DiscussMormonism.com

Today, millions of South Americans claim Church membership and temples dot the continent in almost every nation.

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/7656 ... ntina.html

There is, as of the last statistics three and a half million members in South America. We know from the last census in Brazil that the Church's numbers were overstated by nearly a million, in terms of who there considers themselves a Mormon.

Shouldn't the Deseret News article be more honestly written this way:
"Today, the Church claims millions of members in South America..."

Drifting wrote:

Today, millions of South Americans claim Church membership and temples dot the continent in almost every nation.

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/7656 ... ntina.html

There is, as of the last statistics three and a half million members in South America. We know from the last census in Brazil that the Church's numbers were overstated by nearly a million, in terms of who there considers themselves a Mormon.

Shouldn't the Deseret News article be more honestly written this way:
"Today, the Church claims millions of members in South America..."

Exactly. To make the Deseret News claim accurate, they would need to be basing themselves on a Pew-type survey in which people were asked to self-identify as members of a religion - "Are you a member of any religious group? If so, which?". As has been stated on this board multiple times, the results of the Pew survey in the US found that the number of people who, when asked, identified themselves as "LDS/Mormon" was far less than the numbers listed by the church on membership rolls.

I would expect that to apply in a mission field such as South America even more strongly, since it is notorious that many people get baptized and go inactive very soon after, but are listed as members for 110 years after their birth if they don't get round to resigning.

Chap wrote:I would expect that to apply in a mission field such as South America even more strongly, since it is notorious that many people get baptized and go inactive very soon after, but are listed as members for 110 years after their birth if they don't get round to resigning.

The Cult may not list them as members, but it still uses them in their total membership count. Building temple and stating high membership numbers is only to keep the existing Sheeple (read: Morridor) thinking that growth = truth.

I wonder about something with South America. In North America (the States to be exact), if you do not resign but go inactive, the Cult will hunt you down indefinitely to reactivate you. Seniors are called to missions in downtown SLC whose sole job is to track you down. And they do this by reverse mail or getting family members to "snitch" on your location. You are then hounded by local ward members. It's a nasty business in my opinion.

Question I have is what about all those inactives in South America? Does the Cult work hard to track them down and reactivate them? From what I've read, most never come back after the baptism.

Drifting wrote:

Today, millions of South Americans claim Church membership and temples dot the continent in almost every nation.

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/7656 ... ntina.html

There is, as of the last statistics three and a half million members in South America. We know from the last census in Brazil that the Church's numbers were overstated by nearly a million, in terms of who there considers themselves a Mormon.

Shouldn't the Deseret News article be more honestly written this way:
"Today, the Church claims millions of members in South America..."

I don't see this as a lie...but then it isn't exactly truthful either. The church does in fact have 3.5 million members in South America And its temples are found in many South American locations...however...the truth doesn't tell the whole story...that those who consider themselves as members would actually be somewhere in the 100's of thousands rather than the millions that the church claims

Craig Paxton wrote:The church does in fact have 3.5 million members in South America...

Actually that's not a fact, that's a claim based on guesswork by the Church.
The Church only knows how many people have been baptised in South America who haven't reached the age of 110 years old.
- The Church does not know if a number of those claimed members have died before reaching 110 years old without someone informing the Church.
- The Church does not know if a number of those claimed members have relocated outside of South America without informing the Church.
- The Church does know, but isn't saying, how many of those claimed members don't show up at Church from one month to the next.

Infymus wrote:Question I have is what about all those inactives in South America? Does the Cult work hard to track them down and reactivate them? From what I've read, most never come back after the baptism.

My experience as a missionary in Central America in the mid 1990's was that not much effort is expended on trying to reactivate these people. I tried a few times to go out with a branch list and try and find and reactivate these people. I never saw any success in doing this. I never saw much effort on the part of the members to reactivate people either. I think they knew what we knew, that most of the people on the list never really cared that much about the church. They were all kiddie baptisms, baseball baptisms, younger women hoping against hope that the American elders would marry them and take them to America, and victims of high pressure sales tactics.

When I was there the focus was on growing branches to try and get a stake in the country. However, most missionaries figured out that the quickest way to grow a branch was to go out and baptize a bunch of people. But, that just fed the problem further, you were mostly just creating the next batch of inactives and lowering the activity rate further. But, adding 20 new members (who would attend for a couple of months) to a branch of 60 is a big % increase and resulted in good vibes from the mission president. The result was lots of temporary increases and crashes of membership. Why no leader ever realized this was happening is beyond me.

Aristotle Smith wrote:
My experience as a missionary in Central America in the mid 1990's was that not much effort is expended on trying to reactivate these people. I tried a few times to go out with a branch list and try and find and reactivate these people. I never saw any success in doing this. I never saw much effort on the part of the members to reactivate people either. I think they knew what we knew, that most of the people on the list never really cared that much about the church. They were all kiddie baptisms, baseball baptisms, younger women hoping against hope that the American elders would marry them and take them to America, and victims of high pressure sales tactics.

When I was there the focus was on growing branches to try and get a stake in the country. However, most missionaries figured out that the quickest way to grow a branch was to go out and baptize a bunch of people. But, that just fed the problem further, you were mostly just creating the next batch of inactives and lowering the activity rate further. But, adding 20 new members (who would attend for a couple of months) to a branch of 60 is a big % increase and resulted in good vibes from the mission president. The result was lots of temporary increases and crashes of membership. Why no leader ever realized this was happening is beyond me.

I served in South America in the 70's. My mission president was very aware of the inactivity problem and did take some steps to try to reduce the loss of new converts by improving the training of local Church leadership. He started the first distribution center of Church related materials in the country, brought in a large supply of leadership instruction manuals and made sure every branch and stake had access to the these manuals. He then took 20-30 experienced missionaries, brought them into the mission home for intensive training in operations of branches, wards and stakes leadership positions, and then sent these missionaries to areas within which they had already served to conduct training sessions with the leadership and make sure those people were aware of how the Church operated. I was one of those missionaries and while I do not know how effective it was in retaining new members I could see, in the short time I was involved in the program, a marked increase in the effectiveness of the Chruch leaders.