Ooops....total membership growth is slowest since 1987. Converts lowest since 2005?

Woo Hoo!

I notice they didn't give stats on excommunications, and the ones who have packed up and left for time and all eternity. I imagine those are some very interesting numbers.

" In other words, this finding indicates that there was a decrease in 2015 in the number of members removed from church records due to death, excommunication, resignation, or unbaptized children of record who reach age 18 compared to 2014."

Can this really be true? Surely resignations are up, right?
Maybe nobody died.

"the ones who have packed up and left for time and all eternity..."

- Ha! I got a kick out of that!

It's caused by the members not having enough faith,

what made 1987 a bad year ?

He pleaded guilty to second degree murder in January, 1987.

On the other hand, it might be the missionaries are touching themselves again, like in 1987?

Any 1987 missionaries here who can confirm this?

lol...where's the 'like' button! This was great elderolddog.

These dudes have no idea how to 'save the brand'. For over a century it was grow, grow, grow and now ChurchCo is in severe retraction. I am sure they have a bunch of consultants trying to help them but you can't save something that is so very demonstrably false. JS was a fraud and the damage to the brand is becoming more and more apparent. The fact that ChurchCo is flexing its business arm is a sure sign they are propping up stagnation in donations.

When they talk of 'one of a city, two of a family' that is complete bull s&%t! They want to see success just like a rock star does. But they can't save it - the truth of the fraud of JS is spreading faster than their message.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 04/02/2016 06:22PM by tamboruco.

They are in total and complete denial that the internet WILL be the end of them.

I can't understand how they have ANY converts in a day in age when we all have the internet in our pockets. I mean, they can use the "The Internet is evil; protect your families from it" on members (though I'm sure it works less on younger folks) but how do people taking the discussions not google this stuff? I'm sure most do and then they drop off...

They especially don't want younger people talking to older people about how things actually were 25-30-40-50 years ago in the cult.

They don't want members actually talking to each other, or else they'll realize that all kinds of different bs is being taught in the different classes, & that no one is actually being taught any of the same things. So much for "correlation".

I came to this conclusion after a lifetime (well almost 25 years) of being taught completely different things in Junior SS/Primary, Mutual, Seminary, Sunday School, & RS.

This wasn't just about changing times & changing beliefs. The 4 years that I was concurrently in Mutual, SS, & Seminary was a complete head trip because I was being taught diametrically opposite things in each of these classes on a daily & weekly basis. & then don't forget SM, fire sides, stake conferences, & youth conferences. All contradictory.

The cult leaders do not want members taking about any of this with each other.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/02/2016 09:45PM by Tristan.

Most of the church's baptisms these days are in poorer countries where the literacy rate is low.

Awesome! People wisening up.

I feel a tear coming on.

A summary treatment of LDS 2015 growth statistics can be found at:

http://ldschurchgrowth.blogspot.com/

From that website: "the annual membership growth rate for the Church declined to a mere 1.70% for 2015 - the slowest LDS membership growth rate since 1937 when church membership increased by 0.93%."

Must have been a whole lot of touching going on during that Depression year!

But you know what? I say we go for a new record this year!

And I feel like it's only going to get lower in 2016 mostly because of that gay marriage policy they came out with in November of 2015.

"the annual membership growth rate for the Church declined to a mere 1.70% for 2015 - the slowest LDS membership growth rate since 1937 when church membership increased by 0.93%."

By an amazing coincidence, the percentage of humans who gained access to the internet increased by 1.7% in 2015. :-)

Their growth rate is less than the world population growth rate! So statistically they are falling behind!

"Their growth rate is less than the world population growth rate! So statistically they are falling behind!"

That reminded me of the 1992 prediction by sociologist Rodney Stark that if growth rates held, the LDS church could have a membership of 35 million by 2020:

http://www.mormondialogue.org/topic/63459-lds-church-population-by-2020-will-it-even-be-close-to-the-35-million-rodney-stark-predicted/

The church just announced a total current membership of 15.6 million. They'll have to get cracking to add another 20 million over the next five years to make Stark's prediction come true. Maybe they could just add the names of 20 million more random dead people to the rolls.

... and ice cream.

Exactly... This means that they aren't even retaining the children from member families. Any converts are counterbalanced by losses from people who were born in the church and left.

The missionary program reducing the age requirement was supposed to help with retention. It seems that it was a failure.

I imagine the leaders looking at the numbers and scratching their heads saying, "We've tried everything, we're more bigoted and controlling than ever! We even posted lies about our history and doctrine on our website and we're still losing tithe payers!"

When you consider this is from a year which started with the largest ever number of serving missionaries, it's very significant.

It's going to continue to drop. One more slip up with LGBT issues or financial misuse of funds (shopping malls/master planned communities) and watch out.

Mormon doctrine and history cannot stand the light of day, light that shines whenever LDS, Inc. missteps hit the press.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/05/2016 03:57PM by Doubting Thomas.

If you think this is peak missionary numbers after the age drop. They've had preach my gospel, the new ipads and leaflet apps.

They've never been better equipped or in greater numbers and the converts are still going down.

It's all downhill from here as missionary numbers normalise again.

When will they say "numbers are not important" and stop the stat reports?

Levi Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> When will they say "numbers are not important" and
> stop the stat reports?


That's what I was thinking. The numbers are looking very bad for the morg. These stats make it obvious that people are leaving the church, and very few are interested in joining. The number of missionaries decreased to 74 thousand. This decrease was somewhat expected, and one of the brethren stated that the number would stay there for a while then begin to increase. Well, what if it doesn't increase? What if that number continues to go down? I suspect that at a certain point the brethren will need to keep the stats a secret, as they do the finances.

Pretty soon the only stat that they'll deal with is number of temples open, in the process of being built, in the planning stages or announced. That's the only numbers they'll be able to flog with any enthusiasm.

Was there a definitive number given of convert baptisms?

(and even that number is suspect, since they allow 9 years and older member kid baptisms to be counted as convert baptisms...)

"Was there a definitive number given of convert baptisms?"

Yes, according to http://ldschurchgrowth.blogspot.com/

"Convert Baptisms: 257,402 (decrease of 39,401 from 2014; a 13.3% annual decrease)"

I'd like to believe that what's happening is, the church has just about saturated third-world areas in which they've accrued most of their "convert baptisms" over the last coupla decades, and the numbers are finally leveling off. The above site also shows:

Total Membership: 15,634,199 (increase of 261,862 from 2014; a 1.70% annual increase)

Increase of Children on Record: 114,550 (decrease of 1,859 from 2014; a 1.62% annual decrease)

The increase in total membership could be attributed simply to natural population growth among the existing membership. The decrease in children of record hints that more members of child-bearing age (20s and 30s) are leaving the church and/or not having their babies blessed and entered onto the rolls.

We had one town in my mission where the church buildings (chapel and small residential unit for the missionaries) was dedicated in 1929, by David O. McKay. I have no idea if missionaries were in that town constantly since then. One would wonder about the Depression and WWII, but when I got there, missionaries had been there since the majority of the adult members could remember.

Cuautla was a small town. We didn't have bikes, much less cars. It was small enough so that we were able to knock on every door inside of three months. I was there four months. There were two sets of missionaries, so in the mornings they'd head in one direction and we'd head in the other. The town was 1/3 mormon, 1/3 Catholic and 1/3 Evangelistic.

At the time, I never thought twice about the methodology we were following. They had two sets of elders there, pounding a well pounded pavement, repeating, with the same fruitless results, what countless other elders had done. One thing that helped speed up tracting was the fact that the people knew how to dismiss us rapidito.

And isn't this the basic system followed everywhere? Elders and sisters going over the same turf, year after year? Certainly there is a logical argument for this being a tremendous waste of resources!

Hey dummies!! Leave sets of sister in the functioning wards and sent four elders to brand new towns that have never seen mormons before and turn the elders loose to do their thing! Don't send just two. Trust me, I was sent twice to new towns, and had there been four of us, something might have resulted from the effort, even with me being an atheist and all...

Get the kids out there being really missionaries; forget your dumb ass districts and zones, let them hunt by the spirit, not the rule book. Don't put another pair of elders in a ward that hasn't seen a convert baptism in years and years, open new towns!

Of course this won't work in cities, towns and villages where a high percentage of older teens through adults have smart phones and two or more gigs of monthly connectivity. I'm just screwing with ya. Your model is doomed.