Anyhoo, the best (or at least the most memorable) ward activities should involve fire, or some other risk of physical danger. My favorite ward activity was an impromptu vehicle donut/brody competition in the snow covered parking lot. It morphed into a hooky-bobbing (grabbing the rear bumper of a car and being pulled along as your feet slide on the snow) race.

Only Cory Evans ended up in the emergency room. He got first place though.

You have fallen victim to my shortness in writing–the true plan was not to overwork the AC, but to call several other committee members (Scott = Job Creator!) who would then head up the smaller ones.

The “big” activities were then to be used normally–as big get togethers. The only difference is that no one would be pretending that those were good opportunities for fellowshipping anymore.

If this economist’s solution to the problem of boring quarterly activities, is to replace them with weekly -repeat, weekly activities in the self-interest of small groups of members, then he hasn’t spent much time thinking about the self-interest of the activities committee chair. Seems like parties with the same self-interest (hiking) could use their agency to get together and go do it (go hike, say), thereby not wasting the ACC’s time trying to organize things that self-interested parties should do anyway. What’s that you say? – half the Ward doesn’t even know the names of the other half of the Ward, never mind what they are interested in? Well, I guess that what you hold the big activities for, except that everyone sits with the people they know and are comfortable with and doesn’t speak to anyone they don’t already know – which includes people who have been around for a long time but are intensely shy (did you notice —- sitting with her daughter by herself at the international dinner we just held? – we did try to correct that one).

So, the answer is not making the ACC’s life more miserable by creating a weekly hell of small activities, but rather creating larger activities in which everyone is forced to get to know everyone else, whether they like it or not. This might be done by getting everyone involved in forced labor (like the upcoming clean-up project -brought to you by one of my all-time favorite co-opters of everyone’s scarce time – the Stake). Or perhaps we could create a giant progressive dinner, where all two hundred active Ward members descend on the basement apartments of selected unsuspecting students and newly married couples demanding immediate sustenance. The ensuing commotion would probably attract enough neighborhood attention so that those in attendance would get to know each other very well before their disbelieving non-member friends (you know, the people you really know well from outside the church) bail them out.

So we come to the conclusion that the only way to create a worthwhile Ward AC activity is to generate a full-scale crisis in which people have no choice but to work together to get out of it. Example: do you know the name of the current Secretary of the U.S. Treasury? See – a crisis does create familiarity – although of course it may breed contempt too. But – let’s use Ward AC events to create familiarity. We can reserve the contempt for later – after we become friends.