https://religionnews.com/2022/04/07/is-mormonism-still-growing-five-facts-about-latter-day-saint-growth-and-decline/

1. The church as a whole is still growing, but the growth rate continues to slow down.


Year Total membership Difference from previous yearPercentage growth
2011 14,441,346 +309,879 2.19%
2012 14,782,473 +341,127 2.36%
2013 15,082,028 +299,555 2.03%
2014 15,372,337 +290,309 1.92%
2015 15,634,199 +261,862 1.70%
2016 15,882,417 +248,218 1.59%
2017 16,118,169 +233,729 1.47%
2018 16,313,735 +195,566 1.21%
2019 16,565,036 +251,301 1.54%
2020 16,663,663 +98,627 .59%
2021 16,805,400 +141,737 .85%

(Tables don't format well here)

"According to Christian Anderson, a biophysicist in Utah who follows LDS church growth trends, even more concerning than the shrinking rate of growth is the raw number of new members being added each year."

2. The main areas of growth are primarily in Africa.

"In the United States, growth has essentially been cut in half. We’re seeing a .6% growth rate spread over the two years, whereas in each of the two years before the pandemic (2018 and 2019), we saw that same rate over the course of a single year. And even that was a significant drop from the U.S. growth of a decade ago."
(Table of grothbrte in US included in article)

3. We haven’t yet seen “children of record” rebound to expected levels

"But the 2021 numbers still haven’t caught up. In fact, as Martinich points out, instead of the 2021 numbers representing a “double cohort,” with the expected backlog of babies from 2020 added to the usual annual number, the 2021 numbers were actually lower than for 2019."

4. The missionary force has taken a hit.

5. More members will have access to temples than ever before.

(Whoopie! All is well in Zion)

Well below population growth so shrinking as a percentage of world population.

141,000 ain't that far off negative numbers either. How many of them will be active in 12 months time?

50k missionaries means each one is on 1.5 baptisms or so when you're u take the children of record out of the equation.

And a big percentage of this growth is now in developing countries. Grow in developed western countries is virtually non existant.

Couple this with the steady stream of exits and the western Church is reducing to a small shell of die hards.

TigerTom Wrote:
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> Well below population growth so shrinking as a
> percentage of world population.


Yes, It would be interesting to see the membership by world population year on year. It would probably be shrinking.

"...backlog of babies..."

Sounds about right for the corporate mindset of TSCC, as opposed to loving families.

/s

Not included in the picture of decline are people like me who have simply walked away and taken large parts of our families with us, without resigning. I suspect those numbers are increasingly more significant.

I highly suspect that the actual number of attending members has now started shrinking.

Yes, also suspect that there is a huge disparity between "membership" and active members.

The major problem with having an inflated general membership number is that "percentage" statistics, such as percent of members serving missions, or percent of growth via children of record turn out to be artificially small.

For example, if there are 100,000 "children of record" and you use the church's figure of 17 million Mormons, then CoR constitute only 0.588% church growth, an absurdly small figure.

If you use a more realistic figure of 6 million Mormons, then the CoR percentage is 1.66% which seems much closer to reality. The problem being that those extra 11 million phantom Mormons are also having children, but LDS Inc, since in no longer has any contact with those people, has no idea how many children they are having.

The same thing holds for every other statistic that is derived by dividing by the total number of Mormons. The percentage will be unrealistically low, because the number of Mormons is unrealistically high.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/09/2022 11:26AM by Brother Of Jerry.