The 1920s and ’30s were a time of great experimentation in the Church:

Missionaries were encouraged to find new ways of making friends, and so they tried giving regular speeches on commercial radio, coaching and playing in baseball and basketball leagues, and forming quartets and even entire choruses that sang at civic meetings, reaching new classes of people and demonstrating that Mormons were in the neighborhood.

Missionary teaching of investigators improved, in part because of a new series of tracts – the Centennial Tracts – written by John A. Widtsoe while he was in England. Earlier tracts no longer appealed to most people, because they went to great lengths to prove by biblical scripture that Mormonism fulfilled prophecy, but most people no longer were convinced by, or even knew, arcane biblical ideas. Instead, the Centennial tracts spoke to people in a new age, showing how Church teachings would improve their home life, their health, their happiness – things people cared about more than they did about Isaiah or Daniel.

There were experiments to help improve the Church life of lifelong members, the children and grandchildren of lifelong members. The M Men and Gleaner programs taught older youth and young adults how to be leaders in the Church, giving them actual experience in speaking, teaching, planning, and operating programs.

And there were experiments with ideas that didn’t work so well or didn’t last as long as the others … like the so-called “junior stakes.”

While the Church developed programs that helped youth in the Mormon heartland gain experience in leadership, the same experiences weren’t always available to Latter-day Saints in “the mission field.” (I know we hate that term now because it feels like the experience of beyond-the-Rockies Saints is being denigrated, but it was the term used at the time, to designate regions that were outside of stake boundaries.)

For many decades, in the 19th century, branches outside the intermountain West were treated as merely waystations, places where converts gathered before they could continue their journey toward Utah. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Latter-day Saints began moving to commercial, educational, and governmental centers to make their homes for longer or shorter periods. Latter-day Saints chose such places to make their permanent homes, and the Church adapted to establish regular meetings, regular Church organizations, primarily in the United States but elsewhere as well.

But still Saints in these branches had fewer opportunities for Church life than those in the stakes. Branches were often very small and not able to sustain all the activities of a ward. Clusters of branches in a district were distant from each other, making travel by mission leaders an occasional rather than constant practice. With fewer service opportunities, priesthood holders were not organized into quorums – except where “Utah people” had moved elsewhere, a branch might have no seventies or high priests. Women did not get the experience of leading fully organized auxiliaries.

Hence, the experiment of the “junior stake.”

These began in California, as an experiment by Alonzo A. Hinckley (pictured at right; uncle of Gordon B.), who later became a member of the Quorum of the Twelve. His idea was to adapt the mission District (an administrative grouping of branches in a geographic area) in ways that could give local members a taste of being in a fully organized stake. With that experience, he hoped to encourage the creation of new stakes, staffed with local people who, through their practice in “junior stakes,” were ready to assume leadership roles. Leo J. Muir, a California leader who picked up the idea from Elder Hinckley, carried the “junior stake” idea with him when he presided over the Northern States Mission in the mid- to late-1930s, organizing a “Detroit Junior Stake.” Other mission presidents experimented with the idea in other places.

As far as I can tell from records I have seen – this evaluation may change as I find other records – the chief feature in the operation of a “junior stake” was terminology: let’s call it a stake rather than a district. Let’s form a mission board to travel from branch to branch and oversee auxiliaries as if they were a stake Primary board or stake Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Association. Let’s treat everyone as if they were working in a full-fledged stake so that there will be no feelings of inferiority because of difference between “mission field” and “the stakes.”

Junior stakes couldn’t really function as real stakes, though. Some of the branches were too small to function as wards or to provide replacement leaders if one moved away – the Detroit Junior Stake had 15 members at Ann Arbor at one point – most of them temporary student residents – and that obviously could not function as a stable ward. Local men were, rarely, organized into elders’ quorums, but there was still no real need for seventies or high priests, and except for the very largest branches, elders’ lived too far apart to have regular quorum activities or to serve as ward/home teachers. The leaders of the Junior Stake Relief Society might visit the branches to encourage and teach, but without stake apparatus there were no dues or contributions to pay their traveling expenses.

The First Presidency watched all these experimental developments carefully. Many were adopted and became long-term practices of the Church. But they watched the “junior stake” experiment with special wariness. Stakes are the scripturally mandated fundamental unit of the Church – was it wise to organize imitation stakes? Some “junior stakes” even called “junior high councils” – another scripturally mandated body with official authority – the First Presidency was especially wary of these imitation councils that could trespass into activities they were not authorized to handle. Even such things as patriarchs and patriarchal blessings were limited to real stakes – except on the exceedingly rare occasions when the First Presidency authorized a stake patriarch to travel in a mission or to give blessings if he temporarily resided in a mission on a long term visit to children, members in the missions had to carry a recommend into a stake to request a blessing there – fortunately, I think, no “junior stake” attempted to provide “junior patriarchs.”

The First Presidency eventually began to discourage these experimental organizations – if or whether they eventually implemented a Church-wide policy against them, I have not found the record. I do see the First Presidency warning one mission, though, that

For a considerable time the General Authorities have discouraged the designation of missionary districts as “junior stakes.” They have also discountenanced the setting up of church organizations in these districts and then giving to them the names of stake organizations such, as for example, “High Council” and like designations.

So that was one experiment that did not last. Stakes would eventually cover the United States and expand to other parts of the world – the first stake in Geneva, Switzerland was formed while I was a missionary there; it covered a huge territory, but travel in the 1980s was easier than travel in the 1930s so it worked; it has since been divided into other stakes. The same is the case in many, many other places.

[T]he gathering together upon the land of Zion, and upon her stakes, may be for a defense, and for a refuge from the storm … Nothing “junior” about that.