The Split

At church yesterday our ward was split, along with five others in our stake. They made six wards into seven plus a branch, for a total of 11 wards and one branch in the stake.

For our non-LDS friends, think of it as redistricting in the LDS Church. In the LDS Church, you don't pick a church or congregation. You attend the congregation to which you are assigned geographically.

Yesterday's split was done very neatly. Everyone met in their old ward's building and there was a webcast with handouts. The handout had low-resolution hand-drawn maps that must have taken hours (note: next time, call me!). But it also had lists of who is in which new ward.

The most common rumor--that the new boundaries would more or less follow next year's high school boundaries--turned out to be true, at least in our part of town.

They asked all the members of each new or reorganized ward to stand and sustain the stake presidency in the changes. When our new ward (which is the new ward in the stake) was asked to stand, we were almost the only ones in our building who stood. There was also a single woman and a visiting high counselor and his wife. This in yesterday's congregation of 400+ (two wards).

We live in a town where we used to live, as you may know if you were a frequent reader of The Short Sale Shimmy. We're actually going to be in a ward with more people we know than we knew in the short time we were in our old ward since moving to the new house in September. So we're pretty happy about it, though we made some good friends in the old ward too.