Shrinking wards due to boundary changes?

Our SP loves to read draw ward boundaries and does so every single year.

I haven’t seen anything like that, but:

1) I don’t have much exposure to what lots of other stakes are doing.

2) There are a lot of rural areas where I live and you can’t really redraw boundaries out in more rural areas. The boundary is the whole town or even the whole county. Where do you go from there?

I live in an area where there are lots of members (for the mission field) where they could conceivably mix things up like you are talking about but over several decades my experience is that boundaries only get redrawn when a new ward or new stake is created due to growth. There are a few wards in our stake that are out of balance, really large when compared to other wards in the stake. They could redraw boundaries to balance things out but I don’t anticipate the boundaries being redrawn until those larger wards grow enough to be split. That’s the way it’s always worked in my area.

Interesting approach though. It must wreak havoc on relationships.

Maybe your SP discovered a way to game the system when he reports to area presidencies:

Yeah, my family has been a part of three different wards in the past two years, and there’s rumor the SP is trying to create a new ward we’ll become a part of. It’s funny… we’re 15 minutes away from two different buildings, and yet have to make a 30 minute trip each Sunday to attend “our ward”.

I am going to tip my cynical hat here… Are you sure this isn’t because we’ve changed to a two-hour block?

We also have to drive further for church.

Our first Sunday there and I get a seminary calling.

Two months later my husband is called as bishop.

We knew no one and only brought a few families with us from the other ward.

Stake kept several people for stake callings and they weren’t there on Sunday. It was awful.

That said, my children have made the most amazing friends here, so there’s that.

The 2-hour block. I doubt it. The people coming back have been gone for years. I doubt they had even heard about the changes.

I’d be interested to see how things shape up for you.

I have heard of the redrawing boundaries thing and smaller units spur growth thing. We even tried it here once. It doesn’t seem to work in areas where the church is not super strong to begin with and/or areas where the geographic boundaries of units are large (both apply to where I live). I also think there was, and maybe still is, a push to have smaller units for a while – instead of wards with 500 members they wanted wards with closer to 300.

Just for perspective, when I moved to my ward 30 years ago we had many young families and a major local employer that where many of them worked. Our building (new then) was built to house 3 wards. SM attendance approached 200 (over 200 on special days). The next closest meeting house is 30 miles away. They had the same large employer and had two wards. That employer pulled up stakes in the early 90s. The next building now has 1 ward and our ward gets less than 100 on a Sunday.

Same house 30 years. Multiple ward changes. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. I am praying for doesn’t. I like small wards. Big wards you just get lost in. Oh – wait, maybe that’s what I want. No small, then I know who all the players are, and I know how to navigate.

True. Sometimes people that have been absent for a long time show up long enough to see who the new BP is going to be when there’s a changing of the guard. People could be showing up to see who all is in their ward after the realignments.

The general idea is that really large wards can’t serve members well enough in important ways, and really small wards (or branches) often require too much of the members. Therefore, the ideal is a mid-sized ward in which everyone can serve in some official way without burnout and where callings don’t go unfilled. Generally speaking, that means about 300-500-ish total members and/or 150-200 active members (30-50% activity rate).

Fwiw, that also is the size that has worked best in most places I have lived over the years.

I have long felt the reasons for small wards were a cover for simply maximizing their use of buildings. Big Wards need bigger rooms and bigger buildings. Split the big ward into smaller wards,you can stagger meeting times and avoid having to build more chapels.

The other reasons given a) it gives more people an opportunity to serve b) it spurs growth. These reasons are simply meant to provide apparently benevolent reasons for what is an economic decision.

I am glad I’m not a fully active leader anymore. It was so tired of always acting alone as a president of an organizaton. Sometimes you’d get one good counselor, for a while, until someone else snapped them up. There is a whole body of literature called the Job Demands and Resources Model…it basically says that when job demands are high, and job resources are also high, you get pressure on employees, but also high levels of motivation. In my experience, the job demands are high on leaders all the time in our church. As part-timers, and volunteers, we have a lot to do. But when you split wards to the bone, you cut the resources. And this leads to stress, frustration and burn-out.