Interesting article on baptism rates

1) I worry that the numbers will cause a stir among the GAs and this will eventually translate into even more focus on HtW from the top down. As WML I can already start to feel the browbeating. Focusing on others besides myself… again I worry that all this focus on HtW is going to take away from the spirit of our regular meetings. I’m positive I’m projecting my feelings onto others but HtW is well beyond the saturation point. I’d hate to see a double-down on turning our meetings into what amounts to little more than motivating a sales force.

2) We’re picking up a third companionship next transfer.

3) The article mentions that the ratio of converts to missionaries has slipped from 5:1 to 3.5:1. My calling has already exposed me to that factoid and I’ve already heard the displeasure over it. I’ve heard “that is not HtW” multiple times and I don’t think that’s a healthy message to be sending.

4)

Stewart and Martinich say the number of members helping missionaries find potential converts has not kept pace with the influx of new proselytizers.

“That is the key ingredient,” Martinich says, “to improving the efficiency and productivity of missionary work.”

Unfortunately I think that line right there means that the members are about to get ground into hamburger meat. It’s the member’s fault, they aren’t doing enough. It doesn’t help that nearly every missionary I’ve met comes to the field with this attitude. I’m fairly certain I had that same attitude during my mission, so no stone casting. I agree that members are the key. Missionaries are transient. I’m just sad that I can already vicariously feel the guilt.

The article mentions that in Los Angeles they are instruction missionaries not to track and asking that they only contact member referrals. I hope they aren’t holding idle missionaries over the heads of the members in that area.

5) The article mentions that in a few areas they are experimenting with two hours of service per day. A good step in the right direction. I hope they trend toward more service. What better thing to do with tens of thousands of idle missionaries?

I don’t live in a “fertile” part of the world. People are very skeptical here, know little about Mormonism, and what they know is usually wrong.

I live in a not insignificant city, yet we only have one ward. They’ve tried splitting it, and purely on the basis of population you’d think this would work.

However, we seem to have at least one baptism per month on average. Sometimes two or three.

Our REAL problem is retention, that and many people being foreigners, transients or Americans in the ward.

ps I don’t think saturation has happened – Africa and Asia are still wide open. We’re getting a lot of Chinese converts right now, but activity in the PRC is banned.

We are, however, in a bit of a bubble. We have more missionaries out right now than we will a year from right now, and that will be more than we have two years from right now. When the announcement of age changes was made 18 months ago, there were many young people that were suddenly eligible. So, YM who were planning to go at age 19, instead went a year earlier. We will permanently (and gratefully) have a much higher percentage of sister missionaries, but the floodgates opened and we had many go right away… so we had all those sister missionaries going out. The first-wave sisters will start coming home in in the next months (announcement+paperwork+call+time_before_MTC+18_months = now to July). Elders in that first wave will start coming home six months later.

In the meantime, we will begin to stabilize on the true, sustained rate of missionaries entering the field. It’ll take two years to work through the ‘bubble’.

Right now, the LDS Church pegs its global membership at 15 million.

Here are some of the almanac’s findings:

• About 30 percent of Mormons worldwide — or 4.5 million — regularly attend church meetings.

• Between 2000 and 2010, LDS congregational growth was most rapid in Delaware (63 percent), Virginia (33 percent), North Carolina (32 percent), and Texas and Tennessee (29 percent). Congregational decline occurred in Louisiana (down 18 percent), Connecticut and New York (down 6 percent), and New Jersey (down 3 percent).

• The Philippines is home to the largest population of Latter-day Saints outside the Americas — 675,166 as of 2012.

• There are at least seven countries or dependencies with member activity rates of 15 percent or less — Chile, Portugal, South Korea, Panama, Hong Kong, Croatia and Palau.

• Within the past three years, the lowest convert-retention rates have appeared to occur within Latin America, where many nations have experienced no noticeable increase in the number of active Mormons within this period.

• Ivory Coast appears to have the most successful LDS missionary efforts within the past few years. Only French-speaking African members serve there due to safety and security concerns for non-Africans in this country. Explosive growth has occurred within the past two years. During 2013, the number of Mormon wards and branches, or congregations, jumped from 53 to 72; a 36 percent leap.

• A big obstacle to LDS conversions can be the “ethnoreligious” ties that particular ethnic groups exhibit toward traditional faiths. Examples include ethnic Greeks with the Greek Orthodox Church, the Fulani people of West Africa with Islam, and ethnic Thais with Buddhism. Greece, for example, has seen little Mormon growth notwithstanding proselytizing missionaries serving in the country for more than two decades. There continue to be more active non-Greeks than ethnic Greeks in the LDS Church in Greece, and nominal membership remains under 1,000.

• Tribalism has been a challenge in some areas of the world. In the South Pacific’s Vanuatu, the LDS Church must obtain permission from village chiefs to engage in missionary activity and hold services. Tribal conflicts have resulted, at times, in the church closing member groups and withdrawing missionaries.

• The first full-time Mormon missionary from China completed his service in 2006. By the end of 2010, 42 missionaries from mainland China were serving full-time LDS missions, many in the United States and Canada.

• In 2010, India had more than 150 Mormon missionaries. That number has been greatly reduced due to visa restrictions, but it is close to being self-sufficient with local missionaries.

• In Spain, assimilating Latin Americans and Spaniards into the same congregations presents the most widespread ethnic integration issue. Some congregations with an overrepresented Latin American presence may run into difficulties baptizing and keeping active a Spaniard minority.

• The LDS Church has cut the number of full-time missionaries assigned to Belgium to approximately a third of the levels reported in the 1980s and ’90s. Despite this reduction, Belgium remains reliant on foreign missionaries because few locals serve Mormon missions.

• The United Arab Emirates boasts an LDS stake, four wards and two branches — partly because this Persian Gulf nation provides greater religious freedom for Christians than most Middle Eastern countries.

• The LDS “Word of Wisdom” (a health code urging Mormons to eschew alcohol, tobacco, coffee and tea) and the “law of chastity” (forbidding sex outside marriage) perhaps present the greatest challenges to new converts and seasoned members.

• In sub-Saharan Africa, there have been many instances in which individuals cannot get baptized in some countries because they participate in polygamous marriages per local customs and traditions. These individuals have to divorce polygamous spouses to become Mormons — apparently a rare move. The LDS Church stopped practicing plural marriage more than a century ago.

• Countries with the most members and no LDS temple in place, under construction or announced: Nicaragua (80,605 members), Zimbabwe (23,117), Russia (21,709), Papua New Guinea (21,265) and Puerto Rico (21,174).

http://m.sltrib.com/sltrib/mobile3/57369318-219/church-percent-lds-growth.html.csp” class=”bbcode_url”>http://m.sltrib.com/sltrib/mobile3/57369318-219/church-percent-lds-growth.html.csp

There’s a temple in the Dominican Republic. The Dominican Republic temple is probably only 400 kilometers from the furthest point in Puerto Rico. Sure it means getting on a boat or plane but it’s not like Puerto Rico is completely stranded.

Retention has been a concern for a very long time, and it is something often used by the antis who point out that there are far fewer than the 15 million reported members in church, and in some places it’s so bad that members don’t even identify as members in the census. That leads to the church saying there are x number of members in a certain country while the country says there are only y number.

My son’s mission has some sort of new initiative starting where members are supposed to be more involved with the whole process, including actually teaching on splits with the missionaries and performing the baptism/confirmation. This initiative also includes the missionaries trying to get more member referrals, but I think that’s actually part of the problem – the potential converts aren’t found by the members to begin with so it’s only the missionaries who are invested. Really, if I had someone I knew who was interested in the church the missionaries would be the first to know – but I clearly don’t. His mission spends a great deal of effort on reactivation and reactivation counts the same as a baptism – in the mission newsletter they’re listed together without delineation. Part of this initiative is also less of an emphasis on stats – they don’t report number of lessons taught, etc.

From a personal standpoint, my ward at the time did a great job at this fellowshipping stuff when I joined the church. I was in the military at the time, so the missionaries were not permitted to proselyte on base (I was golden). All of my lessons were taught at member homes or the church (mostly members, and mostly the same members). These people sat with me in church, and invited me over when the missionaries weren’t there. I actually recall a bishopric member asking me what I was interested in and what I would like to do before I was given my first calling (almost unheard of, but I don’t know why). This whole plan worked – I became very TBM and while I liked the missionaries (they did baptize/confirm), I had friends right there in the ward from the start.

Church leadership feel that too many converts lean on the missionaries and dont make the connection with the other ward members. Then when the missionaries move or go home…the converts stop coming to church because they dont have anyone to help them.

This has been a concern since I’ve been a member of the church. Maybe this conversation took place here, but in case it didn’t:

Another thing that was pointed out is that the missionaries visit their investigators multiple times per week. After all, they have the time to do it. Even if the missionaries didn’t move or go home they’d eventually have to move on to other people, the multiple visits per week that investigators and recent converts enjoy eventually dry up. Some people require multiple visits per week as motivation to attend church. It’s difficult for the general membership to sustain a level of visits that some people need. In many cases we baptize before there’s real conviction. The burden is then placed on the members to instill conviction.

It’s a strange process to me. We won’t baptize someone with a very strong desire to be baptized because they smoke… yet we’re more than happy to rush people that aren’t really enthused at all to the waters of baptism.

His mission spends a great deal of effort on reactivation and reactivation counts the same as a baptism – in the mission newsletter they’re listed together without delineation. Part of this initiative is also less of an emphasis on stats – they don’t report number of lessons taught, etc.

Less of a focus on numbers is pretty cool. I wonder how the MP gets away with that when he makes his reports. Just curious… it’s fairly obvious how baptisms are counted, it is an event that takes place. Reactivation is nebulous. What counts as reactivation? For instance, say a less active family starts attending for a month in January, stops attending for 5 months, attends for a month again in July, stops attending again for 4 months, and attends for a month in December. Do they get counted 3 times on the year or only once?

Because I don’t care for the focus on numbers. :crazy:

It’s quarterly results that get reported there.