Is the church in a downward membership spiral?

The last numbers I saw in a training meeting a few years ago showed world-wide growth but flat continuation in North America and Europe. The activity rate was around 30-35%, which is high within Chirstianity and higher than it was 50-100 years ago.

I have no way to look at sub-groups, but activity and retention of young adults (starting ng after high school) always has been the biggest issue in most religions, and ours is no exception.

I would say there isn’t a downward spiral, based on everything I have seen. I am not happy about activity and retention issues, but I know enough of religious history to avoid hyperbolic claims. We aren’t doing great, but we are near the top of the list within Christianity on most measures.

The closest I’ve found is the Pew stuff…You’ll notice it lists attendance at 77%, which is apparently due to self reporting and polling active members because inactives are harder to find and get to participate. I can see our stake data (quarterly reports) on LDS.org, and it is much like your stake – low 30%s. I think that’s the norm, but I think it is a bit higher in the Corridor and a bit lower in Europe and some parts of South America (notably Chile). I don’t know that it’s a downward trend though – I remember having similar conversations with similar data 25 years ago. I think there is a concern about Millennials and Gen X’ers leaving religion overall, including the church, and that is somewhat indicated by the Pew data.

I think one reason why the Pew survey shows such high attendance numbers is because 36% of the people polled that said they were raised Mormon no longer self-identified as Mormon but many are still counted by the Church among the 15 million members (I guess that doesn’t even include all the US converts that were baptized but no longer self-identify as LDS). For many Latin American countries it looks even worse where the Church was counting something like 750,000 members in countries where less than 200,000 still self-identified as LDS. It’s hard to know for sure what’s going on in too much detail if the Church won’t publicly report the average attendance numbers and some of the other information they have but personally I think the Church will gradually decline as fewer and fewer younger members continue to stick around and successfully pass these traditions on to their children and I have no doubt that the internet has already thrown a wrench into business as usual for the Church in a major way. For example, look at the following growth rates for wards and branches and how much of a permanent drop-off in growth happened starting in 1999.

Year units growth

1989 17305 4.5%

1990 18090 4.5%

1991 18810 4.0%

1992 20081 6.8%

1993 21002 4.6%

1994 21774 3.7%

1995 22697 4.2%

1996 23528 3.7%

1997 24670 4.9%

1998 25551 3.6%

1999 25793 0.9%

2000 25915 0.5%

2001 26084 0.7%

2002 26143 0.2%

2003 26237 0.4%

2004 26670 1.7%

2005 27087 1.6%

2006 27475 1.4%

2007 27827 1.3%

2008 28109 1.0%

2009 28424 1.1%

2010 28660 0.8%

2011 28784 0.4%

2012 29014 0.8%

2013 29253 0.8%

2014 29621 1.3%

2015 30016 1.3%

I recall someone doing a blog post and stating that a better measure would be growth of stakes. I tried to do a quick search to provide a link to it, but I didn’t find it. I will have to dig a bit more.

Thanks to DA for providing data — DA — are these Pew numbers? Or did you get this from the General Conference annual reports?…The data shows that the church has experienced a downward growth rate spiral, but not an absolute membership downward spiral…in other words, the church is still growing in the number of wards and branches , but the growth rate is down from a high of 6% per year to between 0.4 and 0.8% in the last four years. Of course, this shows growth in Wards and Branches, not in actual membership. The data could show a tendency for the church to keep Wards big rather than rabid splitting like I saw in one Stake in which I served. So, it’s not a true measure of membership growth, but is probably highly correlated.…Interesting that the rule that women could serve missions at 19 didn’t seem to have a huge boost in the growth. Again, DA provided growth in Wards and Branches while we are talking about total membership numbers, but the data is suggestive.

These are just the number of wards and branches reported in General Conference and the growth percentage was calculated from that. Personally I think this is easily a much better indicator of the Church’s overall health and relative success compared to the way it was in the 1980s and 1990s than the total membership numbers because the Church is certainly going to continue to baptize relatively large numbers of new converts (especially in Third World countries) and children raised in the Church but a solid majority of these will not remain active for very long (I.E. there will probably not be a dramatic downward spiral in total membership numbers anytime soon, it will most likely continue to show consitent linear growth for quite some time but in the past it was exponential growth for some time intervals).

In fact, even if members remain active if their overall level of commitment and willingness to accept callings is reduced compared to the way it used to be then that will also make it harder to create and maintain wards and branches because the Church basically depends on a certain number of people to fill key positions like Bishop, EQ and Relief Society Presidents, etc. I don’t believe there was ever any major shift in policy to deliberately keep larger wards instead of dividing them whenever feasible, in fact I have actually heard of examples of what looks like the precisely the opposite intention of rearranging wards to create new wards and stakes without a corresponding increase in active members in a way that doesn’t make sense to some of the local members that end up with more work to do as a result.

Our Stake has 8 wards, 1 spanish branch and a chinese group.

Monthly Stake youth baptisms might have 2 to 6 kids. Lets be positive and call 4 the average. that is 48 children a year being baptized.

Our ward has had 1 couple and 2 teenagers be baptized in the 8 years we have been inthe ward that have stayed active. Others that were baptized all left within a year or two.

I can think of a HUGE number of people in the ward who have left over tht same time frame — Youth as they become teens as well as entire families. Our stake has lost more than 60 people in the last year. I would call the state growth negative.

The new housing divisions get the young families being transfered in .. But that isnt true growth .. that is merely a popluation shift in location.