New stake in Utah
A new stake was created in the Salt Lake area. The North Salt Lake Utah Legacy Stake was created November 15th with seven wards. The new stake was likely created from the North Salt Lake Utah Parkway Stake, which had 13 wards and two branches. A second stake also existed in North Salt Lake before the creation of the new stake (the North Salt Lake Utah Stake) which had nine wards.
New stake in Venezuela
The Punto Fijo Venezuela Stake was created from the Falcon Venezuela District on November 8th. The district had around nine branches before becoming a stake. A district was created in Coro, Venezuela from the Falcon Venezuela District in the mid 2000s and was recombined with the district in Falcon in 2008 likely in a move to prepare the area for a stake. The new stake becomes the first new stake in Venezuela since 2007. The Church experienced rapid growth in membership and congregations in the early to mid 2000s, which came to a rapid halt after the evacuation of LDS missionaries in late 2005/early 2006. Membership growth rates were over four percent before this time and Church membership in Venezuela reached 134,597 at the end of 2005. Membership grew by 1.78% in 2008. Slowing membership growth over the past few years resulted in congregations slowly increasing in Venezuela, increasing by only two between the end of 2006 and 2008.
There are now 27 stakes and 8 districts in Venezuela.
District discontinued in Honduras
The La Entrada Honduras District was dissolved and combined with the Santa Rosa de Copan Honduras District, which now has seven branches. The district in La Entrada was organized in 1983 and had four branches before combining with the district in Santa Rosa de Copan. It appears that this was done in preparation for creating the first stake in the mountainous, far western region on Honduras. Two other districts were discontinued only a few months ago, both of which only had two branches each and were located in Santa Barbara and Tela.
There are now 20 stakes and 8 districts in Honduras.
Thanks for all your efforts to make this information so accessible. I really appreciate it :)
ReplyDeleteWith 2863 current stakes in the Church we have reached the same number of net new stakes (45) as a couple of years ago and one more would set a record back to 1998.
ReplyDeleteI have checked the record for the last several years and there are almost always new stakes in December, so I believe we'll have more than 45 this year.