Stake Conference? You what?

I realised this morning that even though I had mentioned Stake Conference in my post You Can't Say No, and said that this was an LDS thing that only LDS people would understand that my non LDS friends are going to want more information about what it is exactly.... so this is my explanation.

Firstly to make things easier, I belong to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and from now on I'll use the initials LDS. I'm a Christian, I read the Bible and The Book of Mormon and I believe that we have a living Prophet. I converted when I was 18 (I might have been 17,  I can't quite remember as I've had two children since then and lost half my brain cells) and I like Chocolate... oh wait, that is nothing to do with my religion!

So I go to Church in a Ward, this is basically a boundary to define the area and is really just another word for a parish. There are smaller congregations, and these are called branches, but I've never belonged to one! The Ward is presided over by the Bishop and his two Counsellors and we call this the Bishopric.

Local Wards are grouped together into Stakes, and these are presided over by the Stake Presidency, we have the Stake President and his two Counsellors and there is also a Twelve member Council called the High Council, but I actually don't know a lot about that or them. I'll give myself some homework and find out about it if anyone wants.

Above this we have Areas, which are where Stakes are grouped together and they have leaders too, but I doubt I'll be talking about those in the near future, so I'll explain those if I ever talk about them!

So every six months or so we have what we call Conferences. We have BIG ones where the whole Church across the World will listen to talks by our leaders and we call them General Conference. We have ones in our Ward, which funny enough are called Ward Conference and the talks are given by the Stake Leaders and then we have ones in our Stake too.

These are called Stake Conference and is the reason I was in so much of a tiz, was I'd been asked to talk in our Stake Conference this weekend. The talks in Stake Conference are generally from the Stake Presidency and Stake members (that's me) that have been called upon by the Stake Presidency to speak on a topic assigned to them.

My talk last night went well, I might type it up and add it as a blog post here, but I think that you get enough of my random natterings as it is ;)

So there you go, a basic grounding in phrases I drop as if they are totally normal (well they are to me!). If in the future I start talking Church phrases that you don't know just let me know and I'll explain or try to and find someone much more qualified to answer if I can't.

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