In a month or so, General Conference is looming. In April as you know, they announce the church's "membership numbers" including baptisms and confirmations.

This year, despite the effort they will go towards rigging the statistics, should theoretically show one of the first "actual" declines in membership since the second world war.
Why? The covid-19 has pretty much shutdown the missionary program, ended congregations all over the world and should have severely reduced baptisms to the point that the drop in members by deaths and resignations should theoretically outnumber any gains.

But not only that. I imagine the rate of less actives and quitting mormons has also surged in this period. With churches having been closed so long in many parts of the world, people will have fell out of habit of going and many people will have used the disruption as an opportunity to slip away, if not simply disengage completely.

Although I am still pissed off that people continue to visit our house from the ward and break lockdown rules. But I'm quite confident the virus as a whole will have severely damaged the church in a time where it is already in obvious decline.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 03/07/2021 12:31PM by Tevai.

Help please. I mixed my username and the thread title up!

anonymousman Wrote:
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> Help please. I mixed my username and the thread
> title up!

On the opening post, done.

It's a very good question. How will they dress it up?

Don't worry about the mix-up. You are asking a good question, and it will be interesting to see what church leaders have to say.

I hope that you don't feel that you need to open the door to church visitors! You can talk to them through a closed door, and say that for reasons of health you are not accepting visitors at present.

The number of births will still exceed the number of deaths. There have still been some baptisms, and there have been new stakes created.

The new stakes may be mostly reshuffling existing members, but it still gives the appearance of growth.

And of course they don't account for resigned or inactive members in their statistical report, so even if the number of participating members did shrink, it would not be visible in their "statistical report".

So, growth statistics will be poor relative to other years, but this will be explained and excused because of the impeded missionary program due to the pandemic.

It won't be until we see how the Church does in 2022 that we will know how many people decided to take a permanent break from Mormonism during the pandemic. Even then we will have to make soft estimates based on how many wards and stakes are created or dissolved, and anecdotal reports on unofficial websites like here.

LDS Inc of course will have hard statistics on actual participation in wards after the pandemic, but hell will freeze over before they will make those public.

"Anyone else been hearing voices since they got the vaccine? Specifically Bill Gates’s voice saying “oh god he’s touching himself again?”