YSA Summer Membership and Callings

[CornelsenSR]

In our YSA stake we have a majority of members leave for 3 months during the summer. For those who have callings and will be returning to our stake, can we temporarily move their memberships to their home ward without having to release them from their callings and re-calling them when they get back?

[russellhltn]

Moving the record auto-releases. The only way to avoid that is if the other ward creates an out-of-unit record. But that's something only they can do. You can't create one and send it.

General Handbook 33.6.4 says "When a person moves from the ward for less than three months and plans to return, the membership record is kept in the ward."

I don't know where the 3 month rule comes from. It's been there since the days when membership changes were done via snail mail. It's almost as if it was designed to accommodate summers.

[mevans]

Yes, the 3-month rule is interesting in this age of instant membership record transfers. Even then, if YSA are going somewhere for the summer (back home or to a summer job) they may need to have their records transferred to where they are living if they need to do anything like get or renew a temple recommend, get married, or some other complicated things like repentance issues.
I suppose if records are supposed to remain where they are if it's less than 3 months absence and one of the above isn't needed, that the temporary, summer resident ward can create the out-of-unit record to give the person a summer calling.

[russellhltn]

Of course the real fun with students is they may not come back to live in the same place. For a ward that covers an entire college, that's probably not be an issue. But at BYU, a very small move can put them in a different ward. You need a certain amount of faith that they will be returning to the same ward.

[mevans]

I've seen student units anxious to clear their rosters just send records back to the street address of our church (where the records were prior to attending the student ward). That might be fine in situations when their parents are in our ward, but that's not always the case. Sometimes the YSA was in our family prior to attending school ward without family living here. The records come back to us and then we have to figure out what to do with the record. It's fun

[BrianEdwards]

Regardless of moving records or retention of callings, there's also the underlying issue of watching over the YSA's during their innumerable transitions (perhaps they're going home, or doing a summer job like pest control sales). I can't imagine everything a YSA Bishop juggles at the end and beginning of semesters, but ideally I think both the YSA Bishop and the home ward Bishop, would want to be in communication regarding each individual YSA that is coming-and-going. And in a conversation about each individual YSA, the Bishops together can decide what's best for the YSA -- what's recently happened in the past couple months of their life, if they've started/stopped attending church regularly, any hallway discussions or in-person interviews, etc. Granted, that's a lot when you multiply it by the number of YSA's the Bishop is trying to minister to.

Three summer months in the life of a YSA is a mini-lifetime, and a lot can happen. And communication can help the Bishops together determine how to apply the GHB policy that @russellhltn shared, along with the considerations that @mevans describes (like potential worthiness interviews a particular YSA might need, that only the Bishop where the records resides can perform).