Playford Ward (LDS)

From a Migrant Branch to a Northern Ward

Playford Ward was a congregation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints serving Adelaide's outer northern suburbs, part of the Modbury Australia Stake. Its boundaries took in Smithfield, Craigmore, Blakeview, Munno Para, Davoren Park and the northern parts of Elizabeth, an area of Housing Trust streets, brick unit groups and, later, new estates spreading out over the old paddocks towards Gawler.

The ward grew out of the Elizabeth Branch, which formed in the early 1960s as British migrants filled the new satellite town. A good number of the families who came out to work at the Holden plant and the defence research establishment at Salisbury had joined the Church in England, Scotland and Wales, and they brought their membership records with them. They met at first in a hired hall and then, from 1966, in a small brick chapel in Elizabeth. Local converts joined them through the 1970s, many of them taught by missionaries knocking on doors along the Housing Trust streets.

By the 1980s the branch had become the Elizabeth Ward, and it kept growing as the northern suburbs did. In 1999 the stake divided it, and the northern half became Playford Ward, named after the City of Playford that had been formed two years earlier. The new ward shared the old Elizabeth chapel until 2003, when its own meetinghouse opened in Craigmore. From then on, that building was the centre of its life.

Who Filled the Pews

Playford Ward was never a wealthy congregation, and it never pretended to be one. Its members worked in the car plant and its suppliers, in the hospitals at Elizabeth Vale, in shops, schools, warehouses and trucking yards, and on the land at the edges of the suburbs. Some families had been in the Church for three or four generations. Others had been baptised within the year. A steady trickle of Pacific Islander families, a small Vietnamese household and a handful of young couples who had joined the Church at university gave the ward a broader face than its migrant beginnings.

The rolls were always longer than the pews. In the mid-2010s the ward carried a little over three hundred names on its records and saw between one hundred and twenty and one hundred and fifty people at sacrament meeting on a good Sunday. The gap was made up of people who had drifted away, moved without leaving forwarding addresses or quietly stopped believing. Home teaching and visiting teaching routes always included several doors that rarely opened.

At the core of the ward stood a group of long-established families who held most of the callings and did most of the work. The Smiths and the Bakers, both with large families and deep roots in the northern suburbs, were among the most prominent, alongside the Petersons, the Rigbys and the Nguyens. Their children grew up together in Primary, went through seminary together, served missions in the same years and sometimes married one another. That closeness gave the ward its warmth, and also its cliques, its long memories and its occasional sense that a newcomer had to earn their place.

The Holden plant's closure in October 2017 hit the ward hard. Several families lost their main income in a single stroke, and the welfare requests that crossed the bishop's desk over the following year rose sharply. The Relief Society's food orders and the elders quorum's moving crews were busier that year than they had been in a decade.

The Shape of a Sunday

Sunday at Playford Ward followed the pattern common to the Church worldwide. Until the end of 2018 it was a three-hour block: sacrament meeting in the chapel, then Sunday School, then Relief Society, priesthood quorums, Young Men and Young Women, and Primary for the children. Brother Rigby stood at the chapel doors most Sundays, greeting every family by name. Sister Crofton had played the organ for decades and played it with the authority of someone who knew exactly how slowly the congregation would take each hymn.

The foyer's noticeboard carried the ward's ordinary business: Relief Society sign-up sheets, youth car wash dates, camp rosters, Sunday School lesson swaps and, for one winter, a single lost child's glove pinned up in the hope its owner would return for it. Daffodils came up along the east fence towards the end of each winter. In the cultural hall, the basketball hoops came down on weeknights for youth activities and a ward basketball competition that drew more fathers than anyone admitted.

During the week the ward's work went on in members' homes. Visiting teachers called monthly on the sisters assigned to them, many of them elderly women living alone in Smithfield and Elizabeth. The Relief Society cooked for funerals and new mothers and knitted, by most accounts, more shawls than the ward's elderly members could ever use. Early-morning seminary met before school for the high-school students, and family home evening filled Monday nights.

Leadership changed in the usual way. Bishop Graham Peterson presided from 2009 until early 2015, when Gregory Hahn was called to succeed him. Evelyn Baker served as Relief Society President from 2008, one of the longest tenures the ward had known, and much of the ward's care for its widows and struggling families ran through her and the women around her.

The Winter of 2018

On the evening of Sunday 29 July 2018, selected families from across the stake, Playford Ward among them, attended a special gathering at the Adelaide Australia Temple called by Elder Nathaniel Carter, a visiting member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. Bishop Hahn had helped identify the faithful members invited, and several of the ward's most committed households were present. Elder Carter spoke of a call to service and a relocation to Salt Lake City, and those present gave an undertaking not to discuss what they had heard.

Over the months that followed, families who had been fixtures of the ward began to leave. They did not announce their departures or give the usual farewells, and in most cases the ward learned they had gone only when they stopped appearing on Sundays. The Smiths and the Bakers were among them. Their houses stood empty, their callings fell vacant overnight, and their names stayed on the ward's records with no forwarding addresses.

Bishop Hahn's inquiries through Church channels returned no record of any sanctioned relocation of Adelaide members. That silence troubled the remaining congregation more than the departures themselves. Speculation filled the gap in the foyer and the car park: a secret calling, a quiet move to Utah, something stranger. The bishop said what he could and no more. Some members took comfort from his steadiness. Others read it as evasion, and a few families stopped attending altogether, unwilling to sit under leadership that could not explain what had happened.

The practical losses were heavy. The ward lost a Relief Society President, several teachers, youth leaders and a large share of its children's classes almost at once. The Relief Society was reorganised before the end of the year. Primary classes were combined. Visiting routes had to be redrawn, and some elderly sisters went weeks without the visitors who had called on them for years before anyone noticed the gap.

A Smaller Congregation

The Church's move to a two-hour Sunday block in January 2019 arrived at Playford Ward in the middle of its rebuilding, and for a congregation stretched thin it was a relief. Sacrament meeting attendance settled at around eighty to ninety people through 2019. The pews where the departed families had sat for years stayed mostly empty, and nobody hurried to fill them.

The pandemic of 2020 closed the Craigmore meetinghouse for months. Priesthood holders took the sacrament to members' homes, meetings moved to video calls, and conference broadcasts reached elderly members through tablets set up by the ward's teenagers. When the chapel reopened, a number of families who had stayed away during the closures did not come back.

Growth came back slowly from the edges. New housing estates in Blakeview, Munno Para West and beyond brought young families into the ward boundaries, among them converts and members moving in from interstate who knew nothing of 2018 and had no reason to ask. They took callings the long-time members were tired of holding, filled the Primary rooms again and brought a different kind of noise to the cultural hall.

Through 2026 Playford Ward still met each Sunday in the Craigmore chapel, smaller and more mixed than it had been at its height. Brother Rigby still stood at the doors. The older members still remembered which families had sat in which pews before the winter of 2018, and some of them still kept those families' names in their prayers. The newer members mostly knew the ward only as it was: modest, stretched, warm and unfinished.