Hey all, my first post.
There seems to be a discontinuity in how the membership numbers are figured. In each of the last five years, if you take the previous year's official membership number, add the official numbers for blessed children and convert baptisms, and subtract the official membership number for that year, you get the following (which if I figure rightly should represent official recognized deaths and resignations):

2008: 74,585
2009: 83,483
2010: 86,729
2011: 91,350
2012: 53,476

I am sure you will find the 2012 number surprising, as I did. By way of comparison, a rough calculation of expected deaths in those years (using about 8 deaths per 1000 as the death rate - a reasonable rough assumption for the church) gives about 112,000;114,000; 117,000; 120,000; and 122,000, respectively, for those years. I understand the LDS church does not recognize some deaths until it is statistically unlikely that the member remains alive, and some other accounting practices that skew the numbers, but that only accounts for the difference between the expected and the "official" numbers. It does not, as far as I can tell, account for this sharp deviation just reported a few hours ago.

Is there anyone who might independently check me on these numbers and/or offer any explanation?

I used the following numbers from the official site and ldschurchgrowth.blogspot.com:
2007 total 13,193,999 blsd 93,698 cnvts 279,218
2008 total 13,508,509 blsd 123,502 cnvts 265,593
2009 total 13,824,854 blsd 119,722 cnvts 280,106
2010 total 14,131,467 blsd 120,528 cnvts 272,814
2011 total 14,441,346 blsd 119,917 cnvts 281,312
2012 total 14,782,473 blsd 122,273 cnvts 272,330

baby boomers are living longer?

What amazing miraculous cure last year managed to cut Mormon mortality in half? Maybe those priesthood blessings started to actually work? hahahahahaha

If the majority of LDS growth is in third world countries where healthcare is not as readily available as it is in the US, should the death rate be increasing due to more members living in countries with inadequate healthcare?

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IT'S ALL CALLED "BS", or ...

Beneficial Statistics

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Yes, there seems either to be some miracle at work here, or the statistical people did not want the change in growth to continue negative. Below are the stats from the Wikipedia article on church growth for the last five years. The 2.19% in 2011, by the way, was the lowest growth rate since 1947, and they obviously did not want that to continue.

Therefore they seem to have made some change in their accounting to fix that. I am curious what they have done. If you look at the blessing and convert numbers for 2012, there shouldn’t be a dramatic change in growth rate, therefore it seems likely they have changed how they account for death or resignations to mask the declining growth rate.

Note: There is a difference between growth, and growth rate. The church continues to grow (by the official numbers) but the rate at which it is growing continues to decline (at least until they made this adjustment). I talked to Peggy Fletcher Stack at the Tribune yesterday, and she is swamped with conference articles and did not seem too interested. I think there might be a story here nevertheless. I was surprised to see somebody has already updated the Wikipedia article, (for example).

From

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Church_of_Jesus_Christ_of_Latter-day_Saints_membership_history :

year membership change rate
2008 13,508,509 314,510 2.38%
2009 13,824,854 316,345 2.34%
2010 14,131,467 306,613 2.22%
2011 14,441,346 309,879 2.19%
2012 14,782,473 341,127 2.31%

Somes truths aren't very helpful.