The Church Could Officially Start Shrinking In 2022.

[_Everybody Wang Chung]

Throughout history there have been thousands of different religions that have come and gone. It's quite possible we are witnessing the beginning of the end of Mormonism as we know it.

Noted sociologist, Rodney Stark once projected an LDS population of 265 million by the year 2080 and Elder Holland once prophesied we would have over 100,000 full-time missionaries by the end of 2019.

Boy, did Rodney and Holland have the numbers wrong. If trends continue, the Mormon church could be nonexistent by 2050.


Church Growth

2012 2.3%
2013 2.0%
2014 1.9%
2015 1.7%
2016 1.6%
2017 1.4%
2018 1.2%


Estimates

2019 0.9%
2020 0.6%
2021 0.3%
2022 -0.1%
2023 -0.4%
2024 -0.7%
2025 -1.0%


https://cumorah.com/index.php?target=co ... ind=Search

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Churc ... ip_history

[_Dr Moore]

Everybody Wang Chung: their numbers will be small because of wickedness. — The Book of Mormon

In all seriousness, I see evidence of this decay and decline all around at church meetings and stake training sessions. Leaders are acutely aware of the double bind they’re in. Pull the curtain back more, and more folks will leave. Keep hiding things behind fear and threat tactics and more folks will leave.

Personally I think the behavior we see from church leaders indicates we already have annual declines in active membership. And therefore, almost certainly, declines in tithing income.

[_Dr Exiled]

It's dying. The younger generations in my neck of the woods are leaving.

[_Mormonicious]

Oh you silly, silly anti-Mormons The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Don't you understand the doctrine of Growth by consolidation? Why everyone in tune with Mormon Jebus knows that only by the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints consolidating and shrinking can they expand and cover the whole Earth.

Silly, silly, silly.

[_DoubtingThomas]

If trends continue, the Mormon church could be nonexistent by 2050.

At least the active LDS are going to have a lot of temple work.

[_Physics Guy]

I'm still just perplexed about why the Mormon church apparently grew linearly for about thirty years. The number of new members added each year wasn't exactly constant but it was so close to constant that you could lay a straight line through the tops of all the bars on a graph. Over 25-30 years the total number of members doubled, but it apparently did all that growing without the benefit of any compound interest, the way your savings grow if you put another $50 under the mattress each month.

Every natural kind of growth—or loss—that I can imagine ought to have some kind of compound interest effect, in that the annual gain or loss should be proportional to the number of current members. That's why everyone always speaks in terms of percentage growth. If it takes twenty current members to produce a new member (whether by proselytizing or by procreating), then that's 5% growth. If there were 5 million members in an early year then 5% was 250,000 new Mormons that year. If in a later year there were 10 million members then at that point 5% was 500,000. And it's the same with losses. If one in twenty young Mormons defects then in the 5-million year there were 250,000 exits, but at the same rate of defection per capita there would have been 500,000 departing young Mormons in the year where there were 10 million members.

But for nearly thirty years that just was not the Mormon trend. There wasn't any fixed percentage rate of growth. There wasn't even just a declining percentage growth rate. The percentage growth rate was declining, all right, because 300K on top of 15 million is half the percentage that 300K was on top of 7.5 million, but the stark staring-you-in-the-face pattern of growth was a damn straight line. There was no sign of any connection at all between numbers of new Mormons per year and numbers of old Mormons in that year. It was the same 300,000-ish new members year after year after year, even though over that time the number of already existing Mormons more than doubled.

That's surprising, because it's hard to see what kind of driver of growth could be so unrelated to the current membership total. It's even hard to believe, because even if there is such a fixed-income growth mechanism, there ought to be other mechanisms as well, for both gain and loss, that operate along with it and that do scale with current membership. Those mechanisms ought to have been doing twice as much in 2015 as they were doing in 1990, yet they had no discernible effect on that steady 300K/year growth. So whatever mechanism was producing linear growth must either have been much stronger than any compounding mechanisms, so that even when they had doubled by 2015 they still weren't noticeable in comparison to the linear mechanism, or else the linear mechanism must have been actively compensating for other factors—slacking off if other factors made gains and ramping up if other factors brought losses.

Given that Mormon growth for thirty years simply has not been about percentages, I think that extrapolations of percentage growth rates are an inherently unreliable way to estimate future growth. The last I looked, the annual increase after 2015 seemed to be falling slightly away from its generation-long level. That's where I'd look—and I'd skip the percentages and express everything in terms of absolute numbers.

There is some reason to think that decline might be coming, because the most plausible theory to explain the long linear growth is one that as I recall Gadianton invented. The theory is that the linear mechanism is essentially fraud, though it might be unconscious fraud. People may have been systematically getting looser and looser over the years with their standards for reporting new converts, in an effort to keep up with last year's results. That would explain a linear trend because people would be motivated to fudge a bit to keep close to last year's absolute number, but unwilling to fudge to a bigger number.

That kind of fudging probably hits a limit at some point, however, when you just can't pretend that numbers haven't fallen without stooping to the ridiculous, and once you've crossed the Rubicon of admitting decline, you may as well be honest and show a big decline, perhaps by throwing your predecessors under the bus and blowing the whistle on all their fudging.

[_I have a question]

The Church doesn’t measure growth in members, it measures growth in its database.

It is interesting that the decline in growth rates coincides with the increase in internet availability. Why does more available information mean people are less likely to join the Church?

If you removed Africa from the numbers you’d see a different picture, which is why there is a concerted effort to open up new, previously untapped territories, like Vietnam, China, Russia. Huge populations that are as yet not mature in their collective knowledge about Mormonism. Those places and member babies are all the Church has left to strip mine.

[_Physics Guy]

Suppose you got a $100,000 inheritance from your grandmother thirty years ago, and you put it into a mutual fund, and then added $10,000 to it every year ever since. So now you have 100K + 30x10K = $400K. Better than a kick in the head, but you have a feeling you could have done better, so you ask your fund manager, "Bill, what's up?"

Bill says, "Well, back in your first year with me you went from 100K to 110K, so that was 10% interest! Unfortunately in the last year you only went from 390K to 400K so that was only 2.5% interest. Gee, rates have been falling for thirty years. What can you do?"

You don't buy Bill's bogus pitch about a falling interest rate. You fire Bill, and you should have fired him thirty years ago, because his fund hasn't ever earned a single penny of interest for you. The only growth has been your own contributions. You haven't gotten any compounding at all.

The growth rate in Bill's fund has never really declined. That's the good news. The bad news is that the growth rate in Bill's fund was always zero percent.

And if Mormon numbers were retirement savings, then over the thirty-year period 1985-2015 the Mormon church would have been investing with Bill. Whatever the church was doing to raise numbers in all that time, it never succeeded in triggering self-reinforcing growth that builds with compound interest. It was only ever able to keep on adding the same 300K new members or so per year, year after year.

Nothing took off. Nothing caught on. And whatever happened to shut the Mormon interest rate down to zero, it didn't come on steadily over the past thirty years. It hit like a hammer in 1985 and the church never recovered.

What could it have been?

[_Meadowchik]

Suppose you got a $100,000 inheritance from your grandmother thirty years ago, and you put it into a mutual fund, and then added $10,000 to it every year ever since. So now you have 100K + 30x10K = $400K. Better than a kick in the head, but you have a feeling you could have done better, so you ask your fund manager, "Bill, what's up?"

Bill says, "Well, back in your first year with me you went from 100K to 110K, so that was 10% interest! Unfortunately in the last year you only went from 390K to 400K so that was only 2.5% interest. Gee, rates have been falling for thirty years. What can you do?"

You don't buy Bill's bogus pitch about a falling interest rate. You fire Bill, and you should have fired him thirty years ago, because his fund hasn't ever earned a single penny of interest for you. The only growth has been your own contributions. You haven't gotten any compounding at all.

The growth rate in Bill's fund has never really declined. That's the good news. The bad news is that the growth rate in Bill's fund was always zero percent.

And if Mormon numbers were retirement savings, then over the thirty-year period 1985-2015 the Mormon church would have been investing with Bill. Whatever the church was doing to raise numbers in all that time, it never succeeded in triggering self-reinforcing growth that builds with compound interest. It was only ever able to keep on adding the same 300K new members or so per year, year after year.

Nothing took off. Nothing caught on. And whatever happened to shut the Mormon interest rate down to zero, it didn't come on steadily over the past thirty years. It hit like a hammer in 1985 and the church never recovered.

What could it have been?

If memory serves, 1985 was in many ways during a time of overall optimism, especially for Mormons. There was the financial optimism and also the religious optimisn, like that exemplified by Gordon B. Hinkley. We had the truth and we were prospering!

So imagine being a leader instructed to make reports during that time when things were "going great." You're expected to be the watchmen over a growing flock, but what if your flock is not growing as much as before? You have plenty of pressure, so it becomes easier to reinterpret data in ways that support a picture of growth. You may even feel encouraged to do so.

And the church regularly sends down directives to regional and local units about a variety of matters, from political issues, to all kinds of policies more or less dry or interesting. I wouldn't be surprised if, around 1985, a directive filtered down that treated numbers reporting with much more importance than before, and with instructions on area leaders to follow up more strenuously. Perhaps that alone could have resulted in those current raw numbers representing a minimum standard. Those who fell below it might have produced or imagined ways to comply. Those who met it were less inclined to exaggerate to make numbers higher than the minimum.

This would provide an explanation of rough linear growth, tying a repeated constant to a given reporting entity.

[_I have a question]

August 2012

...when Harris discusses the rapid growth of the Church, he misleadingly states that the Church claims it is the fastest growing Church in the world and puts “a lot of money and manpower into making that happen.” This statement is false. While it is true that we are growing, the Church does not claim to be the fastest growing religion (though others sometimes do).

https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.or ... -august-29

November 2002

LDS Church Is United States’ Fastest Growing Denomination

In a study updated every 10 years, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was named the fastest growing denomination in the United States for the years 1990 to 2000.

The study also indicated that the fastest growing churches were those considered socially conservative—and that the slowest growing churches were those viewed as socially liberal. With a growth rate of 19.3 percent, the Church led the trend toward conservative religion in the United States. The next fastest growing religions were the Churches of Christ, the Assemblies of God, and the Roman Catholic Church.

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/stu ... n?lang=eng

1973 - Hinckley

Yesterday the growth statistics of the Church were presented. They are impressive and gratifying. They called to mind a recent broadcast of one of the nation’s popular television programs in which Joe Garragiola interviewed the Reverend Dean M. Kelley of the National Council of Churches, who spoke of the declining membership of some of the larger, well-known religious bodies and also of the accelerating growth of others. He gave as the reason for the decline: “Because they have become permissive; they allow just anybody to become members or remain members. They don’t insist on any rigorous requirements of belief or of contributions.” He pointed out, on the other hand, that those groups which require sacrifice of time and effort and means are enjoying vigorous growth.

He then went on to say: “The fastest growing church [of] over a million members in this country is the Mormon Church, the Latter-day Saints, with headquarters in Salt Lake City, which is growing at five percent a year, [and] that’s a very rapid increase.”

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/stu ... h?lang=eng

The claim in the “getting it right” (how ironic) quote would have been more honestly phrased as “the Church no longer claims to be the fastest growing religion”.