Stake conference and ward conference—why do these meetings exist?

TL;DR: I don't know.

I sat through stake conference earlier this month. In addition to the normal trimmings of that meeting, there was a visiting General Authority Seventy. You don’t have a General Authority in your building every day; it was a meeting that could have been uplifting and fulfilling, going beyond what we normally hear in sacrament meetings.

But for me, it wasn’t. I struggled with the speakers, including the Seventy (who I’m sure is a wonderful person—that’s not the point here). It became a “run out the clock” situation, just trying to keep my kids from violating too many social norms until the meeting ended and we could go home. Not my best performance as a Latter-day Saint.

Between work and church, much of my life is meetings. I’m sure that’s true for a lot of people.

At work, it’s normal to have recurring meetings that happen every week or every month. Sometimes a meeting like that will lose the life and the purpose it started with, and it becomes a meeting that exists just for the purpose of having the meeting. In the best cases, we’ve taken a step back at this point and asked some existential questions: Why does this meeting exist? What is its purpose? Do we need to modify the meeting in order to better meet that purpose? Do we even need the meeting?

And that’s what I was thinking about, while sitting in stake conference. What is the purpose of stake conference? Have we lost sight of what it’s for? Do we need to reinvigorate it?

Do we even need it?

Ward conference is in the same category—a meeting where I’m unclear about its purpose—while also being an animal all its own. It’s roughly the same as a normal Sunday, with changes so minor that they could almost go unnoticed. How is this a “conference”? Does it really need a name?

The Church does have stated purposes for these meetings, and that’s a good place for our discussion to start. As a baseline, here is what the General Handbook gives as the purposes for normal, weekly sacrament meeting:

Remember Jesus Christ by partaking of the sacrament. In this ordinance, Church members renew their covenant to take upon themselves the Savior’s name, to always remember Him, and to keep His commandments. Other purposes include worshipping, building faith and testimony, and conducting ward business.

This statement strikes me as distinctly well-focused. The purpose of sacrament meeting is remembering Jesus Christ through the sacrament, full stop. The talks, music, and (last of all) ward business trail far behind in importance. We are there for an ordinance focused on the atonement, and the rest is just window dressing. This is actually of some comfort to me; I can be fully there for the ordinance, and maybe it’s okay if the talks don’t always land with me. They come second to the sacred ordinance.

In contrast, here is the Handbook’s stated purpose for stake conference:

The primary purpose of stake conference is to strengthen members’ faith in Jesus Christ.

That’s the whole thing; there’s no more. It’s interesting that it says that strengthening faith is the primary purpose, when no secondary purposes are listed.

It’s a fine purpose, of course. But it’s also interesting that the primary purpose of the stake conference is the third purpose listed for sacrament meeting (after partaking of the sacrament and worshipping). With this description, stake conference comes across as a secondhand version of sacrament meeting. Watered-down sacrament meeting. It’s what sacrament meeting would be if you took out its point, the ordinance of the sacrament.

Many times, to me stake conference feels like a meeting that we have just because we’re supposed to have it. Which, of course, brings us to ward conference.

Here’s the stated purpose for ward conference:

At ward conference, stake leaders instruct, support, and minister to ward leaders and members. Ward members sustain general and local leaders.

This one’s a little different because it’s referring to the two-hour block, not just one meeting; so I assume it also inherits the purposes of a normal sacrament meeting (including the sacrament itself). This statement makes clear that there really are just two differences between a ward conference and a regular Sunday: 1) people from the stake give talks and teach the lessons, and 2) we sustain leaders. Or in other words, not much is different.

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There doesn’t appear to be any scriptural or doctrinal basis for the existence of ward and stake conference; and for sure, the nature of meetings in the Church is generally considered to be policy and nothing more. The closest you get to this being dictated in the scriptures is in D&C 20:61:

The several elders composing this church of Christ are to meet in conference once in three months, or from time to time as said conferences shall direct or appoint;

The Saints did follow this schedule for much of this dispensation. But as the Church has grown and the number of stakes has increased, there has had to be greater distance between stakes and the general leadership of the Church:

Once stakes were organized, the Saints began meeting in stake conferences every three months. The practice of quarterly stake conferences continued from the mid-1800s until 1979, when the frequency was reduced to two per year. General Authorities of the Church presided at most stake conferences until the mid-1980s, when the growth in Church membership and the number of stakes made it impossible for an authority to attend each conference. In 1986, General Authorities were assigned to preside at one of the stake conferences, and the stake president was authorized to preside at the other. In 1990 General Authorities were assigned to visit each stake for a conference only once every other year.

That description¹ is from 1992, and it’s possible that these policies have continued to evolve since then with the continued growth of the Church.

There is some speculation on the interwebs that ward conference and stake conference are holdovers from 1) the early correlation era, when the Church put increased emphasis on doctrinal orthodoxy and cultural orthopraxy and would thus send a General Authority to stake conferences to make sure everything was in line, or 2) earlier eras of communication, where the best way to disseminate information was not by email or the Internet but by gathering everyone into one place. These ideas seem plausible.

But the answer to these questions—specifically, why do we have these meetings—must include a heavy dose of tradition. We’ve had them for a long time. We’ll probably continue to have them for the foreseeable future. They really don’t cause any problems, even if I’m not entirely sure why they would need to exist.

There’s an implied assumption that the talks at stake or ward conference should be better, perhaps more spiritual somehow, than the talks in a normal ward sacrament meeting. That’s not always the case. There’s no guarantee that even the talks at General Conference will be more impactful than those at the ward level; that’s up to us, and our willingness and ability to be taught in that moment.

Maybe ward and stake conference will go away at some point; maybe they’ll stay. Some things in the Church come through revelation, and others are handled administratively. I think this is probably the latter, and that means there’s nothing sacred about these meetings being the way they are. It’s just the way things are done right now, and that’s okay. I just need to get my kids through it.

1. Encyclopedia of Mormonism (New York : Macmillan, 1992), 308. As seen here or here.