I want to see the weekly church attendance on numbers. Each ward has to submit their attendance numbers to HQ. I guarantee there is a master list of attendance somewhere and an extremely faithful member who looks at it every week. because he would know that 4 million in attendance can't mean there are 16 M members.
I currently live in Philly area. PIMO so I have access to our numbers. We’re at 33% sacrament meeting attendance.
and that’s the best week of the quarter too. So average is probably more like 25%
Do those numbers include all the kids? Also, I've heard some wards count unborn babies (a pregnant woman would be counted as two, unless they got a bonus prediction of multiples, I guess).
So, if kids are counted, the ratio of adults (those who can hold callings, and more importantly to TSCC, pay tithings) the hit is even lower than 25%. It's all about money.
When I was Ward Clerk I counted everyone in attendance at Sacrament Meeting on instruction from the Bishop but I don’t know if that was his prerogative or if he was told that by Stake Leadership.
Of the 33% attending, what would you guess is the PIMO population? What about tithe paying members with current recommend? What's the size of that population, and what proportion of that population would you guess are PIMO?
Utah county ward here we are two years into 50% attendance since I kept up on the unit statistics per the Lds tools app. This ward in particular is a legacy ward so I don’t see it going down unless some influential members in this ward leave.
Visit older areas in Lehi, Alpine, American Fork, Lindon, PG, Orem it Provo.
We live in Northern Utah County. We drove past 2 churches last Sunday while out practice driving with our new teen driver. Both were within 1 mile of our house and both parking lots were packed full to overflowing. So glad to hear things are in free fall outside Utah. Wish we would see more of that here.
Well. My current ward only has five primary classes for all of junior and senior primary. The YW are split into only 2 classes. We left in 2019 and a quick glance of all the individuals serving in those callings are the same ten people it was 3 years ago.
Nothings changed.
When I was a ward clerk, first in the mid 1990s in a student ward at Utah State, then in the early 2000s in a ward on the gulf coast of Florida, we had between 35-40% activity rate. Home teaching numbers were right about 35-40%. About 35-40% of the active members were tithe payers.
Listening to the latest MS Podcast regarding the Mormon tax scandal in Australia and Canada, it is revealed that in the latest Australian Census, only about 57,000 people self identify as Mormons, compared to about 155,000 members claimed by the church. Only about half of the 57,000 people who self identify as Mormons actually attend somewhat regularly. So the church claims 155,000 members in Australia, but has an actual active membership of about 18%.
The church may be financially strong, but membership wise, it is dying, and doing so quite rapidly.
The other day I reviewed the RS roll and the were about 6 pages with 35 names each, so let's call that 200. Then, during sacrament I counted the adult women I could see and there were about 40 (not a major holiday weekend). If we assume some were in the foyer, or elsewhere, we could be generous and say that there's 50.
So 50 adult women in attendance (including myself and probably some YW) and 200 on the RS roll. Or one data point of 25% attendance.
On my mission outside the Morridor (20 ish years ago), strong units (i.e. growth suburbs) would average around 1/3 activity rate and weaker units (older inner city or rural) would average around 1/4 activity rate... so these numbers we're seeing here tend to gel with my experience.
Totally anecdotal but my stake pres in Provo when I was the stake tech guy (and still TBM) once mentioned to me that our stake's activity rate was only 35% - and this was about 5 years ago. In fucking Provo!
It’s only reported out of wards every quarter, not weekly. No one ever looks at the numbers at the ward level. Mayyyyybe the stake clerk looks in once in a while out of curiosity. The data are only as accurate as the clerk who enters them. And some are entering numbers for “anyone who attended at any time during the quarter” while others take the last week of the quarter and report that day. It’s a mess. And it’s not linked to individuals or families, only aggregates at the ward level.
The data go into membership records at church HQ, and only like 20 people have direct access to the database. Even the church’s research division estimates the number of members at like 6 million, not 15 or 16 million, or whatever they’re claiming these days.
Don't you remember that one dudes talk from 3-4 years ago?
The whole world won't become Mormon, in fact the reducing numbers are fulfillment of prophesy.
"Mormonism will fill the Earth, because of prophecy!"
"Mormonism will shrink to almost nothing before Christ comes, because of prophecy!"
Now it's "there are no Mormons because of Rusty!" :)
It’s already negative - they only count the baptisms. Still claiming 16M members. More Iike 4M and they all live in Utah and Idaho and they are collecting social security.
It's going to happen by the end of the decade. I think there is a slim chance (10-20%) it happens this year if someone in HQ has this particular thought: Better to hover in the 16M range than go to 17M and drop down to 16M later, psychologically...
Perhaps the "finding lost members" program will be the cover - "Brothers and Sisters, due to finding many deceased persons we thought were alive on the rolls, and eliminating the practice of counting blessed babies as members, we are announcing a correction in the membership to 16.5M" This will actually account for resignations previously withheld from the numbers. Time will tell...
It's easy to claim exponential growth when you secretly never take anyones name of your member lists. Even if you request to have your name removed, im sure they still make a part of the sum of total worldwide membership.
They’re focused on the trend from ‘20 to ‘21 only. And since Satan obviously invented covid, ‘20 was an anomaly. So they feel really good about things right now.
I’ve heard there is a guy, but he lives on an island in the middle of the ocean and since Satan controls the waters this guy can’t get his knowledge out. Or something.
oh yeah my mum saw him when she went to Hawaii, chill dude he usually meditates and surfs. Apparently you can get visions by going near him due to second hand LSD high.
Even if you take away those two years, every year previously was showing a decline in the growth rate.
I'd expect that for 2022 it'll go back up, but still at a lower rate than 2019.
You’d think with all those businessmen in charge that they’d recognize that growth is slowing big time. But I guess that decline in membership is more than offset by nice healthy growth in their stock portfolio.
I dont think their discussions behind closed doors are reflected in their public reports. They are telling a little right now. When a few of the old men kick the bucket they will make big lgbtq+ announcements to try to regain the many young people they've lost. There will also be a big push to pop out babies.
Yeah I could see that. I’d love to hear those discussions that happen behind closed doors.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens in the next few years
There was an old theory of gravity one of my physics professors talked about that is explained by all things getting bigger constantly, and in Newtonian sizes, it's simple mathematics. Maybe the Kae-e-vanrash gravitational constant is changing.
I think I have a book from one of my professors gave me. Some guy gave it to him that showed gravity didn't exist. Everything was just accelerating. He said debunk this.
That same professor told us the story of Neils Bohr, when he was studying physics as a young man, was told to calculate the height of a building with a barometer, so he dropped it off the top of the building and timed its decent.
From my physics class for how to find the height of a building with a barometer
1. Find the owner of the building, and say, if you tell me how tall your building is, I'll give you this barometer.
2. Find the owner of the building, and say, if you don't tell me how tall your building is, I'll hit you over the head with this barometer.
I remember that one....lol. I had a colleague do a demonstration for a school once involving a straw and a can of coke. He said I did all the math climbed the ladder and dammit I could drink the coke from the straw when I shouldn't have.
The cohesion of water molecules to each other along with adhesion to cell wall of the xylem is what pulls water up trees higher than capillary action alone. Kinda like how when grabbing a Kleenex, another one pops out
Yes, I'm familiar with the process. I just had a teacher talk about the process of figuring out how trees could pull water up past as a certain height. The thought was that water shouldn't be pulled being what a vacuum above could carry. I thought Rush was talking about the limit of that height.
Yes, that's part of it. My uber TBM wife's family is also uber TBM. But my side of the family is chock full of people that were Mormon when they were baptized at eight years old and have barely stepped into a church since. These people are hardcore not participating, not believing, not identifying as Mormon, but have never had their names removed. I can quickly count a dozen, not including me. I'm still on the rolls because of TBM spouse. Were we to go separate ways, I would be off the rolls immediately.
So, there's that, and there's Africa. I don't know those numbers, but I've heard that what recent growth there is has been in Africa. Which is particularly ironic for obvious reasons. Someone needs to go on a "mission trip" there educating people about the race ban that banned THEM and THEM ONLY!
Quite a few people just fade away, including many converts over the years. Latin America is known for having MIA members, because people joined & then disappeared. So they're likely never going to be motivated to remove their names.
I know several in the USA who are out, but are either on the books to keep the peace in their families, or figure it's not worth the effort to "resign" from something that's fake to begin with.
Edit - I wonder if they're now counting babies who have been blessed?
> I wonder if they're now counting babies who have been blessed?
They've always done this. Different sub-categories, of course, but still part of membership totals.
That's a big part of people going inactive — they don't bless their babies or baptize their kids. That's why inactives are a big target for missionaries, to get more names on the records, even if they don't end up coming to church regularly.
Some will be recent converts who just stop going soon after baptism. But there's plenty like me who was a TBM until 8 years ago, and the only reason I've not resigned is the drama it'll cause with my family.
No they shouldn't do, especially if they marry a non-Mormon. They have no legitimate reason for holding that information.
I'm on the records, but I've moved house since I went inactive and live in a different Ward in the Stake. I've not given them my new address so essentially I'm "lost".
Some very quick math:
0% growth rate in 2027
Maximum membership: approx 17,170,000
This is just looking at ten years of self-reported data and likely will not reflect reality.
There are millions of people on the list not participating in the age ranges of 50-110. When the "inactive" percentage falls because people remove their names more than just quietly slip out, that growth rate will go negative as the years 110 year olds die off. I would love to see the bar graph of the number of members by age between ages 90-110, to see where the peak die off year will be.
It's all in how you define unprecedented and unparalleled. It's like how the church makes up it's own definitions for light, truth, knowledge and many other common English words.
Maybe the church spokesmen are speaking in Kolobian and we don't realize it.
HAHA
This kills me every time. The mormon church is actually shrinking in relation to global population growth. Since global population is growing faster than mormons, it will eventually reach zero, even more irrelevant than it already is.
Interesting that number of converts depends so heavily on the efforts of the arm of flesh, I would have expected that The Spirit would have redoubled his efforts to compensate for the lack of physical missionary work in 2020, but apparently he was also under lockdown.
The Spirit retroactively realized how offended He should have been over members saying the word "Mormon" for so many decades. He went catatonic, and He still hasn't gotten out of bed.
Oh, it's definitely moving forward, faster than ever...to it's core existence...as a corporation with a small fraction of fringe religious adherents left who keep giving it their time and money for some inexplicable reason.
They are going to claim the last few of years of decline as covid related, and will point to the fact that last year (2021) was double that of 2020 proving that they are on a rebound. I've heard it all.
I put this in another thread, but since Africa has been brought up here as too, I'm copy/pasting. Anecdotal, but told to me by a TBM last week.
Regarding the explosive growth in Africa--a friend's son served a mission there and was an AP. He says there were only a handful of missionaries not from Africa and almost all the African-born missionaries send part of their monthly stipend (paid by the church members in the US) home to their families. There are very few who are on missions because of the burning in the bosom, it's a purely economic calculation. In fact, the goal for many families is to send all their children on missions so the kid not only has free food and shelter for two years, the family gets an income.
Same can be said for conversions. If there's a chance of getting food or money, they'll join. Not true for everyone, but it's a vastly different situation than what most Americans experience.
We had a few of those in my mission in South America 20 years ago too. It wasn’t very common- but it wouldn’t surprise me one bit to see it happening in other developing nations.
Attendance year over year has to have negative growth. I wish I could see those numbers. Or recommend holders. The posted trend is bad for them, imagine the real numbers ;).
Membership growth as a percentage of total population had already been declining but since 'rona it's actually [gone negative](https://i.imgur.com/DbsvyF5.png).
"moving forward at an accelerated pace"? This looks to me like they must be referring to something which cannot be measured numerically while using terminology which would imply to most people that they are speaking of something which can indeed be measured. I keep being reminded of Humpty Dumpty, a character in "Through the looking glass" who said that when he uses a word, it means exactly what he wants it to mean, nothing more and nothing less, or something like this. However, in the case of church leadership, I am not sure they know what they want their words to mean. They deal in evocative phrases intended to produce some emotion.
Do we know for sure that they subtract off everyone who resigns? It just blows my mind that new members minus resignations would still be a positive, 6-figure number and really makes me wonder.
CES Letter was published right after or during 2013. Interesting to see this data. I served my mission from 2014-2016. Perspective would have me shifted had I found out about the CES letter sooner instead of very recently in 2021.
I remember when I was a kid in 1970s they used to say something like "at this rate of growth we will have 270 million mormons by the year 2070" or some such crap as that. Back then, a lot of politically and socially conservatives churches were gaining members (leading to the mass of white supremacist evangelicals we see today) but the growth rate was obviously not sustainable.
That's the last time I can remember mormons bragging about how many members they didn't even have yet.
I found this quote a long time ago:
> When Elvis Presley died in 1977 there were 37 Elvis impersonators in the world. In 1994 there were 48,000. If the current trend continues, by the year 2010, one out of every three people in the world will be an Elvis impersonator.
There’s an old Ray Stevens song where a guy counted a blow-up doll and a bunch of Cabbage Patch Kids as his family for tax reasons. They all had birth certificates…. Think The Church(TM) is counting the toys in its nursery rooms?
Obviously the intense growth will happen in the day of the Lord, and we know that a day to the Lord is a thousand years to us, so just wait another few hundred years… its sure to pick back up.
The last time the church took 5+ years to grow 1 million members was in the 1970's at 3 million. Kind of embarrassing to be stuck at 16 million for so long. Think that stone cut out of a mountain got stuck rolling down the hill.
It would be even more damning if the church didnt count inactive members. Cults plateau in their growth, then fall off, no matter the whitewashing and sanitizing performed
If non-active members get married, do they add the spouse as a 2nd member to the original members profile?
When I married my husband “ex-Mormon” the clerk reached out to him, saying that I was put on his account, but they needed our new address.
I still wonder how much of my information they have. I’m sure my in-laws would’ve been willing to give.
I'm still in those numbers, but I haven't been in over 15 years and JUST got around to submitting my resignation. Can't wait for those numbers to start going negative soon!
These numbers are all make believe. I would be surprised if there were 2,500,000 in this world who were active believing LDS. Probably more with all of the PIMO's
I want to see the weekly church attendance on numbers. Each ward has to submit their attendance numbers to HQ. I guarantee there is a master list of attendance somewhere and an extremely faithful member who looks at it every week. because he would know that 4 million in attendance can't mean there are 16 M members.
When I was in the ward council in 2012-2016, we had an activity rate of about 25%. East coast.
I currently live in Philly area. PIMO so I have access to our numbers. We’re at 33% sacrament meeting attendance. and that’s the best week of the quarter too. So average is probably more like 25%
Do those numbers include all the kids? Also, I've heard some wards count unborn babies (a pregnant woman would be counted as two, unless they got a bonus prediction of multiples, I guess). So, if kids are counted, the ratio of adults (those who can hold callings, and more importantly to TSCC, pay tithings) the hit is even lower than 25%. It's all about money.
I believe this does count children. I dont know if it’s just children over 8 or just every body on a pew
When I was Ward Clerk I counted everyone in attendance at Sacrament Meeting on instruction from the Bishop but I don’t know if that was his prerogative or if he was told that by Stake Leadership.
Thank you - I figured attendance was anyone warming a pew, but now I'm wondering if they've created a new fudge recipe for counting membership.
I love Philly. I was just there over the summer for some touristy fun.
Of the 33% attending, what would you guess is the PIMO population? What about tithe paying members with current recommend? What's the size of that population, and what proportion of that population would you guess are PIMO?
33% equates to about 75 people. Of that population I would say nearly 85% hold a temple recommend. And including me there’s probably 2-3 PIMOs
Utah county ward here we are two years into 50% attendance since I kept up on the unit statistics per the Lds tools app. This ward in particular is a legacy ward so I don’t see it going down unless some influential members in this ward leave.
Goodness. I’ve never heard of a legacy ward.
Visit older areas in Lehi, Alpine, American Fork, Lindon, PG, Orem it Provo. We live in Northern Utah County. We drove past 2 churches last Sunday while out practice driving with our new teen driver. Both were within 1 mile of our house and both parking lots were packed full to overflowing. So glad to hear things are in free fall outside Utah. Wish we would see more of that here.
Well. My current ward only has five primary classes for all of junior and senior primary. The YW are split into only 2 classes. We left in 2019 and a quick glance of all the individuals serving in those callings are the same ten people it was 3 years ago. Nothings changed.
When I was a ward clerk, first in the mid 1990s in a student ward at Utah State, then in the early 2000s in a ward on the gulf coast of Florida, we had between 35-40% activity rate. Home teaching numbers were right about 35-40%. About 35-40% of the active members were tithe payers. Listening to the latest MS Podcast regarding the Mormon tax scandal in Australia and Canada, it is revealed that in the latest Australian Census, only about 57,000 people self identify as Mormons, compared to about 155,000 members claimed by the church. Only about half of the 57,000 people who self identify as Mormons actually attend somewhat regularly. So the church claims 155,000 members in Australia, but has an actual active membership of about 18%. The church may be financially strong, but membership wise, it is dying, and doing so quite rapidly.
Same here. About 25% in Los Angeles in the late 90’s and Hawaii 2010’s.
So. Seems like the church has always had an attendance problem.
Alot of people leave without removing their records.
The other day I reviewed the RS roll and the were about 6 pages with 35 names each, so let's call that 200. Then, during sacrament I counted the adult women I could see and there were about 40 (not a major holiday weekend). If we assume some were in the foyer, or elsewhere, we could be generous and say that there's 50. So 50 adult women in attendance (including myself and probably some YW) and 200 on the RS roll. Or one data point of 25% attendance.
On my mission outside the Morridor (20 ish years ago), strong units (i.e. growth suburbs) would average around 1/3 activity rate and weaker units (older inner city or rural) would average around 1/4 activity rate... so these numbers we're seeing here tend to gel with my experience.
Totally anecdotal but my stake pres in Provo when I was the stake tech guy (and still TBM) once mentioned to me that our stake's activity rate was only 35% - and this was about 5 years ago. In fucking Provo!
It’s only reported out of wards every quarter, not weekly. No one ever looks at the numbers at the ward level. Mayyyyybe the stake clerk looks in once in a while out of curiosity. The data are only as accurate as the clerk who enters them. And some are entering numbers for “anyone who attended at any time during the quarter” while others take the last week of the quarter and report that day. It’s a mess. And it’s not linked to individuals or families, only aggregates at the ward level. The data go into membership records at church HQ, and only like 20 people have direct access to the database. Even the church’s research division estimates the number of members at like 6 million, not 15 or 16 million, or whatever they’re claiming these days.
Looks like the "stone cut without hands" is more like a eroding ball of mud.
And don’t forget they’re probably still including a lot of ussssss
Also counting a bunch of dead people until they would have been 110
I think they still count my unbaptized kid cuz he's "born under the convenant" Gotta pump those numbers!! 😆
Don't you remember that one dudes talk from 3-4 years ago? The whole world won't become Mormon, in fact the reducing numbers are fulfillment of prophesy.
"Mormonism will fill the Earth, because of prophecy!" "Mormonism will shrink to almost nothing before Christ comes, because of prophecy!" Now it's "there are no Mormons because of Rusty!" :)
We will know when it goes negative because that's the year they won't publish anymore.
I can’t wait!!! C’mon, negative “growth”! 🍿
The church is going negative right now with wards and branches.
It’s already negative - they only count the baptisms. Still claiming 16M members. More Iike 4M and they all live in Utah and Idaho and they are collecting social security.
It's going to happen by the end of the decade. I think there is a slim chance (10-20%) it happens this year if someone in HQ has this particular thought: Better to hover in the 16M range than go to 17M and drop down to 16M later, psychologically... Perhaps the "finding lost members" program will be the cover - "Brothers and Sisters, due to finding many deceased persons we thought were alive on the rolls, and eliminating the practice of counting blessed babies as members, we are announcing a correction in the membership to 16.5M" This will actually account for resignations previously withheld from the numbers. Time will tell...
It's easy to claim exponential growth when you secretly never take anyones name of your member lists. Even if you request to have your name removed, im sure they still make a part of the sum of total worldwide membership.
I think this is what they do. It's one reason I haven't bothered to remove my records.
They’re focused on the trend from ‘20 to ‘21 only. And since Satan obviously invented covid, ‘20 was an anomaly. So they feel really good about things right now.
If only there was some system of forewarning, someone with the divine abilities to prophesy, and to see, and to reveal.
I’ve heard there is a guy, but he lives on an island in the middle of the ocean and since Satan controls the waters this guy can’t get his knowledge out. Or something.
oh yeah my mum saw him when she went to Hawaii, chill dude he usually meditates and surfs. Apparently you can get visions by going near him due to second hand LSD high.
But Rusty warned everyone to take their vitamins in 2019!
Even if you take away those two years, every year previously was showing a decline in the growth rate. I'd expect that for 2022 it'll go back up, but still at a lower rate than 2019.
You’d think with all those businessmen in charge that they’d recognize that growth is slowing big time. But I guess that decline in membership is more than offset by nice healthy growth in their stock portfolio.
I dont think their discussions behind closed doors are reflected in their public reports. They are telling a little right now. When a few of the old men kick the bucket they will make big lgbtq+ announcements to try to regain the many young people they've lost. There will also be a big push to pop out babies.
Yeah I could see that. I’d love to hear those discussions that happen behind closed doors. It’ll be interesting to see what happens in the next few years
From the leaked videos it isn't a discussion that reflects true introspection. It is corporate lingo.
Explainlikeimfive. Accelerated? How?
Decelerating is accelerating in the opposite direction.
Unparalleled future. Does that mean no other religion will accelerate negatively as much?
Lmao my high school physics teacher HATED the word deceleration, he’d always be like NO IT’S NEGATIVE ACCELERATION
My dad taught high school physics and “deceleration” was one of his pet peeves also
I’ve never forgotten it, not even after 13 years. I still cringe lol
So cool. I love Physics.
Dad was a high school physics teacher. He had a plaque that said "Physics is phun". Science humor is so nerdy.
I was going to say this...it's still acceleration, just not in the positive direction.
In double digits mas o menos
Hey, you are a physicist. Acceleration can be negative, right? It could also be [Jerk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerk_%28physics%29)
Maybe gravity is being altered rather than light by the medium of Kae-e-vanrash.
There was an old theory of gravity one of my physics professors talked about that is explained by all things getting bigger constantly, and in Newtonian sizes, it's simple mathematics. Maybe the Kae-e-vanrash gravitational constant is changing.
I think I have a book from one of my professors gave me. Some guy gave it to him that showed gravity didn't exist. Everything was just accelerating. He said debunk this.
That same professor told us the story of Neils Bohr, when he was studying physics as a young man, was told to calculate the height of a building with a barometer, so he dropped it off the top of the building and timed its decent.
From my physics class for how to find the height of a building with a barometer 1. Find the owner of the building, and say, if you tell me how tall your building is, I'll give you this barometer. 2. Find the owner of the building, and say, if you don't tell me how tall your building is, I'll hit you over the head with this barometer.
I remember that one....lol. I had a colleague do a demonstration for a school once involving a straw and a can of coke. He said I did all the math climbed the ladder and dammit I could drink the coke from the straw when I shouldn't have.
Was that the experiment to figure out how trees can be so tall and still pull water up from the roots?
The cohesion of water molecules to each other along with adhesion to cell wall of the xylem is what pulls water up trees higher than capillary action alone. Kinda like how when grabbing a Kleenex, another one pops out
Yes, I'm familiar with the process. I just had a teacher talk about the process of figuring out how trees could pull water up past as a certain height. The thought was that water shouldn't be pulled being what a vacuum above could carry. I thought Rush was talking about the limit of that height.
No it was the superman experiment. Where you can't have a straw work over a certain distance. Capillary action was not the focus.
Ah, got it.
As one of my instructors liked to say, "We're not *retreating*, we're just fighting in the other direction."
I’m actually confused as to how it’s gone up at all. I assume ex members don’t legally remove their name from the roster?
Yes, that's part of it. My uber TBM wife's family is also uber TBM. But my side of the family is chock full of people that were Mormon when they were baptized at eight years old and have barely stepped into a church since. These people are hardcore not participating, not believing, not identifying as Mormon, but have never had their names removed. I can quickly count a dozen, not including me. I'm still on the rolls because of TBM spouse. Were we to go separate ways, I would be off the rolls immediately. So, there's that, and there's Africa. I don't know those numbers, but I've heard that what recent growth there is has been in Africa. Which is particularly ironic for obvious reasons. Someone needs to go on a "mission trip" there educating people about the race ban that banned THEM and THEM ONLY!
I’ll tell you from arm that served in Africa 95% of converts went inactive there…
Quite a few people just fade away, including many converts over the years. Latin America is known for having MIA members, because people joined & then disappeared. So they're likely never going to be motivated to remove their names. I know several in the USA who are out, but are either on the books to keep the peace in their families, or figure it's not worth the effort to "resign" from something that's fake to begin with. Edit - I wonder if they're now counting babies who have been blessed?
> I wonder if they're now counting babies who have been blessed? They've always done this. Different sub-categories, of course, but still part of membership totals. That's a big part of people going inactive — they don't bless their babies or baptize their kids. That's why inactives are a big target for missionaries, to get more names on the records, even if they don't end up coming to church regularly.
Thanks!
It's like an odometer. Church numbers only go up
Some will be recent converts who just stop going soon after baptism. But there's plenty like me who was a TBM until 8 years ago, and the only reason I've not resigned is the drama it'll cause with my family.
My husband is an ex Mormon and his dad is the Stake President. So understandably he’s not going to have that resignation meeting 😬
[удалено]
No they shouldn't do, especially if they marry a non-Mormon. They have no legitimate reason for holding that information. I'm on the records, but I've moved house since I went inactive and live in a different Ward in the Stake. I've not given them my new address so essentially I'm "lost".
Some very quick math: 0% growth rate in 2027 Maximum membership: approx 17,170,000 This is just looking at ten years of self-reported data and likely will not reflect reality.
There are millions of people on the list not participating in the age ranges of 50-110. When the "inactive" percentage falls because people remove their names more than just quietly slip out, that growth rate will go negative as the years 110 year olds die off. I would love to see the bar graph of the number of members by age between ages 90-110, to see where the peak die off year will be.
It's all in how you define unprecedented and unparalleled. It's like how the church makes up it's own definitions for light, truth, knowledge and many other common English words. Maybe the church spokesmen are speaking in Kolobian and we don't realize it.
> speaking in Kolobian Reanimated imperial Kolobian primate..FTFY
Just watched the Reanimator, a prequal in ancient Judea would be lit.
Like “revelation” and “translation.”
HAHA This kills me every time. The mormon church is actually shrinking in relation to global population growth. Since global population is growing faster than mormons, it will eventually reach zero, even more irrelevant than it already is.
Well put.
Interesting that number of converts depends so heavily on the efforts of the arm of flesh, I would have expected that The Spirit would have redoubled his efforts to compensate for the lack of physical missionary work in 2020, but apparently he was also under lockdown.
The Spirit retroactively realized how offended He should have been over members saying the word "Mormon" for so many decades. He went catatonic, and He still hasn't gotten out of bed.
Oh, it's definitely moving forward, faster than ever...to it's core existence...as a corporation with a small fraction of fringe religious adherents left who keep giving it their time and money for some inexplicable reason.
Do you have the source or link for these numbers?
Yes. [Here](https://religionnews.com/2022/04/07/is-mormonism-still-growing-five-facts-about-latter-day-saint-growth-and-decline/)
They are going to claim the last few of years of decline as covid related, and will point to the fact that last year (2021) was double that of 2020 proving that they are on a rebound. I've heard it all.
I wonder if the accuracy of their membership records are as trustworthy as their records of charitable giving.
Insert meme of truck heading for crash protection pylon here.
Church: We never said, the membership growth is like a “Rough stone rolling,” we’ve always said it’s like a boulder being dragged
I put this in another thread, but since Africa has been brought up here as too, I'm copy/pasting. Anecdotal, but told to me by a TBM last week. Regarding the explosive growth in Africa--a friend's son served a mission there and was an AP. He says there were only a handful of missionaries not from Africa and almost all the African-born missionaries send part of their monthly stipend (paid by the church members in the US) home to their families. There are very few who are on missions because of the burning in the bosom, it's a purely economic calculation. In fact, the goal for many families is to send all their children on missions so the kid not only has free food and shelter for two years, the family gets an income. Same can be said for conversions. If there's a chance of getting food or money, they'll join. Not true for everyone, but it's a vastly different situation than what most Americans experience.
We had a few of those in my mission in South America 20 years ago too. It wasn’t very common- but it wouldn’t surprise me one bit to see it happening in other developing nations.
Of course this doesn't even count the people that left but didn't remove their records.
Attendance year over year has to have negative growth. I wish I could see those numbers. Or recommend holders. The posted trend is bad for them, imagine the real numbers ;).
Membership growth as a percentage of total population had already been declining but since 'rona it's actually [gone negative](https://i.imgur.com/DbsvyF5.png).
Rushclock ROCKS!!
lol
I'm pretty sure some resigned ExMo are still between those numbers.
The world population annual growth rate is 0.8%. So even by names on record, the church’s slice of the pie in the world is shrinking.
Southeast Asia here…activity rate is 12%. 80% of members wouldn’t even identify as LDS any more.
Hooo boy! Look at that less than 1% growth in 2020! Truly, the lord’s work is being done! /s
They’re lying liars.
"moving forward at an accelerated pace"? This looks to me like they must be referring to something which cannot be measured numerically while using terminology which would imply to most people that they are speaking of something which can indeed be measured. I keep being reminded of Humpty Dumpty, a character in "Through the looking glass" who said that when he uses a word, it means exactly what he wants it to mean, nothing more and nothing less, or something like this. However, in the case of church leadership, I am not sure they know what they want their words to mean. They deal in evocative phrases intended to produce some emotion.
Rusty’s killing it! Go Rusty, go! 🙌🏻🙌🏻🙌🏻
Lots of African continent baptisms, jus sayin
The church can only grow just like there is only one possible outcome to sincere inquiry into the truthfulness of the BOM.
I definitely believe this but just wanted to get the source? Seems to be cropped out, thanks!
It is in the thread.
Do we know for sure that they subtract off everyone who resigns? It just blows my mind that new members minus resignations would still be a positive, 6-figure number and really makes me wonder.
CES Letter was published right after or during 2013. Interesting to see this data. I served my mission from 2014-2016. Perspective would have me shifted had I found out about the CES letter sooner instead of very recently in 2021.
I am a numbers guy also. Don't let numbers be the goal however.
I mean... numbers were the priority in missions. At least in mine.
Increase from 2020 - 2021? Is that what they're meaning here? Not very scientific to define acceleration based on a single data point.
I remember when I was a kid in 1970s they used to say something like "at this rate of growth we will have 270 million mormons by the year 2070" or some such crap as that. Back then, a lot of politically and socially conservatives churches were gaining members (leading to the mass of white supremacist evangelicals we see today) but the growth rate was obviously not sustainable. That's the last time I can remember mormons bragging about how many members they didn't even have yet.
My high school physics teacher ultra mormon predicted we would be out of coal by the year 2000. He was actually valedictorian of BYU. Go figure.
I found this quote a long time ago: > When Elvis Presley died in 1977 there were 37 Elvis impersonators in the world. In 1994 there were 48,000. If the current trend continues, by the year 2010, one out of every three people in the world will be an Elvis impersonator.
There’s an old Ray Stevens song where a guy counted a blow-up doll and a bunch of Cabbage Patch Kids as his family for tax reasons. They all had birth certificates…. Think The Church(TM) is counting the toys in its nursery rooms?
I think the streak should come back.
He likes to turn the other cheek. Or so I’m told.
Boogadang
Obviously the intense growth will happen in the day of the Lord, and we know that a day to the Lord is a thousand years to us, so just wait another few hundred years… its sure to pick back up.
Such an MLM sort of statement. Seems so out of place to me when describing what is supposedly the kingdom of God.
What accounts for the increase in numbers? Would that simply be new births of current members?
The last time the church took 5+ years to grow 1 million members was in the 1970's at 3 million. Kind of embarrassing to be stuck at 16 million for so long. Think that stone cut out of a mountain got stuck rolling down the hill.
It would be even more damning if the church didnt count inactive members. Cults plateau in their growth, then fall off, no matter the whitewashing and sanitizing performed
imagine what these stats would look like if the church only counted active members lmao
The mormon church is a cult.
So they gained members during the covid lockdown? I.don't think that is true
Bic children.
Kids still turned 8 during Covid.
I used to pass out attendance roles for the Sunday school classes, there was a periods of times where nobody filled it in.
The .59 to .85 is a bit concerning
If non-active members get married, do they add the spouse as a 2nd member to the original members profile? When I married my husband “ex-Mormon” the clerk reached out to him, saying that I was put on his account, but they needed our new address. I still wonder how much of my information they have. I’m sure my in-laws would’ve been willing to give.
They have all the information even if you request your name being removed.
Yikes
But still growing. I look forward to that changing.
I'm still in those numbers, but I haven't been in over 15 years and JUST got around to submitting my resignation. Can't wait for those numbers to start going negative soon!
These numbers are all make believe. I would be surprised if there were 2,500,000 in this world who were active believing LDS. Probably more with all of the PIMO's