensome to manage by local leaders. It would make sense in large rural areas.
Also, some countries don’t have the membership to support a traditional stake, but they do have experienced generational membership that could certainly function like a stake rather than as a district. Since districts roll up under the mission president, converting well-established districts to small stakes could alleviate some of the load on international mission presidents. I’ve lived in several districts in Europe that would be perfect candidates for this.
Overall this seems like a purely logistical change that could make a big difference for many local leaders outside of the Mormon belt.
I really hope this isn’t true. More stakes means more stake callings. More stake presidents, more counselors, more everything. Where we live we often feel a bit of resentment to the stake because they have so many great people and we don’t have enough to fully staff the primary. Not to mention more stake presidents means more dads leaving them families for a zillion hours a week. Please, please, no.
Quinten asked: does it matter to people’s church experience to be part of … a nearby stake rather than a far away stake?
Our answer is yes. Our ward was moved from Jackson MS stake to Monroe LA stake several years ago to bolster the leadership availability in Monroe. Jackson stake center was 35 miles east; Monroe is 75 miles west (and in another state on the other side of the Mississippi River). Our nearest medical specialists, Costco, Target, museums, etc are all in Jackson, on the far side of the Jackson stake center. I drive past that stake center regularly. Culturally, we are quite used to and comfortable with driving to Jackson. Our schools compete against Mississippi schools. Louisiana schools run a different calendar that has created scheduling conflicts. Having to go to Louisiana is a trek and definitely not our home turf. It’s a pain to take kids to monthly stake youth events. It’s annoying for stake conference. Yes, it makes a difference.
A few years ago, my family and I lived in a particular city for 6 months on two separate occasions (so a total of 12 months over a few years) where I had served for 7 or so months as a missionary around 30 years ago. This city is in a non-Christian nation far from the North America. We attended local wards speaking the local language while we were there. This city is very densely populated with several million people.
When I was a missionary, the wards in this city were significantly larger and more vibrant. There were enough members who’d been members long enough to share the load and even have breaks from burdensome callings from time to time. There was always a lot happening in the ward, and the social environment was very good. However, these wards have now been split so that they are much smaller. I think we typically only had 40-50 people in sacrament meeting where we would have had 100-150+ in some of these wards when I was a missionary. People were still nice, but it just felt very empty, quiet, and just dead. I also had the sense that the people in leadership callings in these smaller wards were burnt out since each ward only had enough staffing to shuffle the same 10 or so people from high demand calling to high demand calling. There were 3-5 (yes, 5, you read that right) wards meeting in many of the buildings, yet each and every ward in this city was always this new, smaller size. It seemed like such a no-brainer to me to combine some of these wards to create the more vibrant wards that I observed as a missionary, yet I know it still hasn’t been done to this day. This city is so densely populated that the distance between buildings isn’t very great, so it could even make sense to shut down entire buildings and just combine wards that way as well. I just recall as a missionary how active and lively these wards were when they were larger, so it was quite disturbing to see how small and dead they are now. I don’t know. Maybe my perspective is skewed since I was not a “long-timer” either as a missionary or my recent work stints in this city. I agree that wards can get too large and unwieldy, but these wards seemed far too small to me, especially given that it would be so easy to combine them because the geographical area is so small that travel time isn’t really much of an issue at all.
I think, among other things, this could be the result of church leaders looking themselves in the mirror and realizing that the general trend of lower religiosity in the United States has caught up to the lds church, and the future growth for the church in the US looks bleak. I see this move as planning for future growth in “developing countries,” particularly Africa. Smaller geographic boundaries will help the members there, due to difficult travel etc. They also likely see this as a way to move more priesthood holders from these areas up the leadership ladder. More stake presidents means more area authorities, seventies, and so on up the “ladder.” Of course, this all hinges on continued growth of the church in the Southern Hemisphere, so who knows.
Honestly, I have mixed feelings on this one. I am super cynical about actions the church seems to be taking to hide the shrinkage which is definitely happening a lot, and which self-appointed defenders of the faith are denying vociferously, so there’s that. But I’m more cynical about Temple-Palooza as a Nelson vanity project than I am about this specific change.
Growing up back east where there were very few church members, we were in a constant expand / contract status. For a while, we had our own branch that was near the “river towns” most of us lived in. After a couple years, the larger ward in the city (a half hour away, longer in winter) assimilated our branch to increase leadership (?) or expand the youth program (?) or due to a directive from SLC (?) or to add to the coffers to expand the building they had constructed (?) because ward budgets were separate back then. All we knew was that we were suddenly driving to the city twice a day on Sundays (not yet 3 hour block time) and a few times a week for other meetings, sometimes in snow, and that rankled. To keep travel times down, families in the city were asked to host families from outlying areas between the meetings, and we did make some close friendships with ward members this way, many of whom I’m still friends with today. Visiting and home teaching assignments became more time consuming with all the extra driving. After a couple years of this, they split our branch back out, but we kept meeting in that same building in the city, but by then it was the 3 hour block, so only one drive on Sundays. Meetings during the week were usually still at the church, but sometimes would meet more centrally at someone’s house for mutual or Relief Society activities. So when I see changes like this, I think smaller is often better, especially when there are distances involved.
kww’s point about Stake callings is valid, though. What a complete unnecessary waste of human resources most of those are, while doing the opposite of what Jesus taught–stroking the human ego. It’s as if the “high council” concept was expanded needlessly to include even more frivolous callings that are all title, no substance.
We’ve seen this movie before. The only year (between 1970 and 2022) that the church has had a negative growth in terms of stake net change was 2002. We had a net of -5 stakes that year due to consolidation.
So why is that year important? If you look it up in the Ensign of October 2014, you will find an article titled “Conversion and Change in Chile” and you will be able to read that in August of 2002 Elder Holland and Elder Oaks were assigned to Chile and the Philippines respectively. The Hollands and the Oaks lived in these two nations for at least a year to help “train new leaders, and oversaw the reorganization, discontinuation, and merging of wards and dozens of stakes.”
I could be wrong on this, but from what I remember reading from other sources, the thinking that leaders had prior to the 2002 merger effort was that smaller stakes and wards would enable more members to have more rigorous callings and that would keep them busy and committed while helping to offset the tremendous inactivity rates that Chile and the Philippines were both experiencing. However, members were apparently still having challenges staying active even after the scaled-down units and for whatever reason the leaders decided to reverse course.
But I suppose I could be wrong. All I’m saying is we have tried the smaller stake strategy in the past and maybe somebody among the readers could discuss how that all shook out, both in the scaling down and then the merging of units that came later. Seems like it wasn’t but a few years ago that we had some serious consolidation going on in Europe as well.
Pirate Priest,
I don’t think the Church is trying to hide declining membership. I believe that they are creating smaller units to provide more connection, continuity and community in spite of declining membership. Will this move stop the outflow? Perhaps. Smaller communities are by their very nature more personalized.
I actually agree with Old Man here.
Arguments that this merely for appearances are pretty superficial, and neglect the logistical and international implications of the change.
The move not only makes it easier for US & Canadian units to be created but also a little more difficult for unit creation outside of US and Canada relative to the prior rules.
Sometimes, when experimenting with baking, I try to make my leavening agent work a lil harder per gram of dough. The church merely believes it’s found a globally-applicable and optimal formula/indicators for unit sustainability/activity.
While there might be less benign motivations in there, these interests are unlikely to be as simple as wanting a temporary and artificial spurt of membership growth.
The change as mentioned by others will likely increase the calling-related expectations upon members in the US and Canada. The church probably hopes that with increased responsibility will come increased institutional loyalty and ferver. Risk of burnout will also increase but I’m unsure that they care so much about that. The church probably views it as just another ‘sorting’ out process much like Bednar’s missionary ‘raising of the bar’ in my youth.
See the LDSGrowth blog for more details. I find the website sometimes overestimates church growth and apolitical goodwill, but it’s not exactly an apologetic exercise as the analyst is more rigorous than that.
http://ldschurchgrowth.blogspot.com/2023/12/new-global-standards-for-creating-new.html?m=1
Correction: temporary and artificial spurt of *unit growth.
Huh. My prior post with ldschurchgrowth link did not appear.
That’s embarrassing.
But I agree with @Old Man that there’s something more to this than merely saving face re: lack of growth
@Old Man: Yeah, I could see it as a move to try to create smaller, more cohesive communities as opposed to larger, theoretically more efficient ones. I think primarily it’s a practical thing, but closer-knit communities could help with attempts at retention.
It’s just no secret that religion is in a slump, and LDS church stats are following the same trends seen more broadly. We’re not seeing the church claiming huge growth numbers that contradict macro trends. I just can’t see people at LDS HQ realistically thinking that adding a bunch of stakes is going to fool a bunch of people when most people just look at the raw membership count anyway.
The LDS church doesn’t publish what percentage are active, but we have proxies:
1) In 2022 only 46% of people in the US reported that religion is “very important” to them (down from 61% in 2003). So of the ~6.8M members in the US, the same 46% who find it “very important” are relatively likely to meet the minimum activity requirement of attending at least once a month. (Then there’s another 26% in the US who say religion is “fairly important” that we can presume are sometimes active)
2) In 2021 Pew Research Center found that roughly 51% of U.S. Protestants attend church at least once a month, I bet Mormons are in this ballpark. And it roughly lines up with proxy #1.
3) The LDS church in the US usually requires 300 members to form a ward – wards rarely exceed 500 members (except high growth areas where units get frequently split). So using the raw US membership of 6,804,028 divided across the 14,614 congregations, that’s an average of 465 members per ward…there’s just not that many people in most wards in Sacrament meeting. But using the 46%, we get 3,129,852 presumably-active members, which then means there are an average of 214 active members per congregation. There will obviously be variability in the actual sizes (some tiny branches and some huge wards), but the number seems to be a reasonable (albeit rough) estimate of the average congregation size on a given Sunday. This isn’t exact, but it’s a good sign that the LDS church isn’t fiddling with its numbers.
I don’t think it is them attempting to fudge the numbers. I think we underrate how much HQ wants everything to be the same, Correlation rolls on….
Unless you live in a rural area in the US, I don’t foresee this having much impact. However, if they decide to do an audit of existing wards and stakes based on those numbers, I know of a bunch of wards in California that would need to be dissolved.
I don’t think this an attempt to fudge the numbers. I think we underrate how much HQ wants everything to be the same. Correlation rolls on….
Unless you live in a rural area, I don’t foresee this having much of an impact in the US. However, if they do an audit based on those numbers, there are a lot of wards in California that would need to be dissolved.
I grew up in a district in Canada, and yes, there are big differences between a stake and a district.
When my Dad was District President 35 years ago, there was a rumour about the possibility of smaller stakes, and everyone got excited because it would mean growth for our area.
No more travelling for 8 hours to get a patriarchal blessing at the nearest stake. No more travelling 12 hours for every missionary to get set apart by the mission president. Although the job situation was good, many members were reluctant to move to our area because of the prospect of living in a District. Many members didn’t realize you could have ward-sized branches in a District, and some of those branches had decades of history and deep roots.
At the time, it was normal to have GA’s, and even Apostles, visit the nearest stakes. But us? The members who showed great faith and a pioneer spirit, many of whom travelled long distances to attend church and do our HTing and VTing, those who diligently attended the small branches, we only had one GA in 20 years. The District President put in *hours* of travel to visit the units. It never made sense to me that the church hierarchy ignored us.
Despite the challenges, I loved growing up in a District. Honestly, it’s one of the reasons I’m still active. I avoided so many of the cultural issues that occur when members are a majority. I know how it feels when you are really loved and accepted by the people in your branch and district. School was awful for me socially, church was my safe space, a space very accepting of differences. We were just thrilled to have people come, it wasn’t very homogenous.
I’m all for smaller stakes. Even if it’s a numbers game, I don’t care. It’ll benefit everyone outside the Jello Belt, and in my opinion how we do church in “the mission field” is the future of the church.
“Cynics are saying it’s a quick ploy to make it look like the church isn’t shrinking”
This would fit a pattern of statistics manipulation by church leaders to create the illusion of growth and strength to avoid the inconvenient fact that church growth has indeed slowed over the past few decades, following the general trend in organized religion in the developed world. Focus has been placed on the growth of temple construction which suggests that church communities must be growing around the globe. Not necessarily. The church just has the money to build lots of temples and so they do. Look, Millennials and Gen Zers aren’t having as many kids, the Gen Zers aren’t as interested in organized religion, people aren’t converting as much to different churches, the religious population is getting older, and the more money and education people have, the less likely they are to be religious.
Apologists insist, just insist, that the Mormon Church somehow bucks the last trend and that somehow through magical thinking they can show that in Mormonism the more educated and wealthy an individual is the more likely they are to be religious. More statistics manipulation. For Mormonism is a convert-heavy religion, and when you factor in the massive number of converts in poorer countries who go inactive a week later and forget they were ever baptized, well, then, you can make the statistics look that way. But if it were the case that education and wealth are correlated with religiosity in Mormonism, then it would logically follow that Mormonism was seen as the most attractive religion by wealthy and educated folks. Hardly. The bulk of the converts are poor and less educated. The educated and wealthy individuals in Mormonism come almost exclusively from multi-generational families and have long been socialized in a tight and restrictive network of legacy Mormonism, which is extremely different from peripheral Mormonism. Peripheral Mormonism has lots of people on the baptism lists, but few active for long periods of time. Contrast this with Catholicism which has a very large and active periphery. So much so that it has a very large middle class in that periphery. And the more likely that middle class is educated and wealthy, the less likely they are to be religiously Catholic. It is a similar phenomenon with mainline Protestant groups in the US. But because Mormonism has a highly thick central core in the Western US (with lots of wealth and power concentrations in Utah that are built on Mormonism both directly and indirectly) and a scattered and thin periphery that is often strengthened by members coming from the core going to live in the periphery, you get a different phenomenon in Mormonism.
I agreed with Old Man in my initial post but apparently it failed to show up and it was that post I was correcting.
Are we not allowed to reference other Mormon-related blogs on this site that track growth?
I agree that this change is unlikely to be about mere appearances of unit growth.
Interesting to note that, were this to be an effort to help bolster the “pipeline” in membership-growth areas as one commenter hypothesized, wouldn’t that be a benefit in the desires I’ve read elsewhere on this blog that the general authorities become more diverse (at least nationality-wise, with the women-leadership elephant staying in the room)?
“Interesting to note that, were this to be an effort to help bolster the “pipeline” in membership-growth areas as one commenter hypothesized, wouldn’t that be a benefit in the desires I’ve read elsewhere on this blog that the general authorities become more diverse (at least nationality-wise, with the women-leadership elephant staying in the room)?”
– Adam F.
I think the concern is that statistically, more stakes will be formed in the Mormon Corridor (at least at first as the process standardizes itself and it takes longer for stakes outside the Mormon Corridor to meet those membership numbers). So diversity actually has the tendency to decrease as an unintended result of the standardization of numbers.
In the short term, raising the bar to 2000 people from 1900 people means that there is a delay of months/years/decades to meet the new benchmark in non-Mormon Corridor areas (that are more/differently diverse by definition), while in that same short-term time span, the decrease of waiting on those 1000 people (2000 people required as opposed to 3000) means that multiple stakes within the Mormon Corridor are formed during that same short time period (potentially).
CAVEAT: These conclusions do not take into account a) any of the other parameters (temple recommends, priesthood holders, etc.). Those parameters are likely to even out the number of stakes created (but I am not a statistics person).
The tail of my tortoise-of a post arrived before the head apparently. At least it arrived.
I wish we had more Mormon Studies researchers in post secondary institutions who could better hypothesize about the changes than me in my armchair.