Modbury Australia Stake

A Stake for the North and North-East

The Modbury Australia Stake was a regional unit of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints covering Adelaide's north-eastern and outer northern suburbs. Its boundaries ran from Modbury, Tea Tree Gully and Golden Grove in the foothills out across Salisbury and Elizabeth to the northern fringe at Smithfield, Craigmore and Munno Para, taking in some of the city's most settled middle-class suburbs and some of its poorest.

The stake was created in 1985, when growth in Adelaide's northern congregations made the existing stake too large to manage. Its stake centre, a larger meetinghouse in Modbury with a chapel, a cultural hall big enough for stake conferences and offices for the stake presidency, opened two years later. Over the following decades the stake was made up of six to eight wards and, at times, a small branch, the number shifting as congregations grew, shrank and were redrawn.

Playford Ward, formed in 1999 from the division of the Elizabeth Ward, was its northernmost ward. Its neighbours in the stake included the Modbury, Golden Grove, Salisbury, Elizabeth and Paralowie wards, each with its own character. The foothill wards were generally wealthier and more settled, and the northern wards poorer, more transient and more dependent on the stake for welfare support in hard years.

Presidents and Councils

The stake was led by a stake president and two counsellors, supported by a high council of twelve men and stake leaders for the Relief Society, Young Men, Young Women, Primary and Sunday School. Like all local leaders, they were unpaid volunteers who held jobs and raised families alongside their callings. A stake president typically served for around nine years.

The stake presidency called and released bishops, presided at stake conferences twice a year, and signed off on temple recommends after the bishops' interviews. It also decided ward boundaries. Those decisions were rarely popular with everyone. The 1999 division that created Playford Ward split long-standing friendships between families who had sat in the same Elizabeth chapel for decades, and some members never quite forgave the line drawn on the map.

David Lowther, a Golden Grove accountant, served as stake president from 2010 until 2019, a period that covered the stake's busiest years and its most difficult. He was succeeded by Simon Faleolo, a Salisbury schoolteacher whose family had come to Adelaide from Samoa in the 1980s.

Traditions of the Stake

The stake built up a calendar of its own events alongside the Church's regular programmes. Family Heritage Night, introduced in 2012, became one of its best-attended evenings: members brought family photographs, letters, recipes and heirlooms to the stake centre, set them out on trestle tables in the cultural hall and talked through the stories behind them. The family history centre in the stake centre's library was busy for weeks afterwards.

The Summer Service Day each January sent members out into local parks and reserves to clear rubbish, pull weeds and plant natives alongside council crews, ending with a barbecue that usually ran longer than the work. The stake's youth spent several days each winter at the Modbury Youth Conference, held at a retreat property near the Flinders Ranges, where cold nights, long hikes, workshops and dances gave teenagers from the scattered wards a chance to meet one another. For many of them the friendships made there lasted longer than anything else the stake organised.

The stake's members travelled together for temple days at the Adelaide Australia Temple in Marden after its dedication in 2000, organising carpools from the northern suburbs for members without cars. Before then, temple trips meant a long journey to Sydney, usually by coach, and many members had been only once or twice in their lives.

The Northern Wards Under Strain

The closure of the Holden plant at Elizabeth in October 2017 fell hardest on the stake's northern wards. The stake's welfare resources were stretched through the following year, with bishops' storehouse orders, employment workshops and help with mortgage arrears rising sharply. The foothill wards sent volunteers and donations north, and the arrangement exposed old tensions as well as goodwill.

On the evening of 29 July 2018, members from several of the stake's wards were invited to a special gathering at the Adelaide Australia Temple, addressed by a visiting apostle, Elder Nathaniel Carter. Bishops had helped identify the faithful families who were invited. In the months that followed, a number of those families left their homes and their wards without explanation. Playford Ward lost more than any other congregation in the stake, but it was not alone.

The stake presidency's inquiries through Church channels, made alongside those of individual bishops, found no record of any sanctioned relocation. With no explanation to offer, the stake leadership focused on practical consequences: replacing leaders, combining classes, reassigning visiting and home teaching routes and checking on members left behind. Stake conference that spring was noticeably quieter, and the absences were discussed far more in the foyers than from the pulpit.

A Reshaped Stake

The years that followed brought further change. The two-hour Sunday block from 2019 and the closure of all meetinghouses during the pandemic of 2020 tested attendance across the stake, and several wards came out of the closures smaller than they went in. In 2024 the Church redrew congregation boundaries across South Australia, merging some units and renaming others, and the stake's map changed again.

New housing estates on the northern fringe meanwhile brought young families, converts and interstate arrivals into the outer wards, slowly rebalancing a stake that had for decades been weighted towards the foothills. Through 2026 the Modbury Australia Stake continued to hold its conferences in the Modbury stake centre, its Family Heritage Night and Summer Service Day still on the calendar, its congregations more varied than at any point in its history.