...and there's no way anybody can prove me wrong!!!

Or so it seems to me...

I have a friend that worked in Salt Lake in the missionary department for years - now retired. Maybe I could ask her if she knew anything about numbers but she's pretty TBM. In fact, totally brainwashed from all those years working at the COB. But sometimes she lets her hair down. It can't hurt to ask.

I think you can extrapolate from what we DO know, however. Most missions that I know of have approximately 200 missionaries, give or take. So, if there really are 50,000 missionaries, dividing that by 200 missionaries per mission yields a sum of 250 missions. That actually sounds about right to me.

52,494 active full-time missionaries is totally realistic. Keep in mind not all missionaries beat down doors. There are full-time service missionaries, office volunteers, tour guides, etc. I am sure all of them get totaled in to that number.

I bet if you did some statistical analysis you could determine general activity rate based on this number. Here is my shot:

13,508,509 claimed members. Assuming 2.3% male population between the ages of 19-21 (which is generous to offset large family sizes). That gives us ~310,695 males. Let's presume 95% of all full-time missionaries are in this demographic (which feels generous to me), that's about 49,869 individuals, or about 16% of "worthy young men."

So we can do some back-of-napkin deduction and presume that general membership activity is going to be similar to that 16% figure, given these conditions: 1) very active, 2) financially well-off enough to support missionaries (and therefore contribute seriously to tithing), 3) dedicated enough to participate deeply in the faith in order to raise offspring likely to volunteer.

Just in case you were wondering - that's 2,168,115 people. Probably a little low, but we are talking about the truly committed members, not total "active." If about 28,000 people left the church in 2009 (roughly, based on the meager statistics we get), that's a loss of about 1.2% from the 'TBM' base. Some guy with a green visor isn't going to bat an eyelash at a loss of 1.2%, especially when you bury the statistic in the larger claimed members pool. There are still far more coming in than leaving. That poor guy at HQ can't see the forest for the trees.

The 1.2% 'dedicated member' loss rate is a little more than half of the average birth rate (for Mormons) - which means the church is probably statistically close to seeing a 'shifting of the scales' as far as dedicated members go. Don't forget that not every former-dedicated ex-mormon actually resigns. I wouldn't be surprised if they are already seeing a big hit. They would probably track it with some smarmy number entitled 'total worthy priesthood holders'. If we could see that number over time, we would almost certainly see an interesting change over the last 10 years or so. In fact, this gives me all kinds of realizations surrounding local leaders pushing men to 'become worthy' and turn off the Internet porn. I can personally vouch for this in my area. Many of the local bishops are horrible leaders, poorly trained, etc. They are the only people they can get. All of this is evidence of the dwindling number of strong orthodox LDS members.

This is further evidenced by the reclining number of active full-time missionaries (another name for 'dedicated member ratio'). In 2001 there were 60,850. That's a reduction of 13% in 8 years, 1.6% a year, which backups the previous guesstimates nicely. Expect some evasive maneuvers from church HQ to get that active full-time missionary count up ASAP. Here is an idea - allow young men to serve 'mini-missions' that last only a year (they would be able to choose a 12 or 24 month 'deployment' with the pressure to 'renew' once they hit 12 months). A program like that would put a tourniquet on the bleeding stump, for a while any way.

While all this is clearly a guesstimate, it is one based on US census data, the CIA world fact book, 2009 LDS stats, some imagination, and my calculator. I don't know how to estimate error rate, but let's just out-right assume it is +/- 8%.

Numbers don't lie, that's a statisticians job.

I was in the MTC in the summer of 1998 and they were boasting of record numbers of missionaries every week. The place was pretty damn crowded to capacity at mealtime.

That seems like a completely believable number. And we know there are 25K congregations because their names and addresses are listed in the LDS almanac, and if they were bogus, *someone* would notice and post.

Do the mishie numbers include senior mishies?

They've actually declined from a high of 60,000 over the last ten years.

I heard that in Brazil, last november, the whole MTC had only 50 missionaries attending. The majority were natives.
The embassy was denying the entry visa for the foreign missionaries during the year's last quarter (I don't know why).