2017 Statistical Report For 2018 April Conference

[_churchistrue]

The net changes in each year do indeed seem to vary more than they appear to when they are added on top of the millions of Mormons already there. How about a bar chart showing just the annual increases, instead of the running total? I can make one for myself, of course, but I don't have a good way of posting it for everyone. Just from a glance at the list of figures, I'd bet that the bar chart will show a noisy pattern but one that would be consistent with a uniform stochastic process: size of random variations, and mean, being constant over time.

Nevertheless I think the message of the ruler on the bar tops remains. The claimed church membership has doubled in twenty-seven years, and the world population has gone up by a half. And yet the net number of new Mormons each year is still bouncing around 300K ± about 15%. Given all the seemingly relevant things in the world which have changed by substantial factors, it seems weird that the number of new Mormons per year has not changed more than that in all this time. Yes, the changing factors could all cancel each other out. But it would be kind of a fluke if they did.

http://www.churchistrue.com/?attachment_id=3185

The spike year in 1989 is quirky: methodology change or true up.

[_consiglieri]

I have heard it theorized that the spike year in 1989 may indicate the year the church began counting children who had been blessed as members instead of waiting until they were baptized.

Your take?

[_Fence Sitter]

I have heard it theorized that the spike year in 1989 may indicate the year the church began counting children who had been blessed as members instead of waiting until they were baptized.

Your take?

Wait, so new members are calculated by adding convert baptisms to new children of record?

In 2017 we had 233,000 converts plus 107,000 children of record. So we added 340000 thousand new members.

Average number of deaths in a population of 16,000,000 would be 160,000 tops.

340,000 - 160,000 = 180,000. Yet the church is claiming an additional 236,000 new members. Where are they getting the 60,000± new members from?

[_Physics Guy]

Maybe they only had 100 000 deaths?

The spike in 1989 does seem to have been a one-time quirk. It could well represent some kind of accounting change that swept in a lot of members at once by just counting differently.

Otherwise, it looks as though raw growth may be starting to drop in just the last few years, but for a good thirty years before that it was basically constant. Now that churchistrue has shown the raw numbers alone, I agree it doesn't look as dead level as it did in the original chart. The year-to-year variations were so small there compared to the running total membership that only the linear trend leapt to the eye. Looking at the new chart of raw growth each year, I'm less inclined to suspect deliberate fudging of the numbers to make each year keep up with the last.

That eye-leaping linearity of the first graph is not an illusion, however. It's a natural way of filtering out the modest year-to-year variation so that you can notice the background linear trend, kind of like discerning climate change from weather. The less perfectly steady linear growth does look more natural, but it is still a weird phenomenon when so many factors that would naïvely seem likely to affect growth a lot have themselves changed a lot in the past thirty years. I'm still looking for theories to explain it.

One obvious factor is the world population increase of 50% over the time frame. If we ignore the fluky possibility of multiple factors all neatly canceling, we have to assume that Mormon growth has not gone up by anything like 50% because the size of the potential recruit pool is not actually a limiting factor for Mormon conversions. Perhaps essentially nobody converts to Mormonism just because they hear the Mormon message at second hand, so broadcast recruiting doesn't work. If only personal contact can lead to conversions, then the number of converts each year would the same no matter how many people there were in the world, because it would be limited by the number of Mormon missionaries and other proselytizers.

But then the number of Mormons has doubled in the past thirty years. So why don't we have roughly twice as many missionaries and later-life proselytizers bringing in twice as many new Mormons? The simplest theory I can imagine that explains this failure to double the growth rate is that there are really two kinds of Mormons: those who are effective proselytizers and those who are still counted as members but do nothing to recruit more Mormons.

This theory then says that the number of effective proselytizers has not grown at all in thirty years. In other words, essentially all the Mormon converts in the past thirty years have gone inactive before making any converts themselves. The core group of really enthusiastic Mormons has been treading water all this time; it might be slowly growing or shrinking but the rate is too slow to show up clearly within our thirty-year time frame. They manage to keep bringing in nominal converts to Mormonism, at a rate that is steady because the size of the core group is steady, but their converts do not join the core group and raise the rate of further conversions. Instead they remain in the penumbra of inactive or nominal Mormons who stay on the books because they don't care enough to resign but don't preach the Restoration to their friends, don't persuade their spouses to convert, don't baptize their children, and don't go on missions.

Is it plausible that essentially all Mormon growth in the past thirty years has consisted of inactive members?

[_Fence Sitter]

I supposed it is possible they only had 100,000 deaths, especially if it is true that they do not take inactive members who they have lost track of, off the books until they are 110 years old.

One of the most troubling statistics, one that bears our what Physics Guys says above about new converts not really contributing to growth is the fact that in spite of membership doubling in the last 20 years we now only have about 20% more missionaries than we did in 1996. That statistic looks even worse when one considers that female missionaries are serving at a much higher rate than back then. I would expect that if you only looked at the number of young men serving missions now compared to 20 years ago, you might even be looking at a decline, in spite of twice as many members as before.

[_churchistrue]

I have heard it theorized that the spike year in 1989 may indicate the year the church began counting children who had been blessed as members instead of waiting until they were baptized.

Your take?

I think that sounds right. Something related to children it looks like.

[_churchistrue]

I have heard it theorized that the spike year in 1989 may indicate the year the church began counting children who had been blessed as members instead of waiting until they were baptized.

Your take?

Wait, so new members are calculated by adding convert baptisms to new children of record?

In 2017 we had 233,000 converts plus 107,000 children of record. So we added 340000 thousand new members.

Average number of deaths in a population of 16,000,000 would be 160,000 tops.

340,000 - 160,000 = 180,000. Yet the church is claiming an additional 236,000 new members. Where are they getting the 60,000± new members from?

They report increase, converts, and children. The delta of 105K is a total for deaths, children of record that don't get baptized by age 9, excommunications, and resignations. This is where I derive the 22K resignations number from. The number of deaths is smaller than you'd think because activity is so low, about 30%, and they keep inactives on the records until 110, so you really only have deaths on the 30%, and the active population is generally younger than average, due to family size. My model accounts for 57k deaths.

[_Meadowchik]

Interesting...globally, 2000 was the year of peak child. Fertility rates are generally declining except where infant mortality rates are high.

[_Meadowchik]

Have you seen this?

"All Church unit statistical information has been removed at the request of the Church Legal Department. "

https://ldschurchtemples.org/statistics/units/

[_Shulem]

Have you seen this?

"All Church unit statistical information has been removed at the request of the Church Legal Department. "

https://ldschurchtemples.org/statistics/units/

The wagon train is circling.