My "LDS Church Growth" Hobby Horse

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Physics Guy
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Re: My "LDS Church Growth" Hobby Horse

Post by Physics Guy »

What happened in 1999?
I was a teenager before it was cool.
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Kishkumen
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Re: My "LDS Church Growth" Hobby Horse

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I am so far disconnected from caring about how many people join or leave the LDS Church that I can’t get worked up about it. I do, however, applaud efforts to get behind the unhealthy and misleading rhetoric surrounding the LDS Church’s stats. I could never get excited about treating spiritual health like a cheap, mass-marketed product.
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Re: My "LDS Church Growth" Hobby Horse

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Be careful what you wish for.
Last edited by Cultellus on Thu Aug 12, 2021 6:32 pm, edited 2 times in total.
simon southerton
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Re: My "LDS Church Growth" Hobby Horse

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Kishkumen wrote:
Wed Aug 04, 2021 1:53 am
I am so far disconnected from caring about how many people join or leave the LDS Church that I can’t get worked up about it. I do, however, applaud efforts to get behind the unhealthy and misleading rhetoric surrounding the LDS Church’s stats. I could never get excited about treating spiritual health like a cheap, mass-marketed product.
Now that's the insight of a seasoned and crusty critic that I was chasing!

I now feel the same way about the DNA apologetics. Zero interest because there is zero interest outside of a handful of rusted on fossils who sold their soul to the church decades ago.
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Re: My "LDS Church Growth" Hobby Horse

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Physics Guy wrote:
Wed Aug 04, 2021 1:16 am
What happened in 1999?
After decades of rapid growth I think they got ahead of themselves and hit the brakes because people were leaving. It's hard to ignore the dramatic uptake of the internet in the early to mid 90s.This allowed unprecedented access to historical information and connectivity between doubters, a deadly combination.
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Re: My "LDS Church Growth" Hobby Horse

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simon southerton wrote:
Tue Aug 03, 2021 11:24 pm
The leak was published 10 months ago on reddit but I missed it at the time. Peter Bleakley sent it to me. https://www.reddit.com/r/Mormon/comment ... _20112020/

I expected attendance to take a big hit in 2020, so I was a bit surprised by the small decrease in attendance in 2020 in the UK. But the 2020 figures are up until March, well before the pandemic hit. Peter Bleakley believes (and I agree) the church will take a massive hit after the pandemic dust settles. Twenty years ago his ward had 150 active. Pre-pandemic it averaged 40 and post pandemic they are sitting at around 15! They have no youth so that saves on leadership callings!!
So the data in the leak looks to be a summation of the once-a-month head counts conducted by the ward clerk or bishopric counsellor at a designated sacrament meeting. These are manual counts that just need to be done once a month, and they include every man, woman, child and newborn present on that particular day, whether a member or non member. This headcount is used when the Stake/Area makes budget decisions for each ward. In short, the more heads you count the bigger your ward budget. I know Bishops that target baby blessing sacrament meetings for these head counts because the numbers will be inflated for that meeting.

I can say that for one of those Stakes the numbers look generous when compared to the average/regular number of people one sees attending Church on any given Sunday prior to the pandemic impact. I'd guess they could be inflated by c10% due to the visitor/baby blessing impact.
I don't have any data at hand on attrition rates between male and female, but I heard several years ago active single women outnumber men by about 2 to 1. This is a massive problem, meaning half of the women in the church are completely frustrated when it comes to temple marriage. If they don't find a way to make church life meaningful for these women, they'll head for the exits as well. I have heard they have loosened the criteria for some callings that used to be for couples only, but I don't know the specifics. But I would not be surprised at all if single women are becoming the new "prospective elders" of past generations.
The general ageing of the membership profile due to lack of retention of young people, and the increasingly female dominance of the membership profile - have to be the two biggest concerns of the institution. Both are very problematic in terms of the ongoing operation of the church.
Last edited by IHAQ on Wed Aug 04, 2021 11:56 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Physics Guy
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Re: My "LDS Church Growth" Hobby Horse

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simon southerton wrote:
Wed Aug 04, 2021 3:01 am
Physics Guy wrote:
Wed Aug 04, 2021 1:16 am
What happened in 1999?
After decades of rapid growth I think they got ahead of themselves and hit the brakes because people were leaving. It's hard to ignore the dramatic uptake of the internet in the early to mid 90s.This allowed unprecedented access to historical information and connectivity between doubters, a deadly combination.
I don't know how the church decides to create new units but I can imagine two alternative strategies. One would be the conservative one of splitting wards when they grow so big that it's hard to fit everyone in the building or let everyone participate. The other would be the aggressive one of "if you build it, they will come", where little skeleton-crew branches are created in hope they will grow. Quite possibly the church pursues both strategies in different times and places.

The big drop in unit formation in 1999 seems too large to attribute to an abrupt halt in the growth of large wards. I can more easily imagine that there was an ambitious phase of planting new units in the 1990s, as you suggest, and it was abruptly cut back after disappointing results. If it's true that a lot of the units that were being launched in the earlier 90's were optimistic "sprig" branches rather than thriving ward splits, then that itself might have been an attempt to kick-start growth that had been perceived, even then, to have stalled.

The difficulty with counting church growth through units is that their number has an elastic relationship to active membership number. Maybe the '99 crash was just the elastic snapping back after being stretched, and nothing dramatic happened to active membership numbers in that particular year.

Is there any way to dig more deeply into the numbers and find out how large the new units were in each year, or what kind of new units they were?
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Re: My "LDS Church Growth" Hobby Horse

Post by dastardly stem »

simon southerton wrote:
Wed Aug 04, 2021 3:01 am
Physics Guy wrote:
Wed Aug 04, 2021 1:16 am
What happened in 1999?
After decades of rapid growth I think they got ahead of themselves and hit the brakes because people were leaving. It's hard to ignore the dramatic uptake of the internet in the early to mid 90s.This allowed unprecedented access to historical information and connectivity between doubters, a deadly combination.
It was the season of higher expectations, what did they call it? Raising the Bar? I think the Church failed then. They thought they were going strong enough that highering expectations would not hit the Church.

The Church was seeing high growth rates with very little retention. They thought highering expectations would higher retention rates and keep missionaries in at a higher rate.
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Re: My "LDS Church Growth" Hobby Horse

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What I find interesting is how the Mormon Church has slipped into third place in growth when compared to the Jehovah Witnesses and the 7th Day Adventists. Each of these other churches continue to maintain growth while the Mormon's are dropping faster than a lead balloon.

Again the church has the burden of pushing a verifiably false narrative that can be quickly fact checked, thus the change in its branding to the church of blah blah blah, while the other just have their particular flavor of Christianity which emphasize their unique interpretations of the Bible

The Mormon's have a heavier load to lift to indoctrinate someone towards belief and baptism but even after that hurdle is reached the Mormon's can't keep em. New converts come and go seemingly within a very short time while both the JW's and Adventists keep em in.
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Re: My "LDS Church Growth" Hobby Horse

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The other would be the aggressive one of "if you build it, they will come", where little skeleton-crew branches are created in hope they will grow.
On my overseas mission, a large ward that served a large geographic area was broken up with exactly this logic. So what metaphor is right, spreading the seeds out to grow or spreading the coals out to die?

In my case, it was the latter. The breakup had been implemented maybe a year before my arrival, and none of the branches, or twigs as we called some of them, were growing. In fact, they were dying. A major challenge is the assumption that all LDS people just love each other and stick together. So you have some of these twigs with two only two main families, and if one has a problem with any of the others, then boy, as missionaries, your job has become to listen to problems in exchange for lunch. That's on top of the fact that none of them were really interested in doing missionary work.
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