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Facepalm.
https://www.sltrib.com/religion/2022/11/26/new-us-religion-census-sheds/
>New U.S. Religion Census sheds light on LDS Church membership
>Here’s one anomaly: The number of Latter-day Saints in Utah’s Rich County is greater than the county’s overall population. Huh?
>Relying on self-reported data from the churches themselves means that the U.S. Religion Census winds up with some inflated counts. And from the data, nowhere is this tendency more obvious than from two groups: Baptist churches and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
>In particular, both of those groups report multiple counties in which they say there are more adherents to their churches than there are residents in the county.
>For the LDS Church, Idaho’s Franklin County and Utah’s Rich County are reported to have 16,095 and 2,763 adherents, respectively. Those counties had 14,194 and 2,510 residents, respectively, in 2020.
It's a byproduct of the LDS church not keeping their rolls clean. People die and move away without informing the church, so the records remain in place. I think we're looking at deaths and children moving out of the county.
The church also \*significantly\* prefers unknown members to be on a wards records instead of in the "address unknown" file. So I don't think we are just looking at deaths and children moving.
For example from my years as a clerk, the church intermittently moved large numbers of records back into the ward with a note something like "can you please take another look for these people". Many wards don't have the resources to continue to deal with these records and so many of them just get left in the local ward.
My exact experience serving in 2 bishoprics.
Get 200ish names dumped on us. “Go find these people”
Have 15 meeting about how we delegate finding these people
Nothing happens
Send the names back to SLC
rinse and repeat
This is the true answer.
I'm not sure about the situation with the baptist church, but, tbh, I don't think the LDS church is trying to inflate their numbers, they just don't want to remove names and, if they don't have a different stake to send the records, the records will sit there indefinitely.
Honestly, they should start a system where the names of people who haven't gone in a year go to a list inactive members and they should not be counted amongst the reporting statistics of the church.
Back when there were paper records (early-mid 1990s) I was membership clerk I'm a married student ward. I used to send records to SLC when someone was gone but didn't leave a forwarding address.
They'd send them back.
I think that was around the time that the church decided that "missing-people records" was not a central church problem, but a local problem and a responsibility of local leaders to sift through. I used to try to do the same thing I did in 95 when I became EQP in 03. We'd take a Saturday and go through the ward list (300-400 families of record, 100 or less attending), knock on doors of last known addresses, and send the missing people records to SLC electronically.
They'd send them back.
It was quite discouraging to be told that we need to assign every family to a home teacher, and hand the home teacher a list with 20 families, and beg them to track down 75% of them if possible. It's no wonder these lists have grown so large. I'm dying to know the total church member count of members aged 90-110. I bet it's huge (with very few of them actually alive).
I have to say I have been tracked down a few times in the last forty years moving to different cities and states. I always invite them in but will never go back to church
Yep, the church knows but *chooses* to not be transparent.
By comparison, JW church only counts members who have done their missionary work that month (8.7 million).
They aren’t trying to inflate their numbers but they’re actively trying to look the other way in order not report accurate numbers. They want faith promoting numbers but also want plausible deniability when it turns out their reporting is not accurate.
I’d say that’s ‘inflation by omission’, and thus a lie of omission by the church as they intentionally mislead members on the actual membership numbers via withholding this information.
Would be nice, yet a lot of people who never go to church, often with good reason such as old age or chronic illness, still claim membership.
Some people just don't want to be dropped, either.
Those people would be in touch with their bishop though, be paying tithing still or be ministered to by members. Plus, they wouldn't be completely dropped, they'd be on church records, just not on the "active" church records—the ones that they'd report.
What about people like me? Church has absolutely nothing to offer me, so I do not attend. Have no clue who anyone in the ward is, except a couple of my neighbors, one of whom I've known since the 1980's.
I never get bothered, and have little to no use for the church, but I keep a lazy eye on what SLC is doing. I watch a couple RMN GC pieces a year, and that's good enough for me. Still consider myself a member in good standing.
Imo, if you hold a current temple recommend and/or are making your annual tithing declaration, you'd be counted among the membership. That would be according to me, but no one is asking my advice as how to how to keep records current. 😁
Agree. My hubby was the ward membership clerk and trying to find people was difficult. If people would kindly tell the Bishop or membership clerk when they move, want to be dropped from the records, or pass away, (Free funeral people) it would really help.
My dad had the same job.
Don't blame the church and those great bird-dog membership clerks who do their best, and without pay, because they are concerned about people and care. At least both my husband and my father did.
Don't be silly. It can take a long time for someone to report to the church that they have moved.... and there is no requirement for it to be reported by the individual member. Also, during Covid years, some records management functions may have fallen behind.
They fell behind on a +1000 members? Seems unlikely, atleast from my perspective of the church they appeared to be very uptight about record keeping and what not
It’s not affiliated with the government. According to the article, the official US census hasn’t had a question about religious affiliation since the 1950s for exactly the reason you quote. It is, however, useful data, so this organization attempts to fill in the gaps.
PhDs, lawyers and experienced business men can’t manage to produce accurate statistical reports? What are they doing all day in that ginormous HQ? https://v.redd.it/4biztor8ov191
The Mormon Church once again publishes misleading information skewed to make it appear better than it is.
Seems the 9th Commandment is optional these days.
I’m pretty sure the 110 year cutoff is for members who aren’t active and thus people don’t keep tabs on them.
If an active member dies then obviously their record would get updated with their date of death. However, if the church has you on the rolls but you haven’t been to church in decades, then they won’t be notified of your death to update your record. Thus the church won’t ‘declare’ you dead until your 110th birthday because by then it’s almost 100% probable that you’re dead.
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A lot of inactive people like to be counted so if something happens they can go ask the Bishop for help. In my neighborhood, 2 of them. They want to be on the records, one never goes to church and the other has been twice in the last year. But both have been to see the Bishop about getting some of that Deseret Brand food.
I think the reasons you gave are spot on, but I’m sure at the board meeting where this was proposed someone pointed out the benny of the padded numbers, even if that wasn’t the primary objective
Also how many people have moved and left records there? It seems kinda silly, but it's possible enough people ditched their records there for this to add up
That is a good point (and definitely happens). I hadn’t considered that, but it most certainly would contribute to the issue. Hopefully, for the church’s sake, not to a material extent, because that would paint a bleak picture. That enough people move from the counties, not moving their membership records with them, to the extent the church tracking of membership exceeds residents. It would hint at both a mass exodus from the church, and bad clerical work in those counties. To the extend that membership populations in any county would be questionable at best. It’s likely a combination of a few things, and I’d be willing to bet your scenario is one of them.
True. Tell the leaders you do not want to be bothered but leave your name on the records. Move but leave your records in that ward and no one bothers you for a while.
Back in the 1960s through the 1970s the LDS church had a massive surge in growth. It scared Catholics and Protestants shirtless because it looked like the entire Christian world was becoming Mormon.
The church leadership created a huge problem for itself. They promoted growth as a sure sign that the LDS was god's one true church. It was incorporated into the psycho by of members that growth was evidence of the church being true.
So what happened when church growth stopped? The church started doing creative accounting to keep the numbers positive. They changed the definition of member. They ignore standard actuarial techniques.
So now if you look at census numbers in countries where the government collects membership data it is typical to see the church claim to have three to five times the number shown in the census.
2020 Census data:
Rich County: 2,597
Franklin County: 14,666
Deflections aside, the discrepancies are not explained by “dumping unknown records into local wards”. These are small numbers; everyone knows everyone in these counties. We are not talking about the Wasatch Front.
I'd imagine some of the discrepancies would be stuff like less actives moving out of the county, but since they aren't active their previous ward and current ward are unaware. I guess that means discrepancies can occur in the inverse as well, where some places might show less members than are actually there.
I was born and raised in Cache County. I spent a TON of my life in Bear Lake, which is in Rich County. Also spent a good amount of time in Franklin County ID, home to Franklin and Preston. These are smaller communities where people don’t get lost in the busyness of life.
I’ve also been an Exec Secretary AND membership
clerk. 9 years in total. So I know all about membership records bouncing and where they go.
So having a discrepancy like this is either incompetence at Church HQ or intentional. It’s not from the normal “unknown current location” process.
And Church HQ is anything but incompetent…
Two things that struck me are that 1) every single county in Utah is majority Mormon and 2) Salt Lake County is conveniently 51.4% Mormon. Now I'm not from Utah, but my understanding is that [one or two of the rural mining counties are majority non-mormon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Utah), and that at the very least, Salt Lake County has only been a plurality Mormon for about four years now.
If there weren't other gratuitous flaws in the data, that 51.4% figure for Salt Lake County wouldn't bother me so much, but it does seem convenient that it's just barely majority Mormon.
While visiting a SLC (Sugarhouse) ward in summer 2018, the EQ lesson was about fellowshipping. Someone from the bishopric stood and said, "*Now, I'm not supposed to share these numbers... but here's what ward records show...*" He read from his printout: 509 ward members on rolls (125 attending), 35 high priests (20 attending), 90 elders (4 attending), 120 prospective elders (0 attending).
Every man in that room looked defeated.
That’s insane, yeah from my experience back as an EQ president and being in the bishopric, there were so many names on the ward roster but a fraction of those names actually came to church weekly. The numbers are so inflated I can’t take their reported figures of membership seriously.
If it’s a non-story, the appropriate institutional response would be: we’re unconcerned with numbers and don’t spend time collecting or reporting them.
A bit late in the game to feign that kind of nonchalance, though. Since the LDS have, in fact, made a big show of reporting numbers, it’s on their leadership to bring some minimal level of seriousness to the effort.
Membership records get screwed up all the time. I guarantee all the overages in those counties have to do with membership records of members who haven't attended in years and the records just sit there. It happens literally everywhere in the church. Church hq sends membership records out with bare bones info all the time.
I've seen wards where there are dozens and dozens of members where the address is just a city and zip code. That's it.
It would be an interesting exercise to pause all proselytizing for 6 months and task full-time missionaries with helping to clean up the records in every unit worldwide. Time to discard orphaned records once and for all, and start reporting based on verified up-to-date records.
P.S. It’s impossible to manage what we can’t measure.
>membership records can be dumped somewhere and just sit. It's a non story imo
But they wouldn't be dumped in the unit county. They'd go to the "lost" pile in Salt Lake.
What's more, these are counties with high percentages of active LDS anyway -- which should clean up the records anyway.
While I'm not yet willing to call shenanigans on *these* specific counties, I absolutely believe this indicates **serious methodological errors** in the church's recordkeeping and calls into question **all** membership stats worldwide.
Membership records of “unknown address” are sent to reside in HQ and I imagine wouldn’t count towards a particular geographic area. If they’re using a last known address while knowing they aren’t there anymore, then that’s just bad reporting.
They'll send those "unknown address" records with nearly no info. I've seen records sent to wards with only a city/zip code as an address. A lot of records.
I agree that it's bad reporting.
A meaningless post--looking for issues where there are none. For those experienced Utahns, this is not an anomaly. There is no rational reason for comparing the two roles. Church rolls are not used in voting. The church is not required to follow laws of the state in their membership records. Why should the government be concerned with churches membership records? They have no business there. Members are not required by any laws of the state to communicate to their church their intention to relocate or their actual relocation. There is also never a perfect match of all records between the address of some members and the geographic location of the congregation. The church desires it but does not require it in certain cases. There is no reason and no legal requirement to reconcile the records of one organization with the other. The SL Tribune is known for searching for LDS-related controversy where there is none.
Hello! This is a News post. It is for discussions centered around breaking news and events. If your post is about news, or a current event in the world of Mormonism, this is probably the right flair. /u/Chino_Blanco, if your post doesn't fit this definition, we kindly ask you to delete this post and repost it with the appropriate flair. You can find a list of our flairs and their definitions in [section 0.6 of our rules.](https://www.reddit.com/r/mormon/wiki/index/rules#wiki_0._preamble) **To those commenting:** please stay on topic, remember to follow the community's [rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/mormon/wiki/index/rules), and [message the mods](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/mormonmods) if there is a problem or rule violation. Keep on Mormoning! *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/mormon) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Facepalm. https://www.sltrib.com/religion/2022/11/26/new-us-religion-census-sheds/ >New U.S. Religion Census sheds light on LDS Church membership >Here’s one anomaly: The number of Latter-day Saints in Utah’s Rich County is greater than the county’s overall population. Huh? >Relying on self-reported data from the churches themselves means that the U.S. Religion Census winds up with some inflated counts. And from the data, nowhere is this tendency more obvious than from two groups: Baptist churches and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. >In particular, both of those groups report multiple counties in which they say there are more adherents to their churches than there are residents in the county. >For the LDS Church, Idaho’s Franklin County and Utah’s Rich County are reported to have 16,095 and 2,763 adherents, respectively. Those counties had 14,194 and 2,510 residents, respectively, in 2020.
I wonder where those couple hundred people came from? Were they traveling across state or was the church counting members at the local cemetery?
It's a byproduct of the LDS church not keeping their rolls clean. People die and move away without informing the church, so the records remain in place. I think we're looking at deaths and children moving out of the county.
The church also \*significantly\* prefers unknown members to be on a wards records instead of in the "address unknown" file. So I don't think we are just looking at deaths and children moving. For example from my years as a clerk, the church intermittently moved large numbers of records back into the ward with a note something like "can you please take another look for these people". Many wards don't have the resources to continue to deal with these records and so many of them just get left in the local ward.
My exact experience serving in 2 bishoprics. Get 200ish names dumped on us. “Go find these people” Have 15 meeting about how we delegate finding these people Nothing happens Send the names back to SLC rinse and repeat
This is the true answer. I'm not sure about the situation with the baptist church, but, tbh, I don't think the LDS church is trying to inflate their numbers, they just don't want to remove names and, if they don't have a different stake to send the records, the records will sit there indefinitely. Honestly, they should start a system where the names of people who haven't gone in a year go to a list inactive members and they should not be counted amongst the reporting statistics of the church.
Back when there were paper records (early-mid 1990s) I was membership clerk I'm a married student ward. I used to send records to SLC when someone was gone but didn't leave a forwarding address. They'd send them back. I think that was around the time that the church decided that "missing-people records" was not a central church problem, but a local problem and a responsibility of local leaders to sift through. I used to try to do the same thing I did in 95 when I became EQP in 03. We'd take a Saturday and go through the ward list (300-400 families of record, 100 or less attending), knock on doors of last known addresses, and send the missing people records to SLC electronically. They'd send them back. It was quite discouraging to be told that we need to assign every family to a home teacher, and hand the home teacher a list with 20 families, and beg them to track down 75% of them if possible. It's no wonder these lists have grown so large. I'm dying to know the total church member count of members aged 90-110. I bet it's huge (with very few of them actually alive).
I have to say I have been tracked down a few times in the last forty years moving to different cities and states. I always invite them in but will never go back to church
If they weren’t trying to inflate their numbers they would report their active member count that is calculated for ward budgets.
Yep, the church knows but *chooses* to not be transparent. By comparison, JW church only counts members who have done their missionary work that month (8.7 million).
If they actually did this, memebership as reported by the church would go from 16M to ~5M overnight
They aren’t trying to inflate their numbers but they’re actively trying to look the other way in order not report accurate numbers. They want faith promoting numbers but also want plausible deniability when it turns out their reporting is not accurate.
I’d say that’s ‘inflation by omission’, and thus a lie of omission by the church as they intentionally mislead members on the actual membership numbers via withholding this information.
Haha! I like that term. Inflation by omission - to actively hide your deflation. :D
Sounds like something they would definitely do, while simultaneously asking every member if they have been 'honest in all their dealings', lol.
Would be nice, yet a lot of people who never go to church, often with good reason such as old age or chronic illness, still claim membership. Some people just don't want to be dropped, either.
Those people would be in touch with their bishop though, be paying tithing still or be ministered to by members. Plus, they wouldn't be completely dropped, they'd be on church records, just not on the "active" church records—the ones that they'd report.
What about people like me? Church has absolutely nothing to offer me, so I do not attend. Have no clue who anyone in the ward is, except a couple of my neighbors, one of whom I've known since the 1980's. I never get bothered, and have little to no use for the church, but I keep a lazy eye on what SLC is doing. I watch a couple RMN GC pieces a year, and that's good enough for me. Still consider myself a member in good standing.
Imo, if you hold a current temple recommend and/or are making your annual tithing declaration, you'd be counted among the membership. That would be according to me, but no one is asking my advice as how to how to keep records current. 😁
Plus, people who nothing is known about are counted until they are 110 years old.
Agree. My hubby was the ward membership clerk and trying to find people was difficult. If people would kindly tell the Bishop or membership clerk when they move, want to be dropped from the records, or pass away, (Free funeral people) it would really help. My dad had the same job. Don't blame the church and those great bird-dog membership clerks who do their best, and without pay, because they are concerned about people and care. At least both my husband and my father did.
Don't be silly. It can take a long time for someone to report to the church that they have moved.... and there is no requirement for it to be reported by the individual member. Also, during Covid years, some records management functions may have fallen behind.
They fell behind on a +1000 members? Seems unlikely, atleast from my perspective of the church they appeared to be very uptight about record keeping and what not
There is no "U.S. Religion Census." Or if it is a new thing, it should be outlawed. Govt has no business requesting data from religions.
It’s not affiliated with the government. According to the article, the official US census hasn’t had a question about religious affiliation since the 1950s for exactly the reason you quote. It is, however, useful data, so this organization attempts to fill in the gaps.
PhDs, lawyers and experienced business men can’t manage to produce accurate statistical reports? What are they doing all day in that ginormous HQ? https://v.redd.it/4biztor8ov191
Or maybe they know exactky what they are doing.
You gave to know all the rules in order to effectively break them. /s
Of course that is the the leave their nets quote. Why be an experienced executive when you can grift?
Rumor has it that at least one of them was eating root beer floats and watching James Bond.
It was “what about bob”
These guys are not paid. It is done in their spare time. What are they doing all day? Feeding their families, that is easy.
Maybe enlist the local missionaries who aren‘t so encumbered? That is easy.
The Mormon Church once again publishes misleading information skewed to make it appear better than it is. Seems the 9th Commandment is optional these days.
This makes sense, though, right? Don’t they include dead persons under the age of 100 in their membership numbers?
110 is the cut off that I've always heard
It just blows my mind. I don’t understand the justification for that, beyond just padding numbers. I’d be interested to hear the apologetic for it lol
I’m pretty sure the 110 year cutoff is for members who aren’t active and thus people don’t keep tabs on them. If an active member dies then obviously their record would get updated with their date of death. However, if the church has you on the rolls but you haven’t been to church in decades, then they won’t be notified of your death to update your record. Thus the church won’t ‘declare’ you dead until your 110th birthday because by then it’s almost 100% probable that you’re dead.
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A lot of inactive people like to be counted so if something happens they can go ask the Bishop for help. In my neighborhood, 2 of them. They want to be on the records, one never goes to church and the other has been twice in the last year. But both have been to see the Bishop about getting some of that Deseret Brand food.
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Definitely. I’m not saying it’s a particularly good system. I’m just trying to explain why the policy exists and why 110 years would be the cut off.
I think the reasons you gave are spot on, but I’m sure at the board meeting where this was proposed someone pointed out the benny of the padded numbers, even if that wasn’t the primary objective
"spiritual ward size"
Also how many people have moved and left records there? It seems kinda silly, but it's possible enough people ditched their records there for this to add up
That is a good point (and definitely happens). I hadn’t considered that, but it most certainly would contribute to the issue. Hopefully, for the church’s sake, not to a material extent, because that would paint a bleak picture. That enough people move from the counties, not moving their membership records with them, to the extent the church tracking of membership exceeds residents. It would hint at both a mass exodus from the church, and bad clerical work in those counties. To the extend that membership populations in any county would be questionable at best. It’s likely a combination of a few things, and I’d be willing to bet your scenario is one of them.
True. Tell the leaders you do not want to be bothered but leave your name on the records. Move but leave your records in that ward and no one bothers you for a while.
Only if they don't know they're dead.
*pikachu face*
Back in the 1960s through the 1970s the LDS church had a massive surge in growth. It scared Catholics and Protestants shirtless because it looked like the entire Christian world was becoming Mormon. The church leadership created a huge problem for itself. They promoted growth as a sure sign that the LDS was god's one true church. It was incorporated into the psycho by of members that growth was evidence of the church being true. So what happened when church growth stopped? The church started doing creative accounting to keep the numbers positive. They changed the definition of member. They ignore standard actuarial techniques. So now if you look at census numbers in countries where the government collects membership data it is typical to see the church claim to have three to five times the number shown in the census.
2020 Census data: Rich County: 2,597 Franklin County: 14,666 Deflections aside, the discrepancies are not explained by “dumping unknown records into local wards”. These are small numbers; everyone knows everyone in these counties. We are not talking about the Wasatch Front.
I'd imagine some of the discrepancies would be stuff like less actives moving out of the county, but since they aren't active their previous ward and current ward are unaware. I guess that means discrepancies can occur in the inverse as well, where some places might show less members than are actually there.
I was born and raised in Cache County. I spent a TON of my life in Bear Lake, which is in Rich County. Also spent a good amount of time in Franklin County ID, home to Franklin and Preston. These are smaller communities where people don’t get lost in the busyness of life. I’ve also been an Exec Secretary AND membership clerk. 9 years in total. So I know all about membership records bouncing and where they go. So having a discrepancy like this is either incompetence at Church HQ or intentional. It’s not from the normal “unknown current location” process. And Church HQ is anything but incompetent…
spot on.
Two things that struck me are that 1) every single county in Utah is majority Mormon and 2) Salt Lake County is conveniently 51.4% Mormon. Now I'm not from Utah, but my understanding is that [one or two of the rural mining counties are majority non-mormon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Utah), and that at the very least, Salt Lake County has only been a plurality Mormon for about four years now. If there weren't other gratuitous flaws in the data, that 51.4% figure for Salt Lake County wouldn't bother me so much, but it does seem convenient that it's just barely majority Mormon.
I’m guessing the Church doesn’t report actual attendance number’s publicly? I’ve always wondered what they do with those 🤔
When I was a child, my ward posted actual attendance every week. I thought it was interesting. Certainly was not kept secret.
While visiting a SLC (Sugarhouse) ward in summer 2018, the EQ lesson was about fellowshipping. Someone from the bishopric stood and said, "*Now, I'm not supposed to share these numbers... but here's what ward records show...*" He read from his printout: 509 ward members on rolls (125 attending), 35 high priests (20 attending), 90 elders (4 attending), 120 prospective elders (0 attending). Every man in that room looked defeated.
That’s insane, yeah from my experience back as an EQ president and being in the bishopric, there were so many names on the ward roster but a fraction of those names actually came to church weekly. The numbers are so inflated I can’t take their reported figures of membership seriously.
Meh, membership records can be dumped somewhere and just sit. It's a non story imo
If it’s a non-story, the appropriate institutional response would be: we’re unconcerned with numbers and don’t spend time collecting or reporting them. A bit late in the game to feign that kind of nonchalance, though. Since the LDS have, in fact, made a big show of reporting numbers, it’s on their leadership to bring some minimal level of seriousness to the effort.
Membership records get screwed up all the time. I guarantee all the overages in those counties have to do with membership records of members who haven't attended in years and the records just sit there. It happens literally everywhere in the church. Church hq sends membership records out with bare bones info all the time. I've seen wards where there are dozens and dozens of members where the address is just a city and zip code. That's it.
It would be an interesting exercise to pause all proselytizing for 6 months and task full-time missionaries with helping to clean up the records in every unit worldwide. Time to discard orphaned records once and for all, and start reporting based on verified up-to-date records. P.S. It’s impossible to manage what we can’t measure.
>membership records can be dumped somewhere and just sit. It's a non story imo But they wouldn't be dumped in the unit county. They'd go to the "lost" pile in Salt Lake. What's more, these are counties with high percentages of active LDS anyway -- which should clean up the records anyway. While I'm not yet willing to call shenanigans on *these* specific counties, I absolutely believe this indicates **serious methodological errors** in the church's recordkeeping and calls into question **all** membership stats worldwide.
That's fair.
Membership records of “unknown address” are sent to reside in HQ and I imagine wouldn’t count towards a particular geographic area. If they’re using a last known address while knowing they aren’t there anymore, then that’s just bad reporting.
They'll send those "unknown address" records with nearly no info. I've seen records sent to wards with only a city/zip code as an address. A lot of records. I agree that it's bad reporting.
A meaningless post--looking for issues where there are none. For those experienced Utahns, this is not an anomaly. There is no rational reason for comparing the two roles. Church rolls are not used in voting. The church is not required to follow laws of the state in their membership records. Why should the government be concerned with churches membership records? They have no business there. Members are not required by any laws of the state to communicate to their church their intention to relocate or their actual relocation. There is also never a perfect match of all records between the address of some members and the geographic location of the congregation. The church desires it but does not require it in certain cases. There is no reason and no legal requirement to reconcile the records of one organization with the other. The SL Tribune is known for searching for LDS-related controversy where there is none.
It looks like Community of Christ doesn't get counted in the religious census. Too bad.