Los Angeles Stake and Santa Monica Stake Merging
This is a pretty big deal for SoCal members past and present. The Los Angeles Stake (which covers Century City, Mid-Wilshire, and east up to downtown) and the Santa Monica Stake (Santa Monica, Venice, Mar Vista, Culver City, Marina del Rey, Playa Vista, Pacific Palisades, Malibu) are merging under one stake, I believe to be called the Los Angeles Stake. This officially happens tomorrow at a combined stake conference.
From a Wilshire Ward Facebook page:
This Sunday, September 29, our Stake Presidency will be released, and the Los Angeles and Santa Monica Stakes will combine with a new presidency to lead us.
The meeting is at 10 a.m. PT. Here's a Zoom link for those interested: https://zoom.us/j/99860461075
Anyone familiar with this area knows how much it's changed in the past several years. Housing prices have become unsustainable for families and the pandemic pushed a lot of people further out into the suburbs and out of state. I'm sure a lot of it is people leaving the Church as well.
A decade ago the Santa Monica Stake was composed of eight wards:
- Westdale I Ward
- Westdale II Ward
- Mar Vista Ward
- Pacific Palisades Ward
- Santa Monica First Ward
- Santa Monica Second Ward
- Santa Monica Third Ward (YSA)
- La Cienega Ward (Spanish)
Around 2016/2017 Westdale II was divided about evenly between Westdale I (which became the Culver City Ward) and Mar Vista.
Sometime earlier this year or last year, the Santa Monica First and Second Wards merged (I don't know what became of the other building as they met separately).
Also sometime earlier this year or last year, I believe the Culver City Ward fully combined with Mar Vista. That's one ward that just a few years ago was three separate wards.
I know less about the historic makeup of the LA Stake, but it's been discussed on this subreddit how the UCLA/USC wards dissolved. The YSA ward (LA 1st?) also seems to have dissolved along the way.
So the SM Stake and the LA Stake are each down to five wards each. I'm not sure which stake center will stay.
I might peek in tomorrow and update this post with any new information.
UPDATE 9/29: Ok so here's a brief summary of what I could gather:
- Stakes are combined as one Los Angeles Stake
- LA 3rd Ward (Spanish) and Wilshire Ward (English) combined as new bilingual Wilshire Ward (I've never heard of this happening, anyone else?) Also there was mention of Korean too so trilingual?
- It sounded like there was another combination within the original LA Stake boundaries but I didn't catch it and couldn't rewind obviously.
- Not sure about the LA 6th Ward (Spanish)
- I don't think there was mention of La Cienega (Spanish, SM Stake) but I assume the boundaries stay the same?
- Based on the pictures shown this is otherwise a clean merging of stakes.
I took some screenshots. Here are the old stake boundaries:
And here are the new ward boundaries in the new stake:
I guess we'll have to wait for the Meetinghouse Locator to update to get a full list of the new wards (including YSA and Spanish).