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I thought this was a great article that gave some hard growth numbers for the church. Bottom line, the church is still growing, but the rate of growth is slowing. I am sure a lot of this can be attributed to Covid recently, but the numbers show the slowdown was occuring pre-covid. Apparently we are still better than a lot of other churches who declining in overall membership. One thing, though, other churches don’t have the massive missionary force like we do, so you would expect us to produce better numbers overall.
I think that’s why we’re seeing so much emphasis on the priesthood responsibility of serving a mission. The number of missionaries is interesting. I think focusing on just the total number of missionaries hides another phenomenon.
The mission age was lowered to 18 for men and 19 for women during the October ’12 general conference. First I want to look at the numbers before the age change:
2011: 55,410
2012: 58,990
And the few years immediately after the change there was a high water mark in the numbers as both the kids that had to wait until they were 19 were still on their missions and 18 year old kids were starting their missions. There was also an enormous influx of women.
The flood of missionaries passed and eventually the numbers stabilized. Taking the numbers from the years immediately prior to the pandemic:
2018: 65,137
2019: 67,021
Now for some
completely made upnumbers to illustrate a point. I’ve heard an estimate that before the age change that 15% of missionaries were women. Under that assumption and using the numbers above:
2011: 8,311 women; 47,099 men
2012: 8,848 women; 50,142 men
I’ve also heard estimates that after the age change, as many as 50% of the applications to serve a mission were from women. I have no way of knowing but that feels too high for today. Maybe that was the case closer to the time when the age change occurred. Looking at the missionaries currently in my stake, 25% are women and 75% are men. If I run with those numbers and apply them to the numbers from immediately prior to the pandemic:
2018: 16,284 women; 48,853 men
2019: 16,755 women; 50,266 men
And to last year:
2021: 54,539 total; 13,635 women; 40,904 men
So currently (again this is using made up estimates) there are about 6,000 fewer men serving that before the age change and about 8,000 fewer men serving when compared to the stabilized numbers after the age change.
I fully expect the number of missionaries to go up over the next few years. 1) Because we’re still getting past covid’s influence and 2) the pressure the culture will put on young men to serve.
Switching subjects from my other post. There’s growth for the sake of growth and there’s sustainable growth. If not for Africa, the church could very well be in a decline. The levels of growth in Africa remind me of the growth that occurred in South America some decades ago, growth that was perhaps on paper only. One can’t help but wonder whether we’re falling into some of the same traps in Africa.
But it’s still growing in the United States, which is the area I care most about. But the growth is definitely slowing in new membership. I also want to add, consider what it takes to achieve the growth we have achieved in past years — a massive missionary force that seems to be far above the missionary forces of other religions. Can you imagine what our growth would look like if we scaled back our missionary force to that of other religions? Here is another good article on growth in the church. It provides more than the opening article I made for this discussion thread. One reason given for slowing total membership growth is that women are getting married two years later and families are having fewer children. Plus, young people are leaving the church and then not coming back when they get families and children like they used to. Further, we are not retaining youth as well as we used to.
nibbler wrote:
Switching subjects from my other post. There’s growth for the sake of growth and there’s sustainable growth. If not for Africa, the church could very well be in a decline.The levels of growth in Africa remind me of the growth that occurred in South America some decades ago, growth that was perhaps on paper only. One can’t help but wonder whether we’re falling into some of the same traps in Africa.
The Africa growth reminds me very much of the SA growth as well and I also wonder if we’re falling into the same traps. Time will tell, and there are few more frontiers (China and India I suppose).
The other thing I see in relation to church growth is a concern on the church’s part for growth from within. Birthrates are down in the US, including Utah (although apparently not as much). The 80s Mormon family of 8 kids are a rarity today, even in the Corridor. My ward (not in the Corridor) had no less than 6 such families in its heyday. There are none today, and only one that I can think of off hand in the entire stake. I bring this up because the only place I read about any concern for a falling birthrate is the venerable Deseret News. Their main source of news always seems to be the church, so this indicates to me that the church is concerned about it (noting that other churches rely heavily on growth from within – think Catholicism*). Another indication that the church is concerned about the falling birthrate is Senator Romney – who also talks about it.
*Even when the church constantly proclaimed its status as the fasting growing church that was only true from one statistical point of view – percentage of convert growth. Catholicism (and other religions including Islam) always grew faster simply by having more kids, and they didn’t need families of 8 kids (although some Catholics did because of their birth control stance).
I have multiple friends in multiple parts of Africa. They all say the Church could be baptizing far more people there than they are but that they are being cautious not to outgrow the ability to support the membership. I think the SA (and Japan) experience is a major factor.
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