New Stake in Tonga

For the first time in 12 years, a new stake has been created in Tonga. The new stake, the Nuku'alofa Tonga Harbour Stake was created in the capital city of Nuku'alofa. This brings the total number of stakes in Tonga to 17. Stakes are generally created in spurts in the South Pacific. For instance, between 1994 and 1997, six stakes were created in Tonga, three in Fiji, two in Tahiti, and eight in Samoa but no stakes have been created since then really. A similar spurt occurred in the 1970s. Only one other stake has been created in the South Pacific this decade, which was last year in Kiribati. The Church continues to grow steadily in all of these nations and in Tonga the number of wards has increased by around 15 from 2000 to 2006. This is impressive considering most of these countries have only around 100-200 thousand people with slowly growing populations. Membership stands around 53,000 in Tonga. The yellow squares are stakes; the green squares are districts.

I imagine more stakes will be organized in Tonga in the next two years considering Tonga has one of the highest ward to stake ratios in the world.