Blogger of Jared

As a member of the HP Group Leadership, I accepted an assignment to work with ward leaders to identify individuals on the ward roster who nobody seems to know – the “Lost Sheep” – so that we can reach out to them. What I thought would be a quick problem to solve turned into a complex and ongoing challenge. As many wards probably face this same problem, I’ll share my experiences here.

I don’t know how these individuals fell through the cracks exactly, but I think it happened in one of two ways. First, institutional knowledge has disappeared over time. It seems that over the years, as ward leaders were released and new leaders called, our knowledge of some less-active members left with leaders who were released. Second, as records of less active members were transferred to our ward, for whatever reason, ward leaders never made contact with these individuals.

My challenge was to find out who nobody knows. I learned quickly that in many cases, a less active family or individual was known to one organization (usually the Relief Society) but not to the others (usually the Priesthood quorums). To tackle this problem, therefore, I took the current ward roster and invited the R.S., Elders Quorum, and High Priest Group leaders, along with former leaders, to review the roster with me.

This scrub of the ward roster was successful in narrowing the list of truly Lost Sheep, but it also added some additional complexity to my efforts to maintain an accurate list. We quickly learned that many on the ward roster fall into three related categories: Do Not Contacts, those who want their names removed from the Church’s records, and those who have moved. So I added those three categories to my list and provided the names to the ward clerk.

The Do Not Contacts are those individuals who have requested no or limited contact with the ward. We decided to maintain a record of these individuals on the Lost Sheep list to ensure that we comply with their wishes. Sadly, our sporadic and poorly coordinated efforts to reach out to Lost Sheep in the past have caused hard feelings when we inadvertently contacted those who don’t want contact. This would happen because each organization had its own Do Not Contact list.

Removing names from Church records is a sensitive issue. I won’t address it here beyond mentioning that when someone on our ward records asks for this, we refer the matter to the Bishop. He can then reach out to them, explore the matter, and explain the process.

One of the side benefits to this effort has been to identify those who have moved so we can request their records also be moved. In most cases, we don’t have a forwarding address. But at least now, the Church Membership Department can get to work finding these truly Lost Sheep and send their records to their current wards. Since we started this effort a few months ago, we’ve started to see old records begin to move out.

Once we completed our initial scrub of the ward list, we gave it to the Bishopric and the ward mission leader to review. The missionaries are a great source of information since they’re out every day contacting people and have met many less active ward members including some for whom we don’t even have records.

Once the Bishopric completes their review, we will have an up-to-date list of members nobody knows. We then plan to reach out to them and get to know them. As we do so, we will update the list. I will also update it every month as records move in and out of the ward. When new records come in, we will note on the list who has met them. In short order, we hope to eliminate the list of unknown members by reaching out to them all. And as with the lost sheep spoken of by the Savior, we plan to work with those in our ward bring them back into the fold.

As this is probably a universal problem, I would love to hear what experiences others have had dealing with the Lost Sheep and any advice you can share.