If you live in Utah and if you are part of the predominant religion, where you attend church is almost entirely decided by where you live. Like most organizations, large groups are divided up into smaller units. In the case of the LDS church, areas are divided into stakes. Stakes are made up of smaller congregations called wards, and even smaller units called branches.
There's usually somewhere between 8-12 wards/branches in a stake. The size of branches, wards, and stakes are based on the number of members living in a particular area. In Utah, there happens to be a lot of members of the church so that means the areas of branches, wards, and stakes are small...
Or, most of them anyway.
A year ago we moved from the most populated county in the state to one of the lesser populated ones. Box Elder County where we now live has one big city, a few smaller towns, then a lot of open space, especially to the west. There's just nothing out there, or very little. The other day I was bored so I looked up the boundaries of the stake in which we now live.
Needless to say, it's huge.
When I served my LDS mission I lived in Denmark. The entire country has two stakes. I've lived in areas with big stakes boundaries, and small. In Farmington Utah, where we used to live, there's close to ten stakes in that small area alone. It's unusual to have such a large stake in Utah. Just another way life here is a bit...different
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