NOM

What was/is the most dysfunctional LDS group/ward you've seen?

I'm thinking of....well I'm going to wait to share.

Ok, so my ward in Albuquerque, NM, was crazy. (Late 90s) They were SUPER TBM. During Bishop/youth interviews, the Bishop would tell me not to be friends with non-members. We had to wear Sunday dress to Wednesday night mutual. SM F&T meets were the craziest though. So many people would get that it would last all three hours, people would sing, stand there and weep, tell super cringe stories, confess random shit... Eventually my mom said we could skip F &T Sunday. So, it was a win in the end!

Mine was a BYU married student ward. In the single BYU student wards there were fewer over-zealous people, but in the married ward I was in it felt like a continuation of missionary life. Lot's of judgement and pressure from all sides. I was in the elder's quorum presidency and the pres was extremely demanding - one time I sent a home teaching report email at midnight and he woke me up at 5:30am to get me to resend it because I hadn't attached the report. He acted like if we didn't take every tiny thing seriously we were going straight to hell. It was traumatic. The dude's a therapist now, his poor patients.

The LARPing was taken very seriously and got a bit dystopian in that ward.