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The church admitted that the activity rate is 36% in a posting on DN, then after 5 min took it down, and then an hour later put it back with that statistic (and a few others) missing. You can read about it here36% is about what we thought here on the internet. They also posted and removed that the average ward is 35% men, 42% Women, 10% YM/YW, and 13% children in Primary.
Okay. So it matches what we thought and what has been said for a LONG time in training for local leaders. Cool. They have been consistent with the numbers. I’m glad to know that.
Weird that they took it down since it is fairly common knowledge. In fact, I always heard that too – that roughly 1/3 were active. I’ve always heard the 1/3 figure too. That’s been the same here in the midwest for the past 40 years. No one ever talked about how it was calculated or if it was accurate. I always considered it as a rough estimate.
I’d heard that in Latin America it was closer to 25%. It probably is, GB, if that. The baseball baptism period, albeit relatively short, was devastating to activity rates in more than one area. Otoh, in some places it is significantly higher than 1/3.
GBSmith wrote:I’d heard that in Latin America it was closer to 25%.
I think it does depend on where you are in Latin America, just as in North America. I don’t think there’s much disputation that the activity rate is higher in Utah (perhaps as much as 60-65%) than outside the corridor where it seems to be closer to 40-45%. My son is a missionary in Chile where the activity rate is 10-15% (doorstep conversions did hurt there), and he spend most of his time “reactivating.” An activation counts the same as a baptism for them. I’m sure the rates are a bit higher in urban Brazil.
Statistics in isolation are interesting, but I find it particularly enlightening when compared with some other reference group’s statistics. The stats reinforce my idea that living in Utah would be a mistake for someone like myself as there is likely a much higher concentration of TBM people who will cause my grief over my new way of coping with my membership. SilentDawning wrote:Statistics in isolation are interesting, but I find it particularly enlightening when compared with some other reference group’s statistics. The stats reinforce my idea that living in Utah would be a mistake for someone like myself as there is likely a much higher concentration of TBM people who will cause my grief over my new way of coping with my membership.
I don’t disagree with that, SD. Indeed, I am glad I don’t live in Utah, although I do find it a nice place to visit.
DarkJedi wrote:GBSmith wrote:I’d heard that in Latin America it was closer to 25%.
I think it does depend on where you are in Latin America, just as in North America.
I don’t think there’s much disputation that the activity rate is higher in Utah (perhaps as much as 60-65%) than outside the corridorwhere it seems to be closer to 40-45%. My son is a missionary in Chile where the activity rate is 10-15% (doorstep conversions did hurt there), and he spend most of his time “reactivating.” An activation counts the same as a baptism for them. I’m sure the rates are a bit higher in urban Brazil. To me it looks like there is no way that 60% or more of the Church members in Utah are active. Maybe that is the case in some wards in small towns, some Utah county neighborhoods, etc. that are dominated by a few hardcore LDS families but the majority of the members I grew up with that were active in primary and YM/YW largely because of their parents quickly became inactive as adults and I think this is probably typical in many Utah wards nowadays. There have also been reports that even half of the return missionaries have been falling away from the Church recently. Sometimes members’ records are never transferred to their new ward when they move which makes me wonder if these statistics are simply an average of the numbers reported by the individual wards and already exclude many of the converts and members baptized as children that the Church has lost track of and doesn’t know where they live anymore. There were rumors supposedly based on inside information that the activity rates could actually be less than 20% worldwide when actually counting the total number of members the Church claims versus the number that actually attend the meetings frequently enough to be considered active.
Realistically, I think that the Deseret News is an organ of the Church, and an important part of PR. We’ve been pushing this “15 million strong” thing for the last few years, so I can see how the statistic would be embarrassing for some, and necessitate “editing”. I live in Utah, and in the young single adult wards, we’re sometimes looking at less than half the total members as active members, at least in one of the wards I keep track of (I like keeping track of things; I’m weird like that). They’re really big on ward missionaries and working toward reactivating members. I remember years ago in institute at the local university that one of the teachers said a little less than half of the returned missionaries on campus were inactive. There are a lot of ex-Mormons I work with, too, way more than active Mormons. Utah is an interesting place. What is the real denominator? Is it the 15 million members worldwide so we can assume about 5 million in Sacrament meeting on an average Sunday? Or is it the number on your ward roster after an aggressive clerk has cleared out all the lost sheep and shipped them off to the great big computer in the tops of the everlasting hills.
In Utah when my dad was the ward clerk about 40 years ago, he could walk past the houses of every member in the ward and all the few non-members each week and check to see if they had cut their grass or shoveled their snow. He often knew early if there were any problems and he knew exactly how many people lived in that area and who went to each meeting, etc. One of my aunts as the RS president went so far as to use a step ladder to peek in people’s windows. She saw a young wife in bed with a man not her husband. She fell off the ladder and broke her leg. I think those days are gone.
About a half a million people live in my ward boundaries. For awhile they were reading in the names every week of new members, 20 or 30 at a time. Weeks would go by before anyone on those lists was actually there. I think our rolls carry about 2 or 3 times as many names as attend church. But I think many times that number live quietly under the radar and off the rolls. It is hard to know how fast they move around but it has got to outnumber the people we have on the rolls.We have no mechanism to clear them off the 15 million roster until they live to be 110 and are assumed to have died.
I live in the South. We are stronger here than in populous New England and across the midwest, but weaker than in the far west and obviouly Utah. If I assume I live in a statistically average ward and that 7.5 million of the 300 million Americans are Mormon, that predicts 2.5% LDS in the half a million in my ward. Our ward should have 12,500 attending it. Last week we only had six there sitting in the congregation; in addition to those on the stand and doing the sacrament. About 60 or 80 did trickle in at various stages of late and later. I take that 36% number as more a measure of how fast the ward clerks are clearing them out in comparison to how fast the missionaries are dunking them.
I remember sitting in a meeting with an EQP who was functionally illerate. He had a heart as big as Texas but he could only read at about the third grade level and he could not do fractions or percents. He was asked by some visiting authority what the home teaching percent was in our quorum and he asked me if I had done mine last month. I said, no. He looked up at the ceiling for a minute and then said 36%. I asked him later how he made the calculation, and so quickly without paper or a calculator. He replied that if I had said yes, it was going to be 63% and if I had said no it was going to be 36%. That was about as accurate as he could get factoring in all the lying and faking going on anyway. I guess he was onto something.
We can’t keep kicking this can down the road indefinitley. It will only get worse. A single figure without any context is meaningless. Is anyone capable of just telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth any more?
Bad statistical analyses are meaningless, as are horror stories that have nothing to do with a post.
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