church

I actually don’t have a problem with their reporting of numbers. (And there is plenty else I do have a concern with.) How else would they do it?

They report based on the number of baptisms. If someone is baptized and they don’t rescind their membership that makes them a member whether then actively participate or not.

The challenge becomes those members who disappear and the church does not know where they live. In that case the church keeps their record on file until the age 110. So there are definitely some deceased members that the church is counting as still being members. This probably does inflate the number by a couple hundred thousand, but they really don’t have any way of knowing if these people are alive or not and it kind of makes sense to keep them on file until they are very confident the people are deceased.

My guess is that actual active membership is somewhere in the 3 million range – however it’s just a guess. The activity rate in countries like the Philippines & Brazil is somewhere in the range of 20% as I understand it.

I also agree its misleading but I don’t see that as the leaders’ intention. I think it’s simply easier to report gross membership as activity rates are hard to measure, although I suspect they could be easily estimated with sampling statistics. All the other churches do it as well, so it’s like an industry standard.

While it is (perhaps) an industry standard, gross membership is the ‘biggest number’ among the metrics they have, and in my opinion, the one they know the least about.

The church does have some very important statistics that are far more reflective of membership:

1. They KNOW the number of people attending church each week. Since budget allocation is based upon head-count, i bet it would be very easy to report attendance sunday by sunday.

2. They KNOW how many people (a) pay tithing at all (b) self-declare as full tithe payers.

3. They KNOW how many people actively hold a temple recommend

4. They KNOW how many people attend the temple.

5. They KNOW organic growth through births of record and baptisms of member children.

6. They KNOW missionary growth through baptisms of converts

7. They KNOW how many people resign or are excommunicated each year.

All of this data should be available at a push of a button. Given the management-obsession of the Corporate culture inherent to LDS leadership, I would suggest strongly that they slice and dice this data 57 ways from sunday.

I would LOVE to see these statistics, but there is, of course, no transparency on these statistics. It is what it is.

Good points from Wayfarer — you’re right — there is probably less mystery than I surmised. Activity rates, defined as attending church once a month, would still be hard to get I think, but average percent of membership attending sacrament meeting would be very easy to get.

However, I’m familiar with companies like Dunn and Bradstreet who publish industry ratios for people in Finance to use when analyzing companies and their financial performance. To have meaningful ratios, you have to be able to calculate them on a fairly consistent basis across all companies in the industry. When there are public financial statements available, this is easier, but I know of no requirement that churches publish their membership statistics in any detail that would afford such a comparison.

So, providing our own self-styled report of “activity” would be misleading unless other churches use a similar standard. And I suspect there is a whole variety of configurations for Sunday attendance that are not standard across churches.

Roy, when I taught high school I also co-chaired the Fellowship of Christian Students. My co-leader was Baptist – and a great guy.

We attended an event with the group at one point, and at one point the youth minister asked everyone to bow their heads and close their eyes while he prayed. I did so – until he started using the “prayer” as a pep rally speech. With open eyes, he was scanning the students in the room and tallying how many of them raised their hands as he exhorted them to do so and commit their lives to Christ. He then said, to the students, during a “prayer”, “Now say to me, ‘Dave’, I commit my life to Christ.”

That experience isn’t relevant directly to the topic of membership, but it was one of the creepiest church experiences I have had in my life, and I’ve had some creepy ones. I know from former research, however, that some churches count oversees membership based on how many people attend a revival and raise their hands to commit to Christ.

If being on the records of the church is the definition they’ve used to count membership, then it is not deceptive.

They use the same definition and the same method year after year, and it is the most honest way to compare year over year growth.

If they were changing definitions constantly, and changing methods for calculating it, then it would bother me. And it would mean less.

They also report other statistics like number of stakes and local units. They do not count the activity rates of those, just the numbers.

I’m OK with that.

What would be be accomplished by reporting 5 million “active” members? Who determines what “active” is? Why is that a “better” statistic? Ray and others have pointed out how other churches have issues with counting.

So I would disagree with stating there is a fallacy, or this is dishonest. Is it trying to show the church in a “good light” …ya, but that is not dishonest, IMO.

I’ve always been annoyed with how we report numbers. It makes the ward lists completely useless for things like home teaching. It just becomes another cause for needless guilt for the priesthood holders who feel they need to get 100% home teaching done to be ‘worthy’, and frankly, 2/3rd of the people on their list have not considered themselves to be “Mormon” for twenty years and do not want any contact from the church. I don’t think we need to throw away the baptismal records, but I think the records of local units could use a good housecleaning.

Well, I think there are well-meaning reasons to include all who have been baptized who haven’t resigned. They are part of the flock for whom ward members are responsible. There are too many who report they can’t get their names removed, which should be remedied, but I’m not generally in favor of cutting people without their explicit request or soliciting them to request it. I don’t care if people attend or not. That never got them off the Catholic church’s rolls! In fact, in some accounts, Catholics count all Christian sects as all Protestant sects originated with them. Certainly that’s looser accounting than anything we’ve got!