Active vs. Less Active

Is there an official Church policy that tells us what makes a member "active"? I know there are different views on what policy is (i.e. attending sacrament meeting at least one Sunday a month, or attending mid-week activities 3 times a month, etc.), but I don't know that I've ever see an official policy. Is there anything in the handbooks that would indicate as such?

I'm the Stake Clerk and right now we're addressing ward boundary issues. Part of this process involves asking the bishops to indicate which members who are active in the ward. To create a new ward in the boundary proposal system, the system requires a minimum of 125 active members at sacrament meeting, which is a great number, but when all is said and done, how can we know that the figures in the proposal (based on the bishops' indications) will come to fruition when the new ward begins?

Hope this all makes sense.

justin.scott wrote:Is there an official Church policy that tells us what makes a member "active"?

None that I've seen.

For purposes of planning, it sounds like "active" is someone who usually attends sacrament meetings.

Nothing official. The question in the quarterly report is about as close as it gets. Lines 14, 15, 16, 17 are about how many attended their meetings at least once during the last month in the quarter.

By that metric, active membership would exceed average sacrament meeting attendance by some (small, in most cases) percentage.

There seems to be 2 questions here. Can you get enough numbers and can you get them geographically.

So the first step is raw numbers. Say you currently have 2 wards and the 125 is the mimimum desired goal. That means to make 3 wards you would need the sacrament attendance in the 2 wards to be 125 X 3 or 375.

Now a word of warning learned the hard way in my stake. The boundary program helps but it needs good information mapped to work. You can enter the address location data correctly into it but it does NOT put it in correctly on lds maps. It does not export it back down to LDS maps. So to save redundancy the first step is for the affected wards to make a real effort to get their maps stuff up to date FIRST before ever running the boundary program. The boundary program will then import correct information. Simply put you can do the work once or you can do it twice. My stake ended up doing it twice.

Next step is look at boundaries looking at raw numbers of active members in each area. Likely this is done by household to start with. You will have to watch out for total number discrepancies to though. For example one area might be mostly older single widows and another area all families. You could end up with a real discrepancy based on numbers looking at just households. So you are looking at total numbers of active members. You also need to look at age balances, number of priesthood in each ward, and even things like economic resources.