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Denver Post had this article: http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_22247809/lds-scholars-mormon-moment-could-expand-into-cultural ” class=”bbcode_url”> http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_22247809/lds-scholars-mormon-moment-could-expand-into-cultural Wondering what others thoughts were. I kind of disagree with even the 2% growth. I don’t think the church has been keeping up with that over the last decade have they? i think that it will bubble a bit because all of the lovely lady missionaries hitting the streets (wonder if the church is buying a bunch of cars…usually sisters HAVE to drive…at least in the US) but then I suspect it will lag and we will lose more folks than ever while the strange history of the church gets revealed….then once there is time for the newer leadership to change the way we do business then it will grow again…I think the church will look quite a bit different at that time.
Couple of quotes:
Quote:Yet Koltko-Rivera argues that the “high growth” model of sustained annual growth of 5.5 percent is more likely, putting the global Mormon population at more than 24 million by 2030 and 2.6 billion by 2120
Read more: LDS scholars: “Mormon moment” could expand into cultural shift – The Denver Post
http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_22247809/lds-scholars-mormon-moment-could-expand-into-cultural#ixzz2GnAhIOwi Read The Denver Post’s Terms of Use of its content:
http://www.denverpost.com/termsofuse Quote:Yet, Douthat said, a trip to Utah also reminds one of the secrecy of temple rituals (that no non-Mormon can view), the defensiveness around issues of polygamy and race, the fine line between “a healthy solidarity and an unhealthy conformism,” and a Book of Mormon counterhistory of the Americas that is unsupported by archaeological science.
Koltko-Rivera believes Mormon beliefs and values are becoming increasingly appealing to the general populace, including central tenets such as “exaltation,” or becoming godlike.
“God the Father was once a mortal human on some other world, and ultimately received the gift of eternal life, which he now wishes to make available to us, on condition of our worthiness, that is, our obedience to Him,” he wrote.
Also appealing, he said, is the belief that families are forever. “God the Father is eternally married to our Heavenly Mother.”
I don’t care, frankly, and I’ve always been bothered by what estimates like this do to many members’ testimonies and actions. We don’t need any more reasons to be obnoxious.
Having said that, the overall growth rate for the membership of record has been over 2% even in the last decade. It’s been relatively flat in the US and Europe, but it’s been around 5% in the rest of the world.
No. I don’t believe it. And I don’t care.
But I do like the thread johnh.
If the world and church is still around in 2130, will they still be telling the youth they are a “chosen generation held back for the last days?” I once had a business plan that had our family business growing from 120k/year to 1.5million in about 5 years. It’s amazing what excel spreadsheets will do if you let them
mackay11 wrote:If the world and church is still around in 2130, will they still be telling the youth they are a “chosen generation held back for the last days?”
I once had a business plan that had our family business growing from 120k/year to 1.5million in about 5 years. It’s amazing what excel spreadsheets will do if you let them
Ah yes…the Amway approach
johnh wrote:Wondering what others thoughts were.
I kind of disagree with even the 2% growth. I don’t think the church has been keeping up with that over the last decade have they?i think that it will bubble a bit because all of the lovely lady missionaries hitting the streets…but then I suspect it will lag and we will lose more folks than ever while the strange history of the church gets revealed… No, I don’t believe that for a second. This speculation mostly shows how misleading and easy to misinterpret statistics can be. Basically they are projecting long term results based on short-term growth rates which they expect to continue to compound indefinitely in an exponential way. The problem with this growth model is that all new members counted each year are treated as if they are the same and it doesn’t really consider the long-term effect that inactive members will have on these future projections.
Many of these new members counted each year are converts that will not even be active one year later or children raised in the Church that will end up being permanently inactive as adults but the Church continues to count inactive members they have completely lost touch with until they would have been 110 years old. For example, in some Latin American countries with large numbers of new converts each year the Church still counts over 700,000 members but less than 200,000 still self identify as LDS. So at some point most if not all of the children and grandchildren of many of these inactive members will not be LDS at all and I doubt that the Church will be able to continue to basically outwork and “out-breed” the competition (little or no church involvement) enough to make up for all the losses that are already happening but not counted in these official total membership statistics.
johnh wrote:mackay11 wrote:If the world and church is still around in 2130, will they still be telling the youth they are a “chosen generation held back for the last days?”
I once had a business plan that had our family business growing from 120k/year to 1.5million in about 5 years. It’s amazing what excel spreadsheets will do if you let them
Ah yes…the Amway approach
Yeah, I am not a statistician or anything but I do suspect some problems with this forecast. I believe that saturation will be the biggest challenge. Ray said that growth rates in the US and Europe are relatively flat. There was a time the Europe was producing a flood of converts. What changed? 1) The times – must have been fairly romantic and wondrous to sail away to the land of opportunity/milk and honey to help build the promised Zion with living Prophets and messenger angels. 2) Saturation – In Chile (where I served my mission) there were significant numbers of baptized members on the rolls. I believe that we have a fairly good program for getting people into the waters of baptism, less good at keeping them, and even worse at reclaiming those that never really assimilated into the ward before falling away (i.e. those that lost their major contact with the church when the missionaries transferred). Of those that were never members, we found that roughly half had received a BOM at some previous date.
So my point is that there are only so many new and fertile frontiers to go around. Once they become saturated with our initial conversion method then things are likely to slow.
I’m not so sure I like the little review of Mormon history at the end of the article…Did JS really intend to establish the US as a theocracy based in D.C.? This information coupled with the growth forecast almost makes this article hint at “the Mormons are taking over, they tried to do it before and now they are back to do it again.”
I don’t know what the Denver Post is like now, there have been some major changes in how it is run, but it used to be veryanti-mormon. In all I don’t believe that you can project growth that far in advance, really they are talking about almost doubling the life of the church and assuming that everything will happen at the same rate.
If there were that many Mormons, I think it wouldn’t be so great. I don’t function well in areas with a large percentage of Mormons.
Roy wrote:johnh wrote:mackay11 wrote:If the world and church is still around in 2130, will they still be telling the youth they are a “chosen generation held back for the last days?”
I once had a business plan that had our family business growing from 120k/year to 1.5million in about 5 years. It’s amazing what excel spreadsheets will do if you let them
Ah yes…the Amway approach
Yeah, I am not a statistician or anything but I do suspect some problems with this forecast. I believe that saturation will be the biggest challenge. Ray said that growth rates in the US and Europe are relatively flat. There was a time the Europe was producing a flood of converts. What changed? 1) The times – must have been fairly romantic and wondrous to sail away to the land of opportunity/milk and honey to help build the promised Zion with living Prophets and messenger angels. 2) Saturation – In Chile (where I served my mission) there were significant numbers of baptized members on the rolls. I believe that we have a fairly good program for getting people into the waters of baptism, less good at keeping them, and even worse at reclaiming those that never really assimilated into the ward before falling away (i.e. those that lost their major contact with the church when the missionaries transferred). Of those that were never members, we found that roughly half had received a BOM at some previous date.
So my point is that there are only so many new and fertile frontiers to go around. Once they become saturated with our initial conversion method then things are likely to slow.
I’m not so sure I like the little review of Mormon history at the end of the article…Did JS really intend to establish the US as a theocracy based in D.C.? This information coupled with the growth forecast almost makes this article hint at “the Mormons are taking over, they tried to do it before and now they are back to do it again.”
Supposedly there was a society setup that ran until the 1860’s ish decalring Joseph (later Brigham) the King. They even sent a letter to teh president and other leaders putting them on notice that the lords government would prevail. Just read about it somewhere…will have to go find it unless one of the braniacs here have it on hand.
What a fascinating thread! Thank you for posting the link to the original article. Predictions can be tough. I remember a statistics professor who “proved” that the population of Texas would exceed the population of the United States by the year 2100. He just used two different extrapolation models that seemed perfectly reasonable in isolation but which yielded nonsense together. A sort of negative synergy, I suppose.
However… I also once read an article about the growth of Christianity in its first four centuries of existence. Christianity was microscopically small in AD 33 and went on to sweep the Roman Empire within a few centuries… against stupendous headwinds in the early days. The author claimed that slow but steady growth over a few centuries could turn the world upside down. He also claimed that Christianity won converts because the Christian culture embraced compassion, selflessness, and brotherhood of all men (or siblinghood of all humans, if you prefer). I have read that the Christian church is growing rapidly in China because the Chinese are judging Christians for what their faith leads them to do (compassion, selflessness, etc), not because of Noah’s Ark or the Psalms or the Book of Revelation. And for the very same reasons, I do think the Mormon church will turn the world upside down if you give it enough time.
Side note on compassion: Today in the car I listened to a podcast from the dean emeritus of the local Episcopal cathedral (his name is Alan Jones and he is very cool). His comments blew me away. He defined “sin” as the willful denial of the interconnectedness and interdependence of all humans. At first I was tempted to shrug this off as another crackpot, crystal-waving New Age sort of thing that I hear with such depressing frequency here in California, but the more I contemplated his definition, the more I realized he had hit a bull’s eye. Love God, and love your neighbor as yourself. I immediately thought of LDS temple activity, which had really spooked me when I first learned about the LDS Church, but which I gradually grew to understand. Someone told me once that temple work was, at its foundation, an act of compassion. After hearing the insightful comment from Alan Jones, I now see temple work as a holy ordinance that teaches us and celebrates the interconnectedness of all humans, even those who have died, and that is therefore God to the core.
Back to the point about church growth predictions. In 2010 I took a year sabbatical but got bored and took a job with the U.S. Census Bureau for the the decennial census. I was a crew leader for a fairly white section of my city, and I had to review dozens of census forms that my enumerators turned in each day. I was absolutely stunned at the number of multiracial children here. You keep hearing how the majority of Californians will be Hispanic by 2050. Utter hogwash. The majority of Californians will have Hispanic surnames, but many of them will be multiracial.
I believe the same future awaits the Mormon church. There may be hundreds of millions of Mormons by 2150, but it will be a “multiracial” form of Mormonism that differs in important ways from the Mormon church of 2013. I think you are going to see a lot of revelations and changes in church doctrine that sweep away some of the debris that is today a stumbling block for so many Mormons and investigators. The church will redefine its relationship to women and gays, perhaps in ways that nobody can predict. The role of Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon will be different in 2150. Not weaker, just different and purer and more welcoming to LDS investigators who hear the word “polygamy” and run for the exit. And if the LDS culture remains true to its principles of compassion and Christ-like selflessness, it will grow just as mightily as Christianity did in the Roman Empire and as it does in China today. (Did you know that there are an estimated 67 million Christians in China today?)
Oh… and one other shaping force is in play here. Atheists have really low birth rates. I guess atheists stick to this nutty idea that we live briefly and then kick the bucket with no more meaning or importance than a squashed cockroach. Well, yeah, if I believed that, I would gravitate toward hedonism and away from changing diapers, too. (There are a lot of negative aspects of atheism that are not reported; apparently sexual harassment of women at atheist conventions is a real problem.) Anyway, LDS birth rates alone are an important factor in church growth.
Now I am starting to worry. I have been inactive for 15 years, but I am feeling a prompting to return to the LDS Church. I wonder if it’s because subconsciously I just want to be part of a successful enterprise?
Quote:apparently sexual harassment of women at atheist conventions is a real problem
As is the same thing at military academies and Catholic colleges. Meanwhile, we don’t have a stellar record of treating women progressively ourselves, and our view of sexual morality concerning women is still Victorian-based and quite screwed up, imo.
Just saying.
Wow. Sent from my SCH-I500 using Tapatalk 2
Okay. I can’t just let this go. Quote:However… I also once read an article about the growth of Christianity in its first four centuries of existence. Christianity was microscopically small in AD 33 and went on to sweep the Roman Empire within a few centuries… against stupendous headwinds in the early days. The author claimed that slow but steady growth over a few centuries could turn the world upside down.
He also claimed that Christianity won converts because the Christian culture embraced compassion, selflessness, and brotherhood of all men (or siblinghood of all humans,if you prefer…
This is so, well, so ridiculous, that it amazes me every time I hear it. Europeans did not embrace Christianity because it was gushing with “compassion, and brotherhood.” Europe embraced Christianity because it was conquered.
And for that matter, my wife’s ancestors “embraced” Christianity at the end of bayonet. Compassion? No. Compassion had nothing to do with a mass genocide of an entire race…
And lets not even talk about our African American brothers and sisters…who embraced Christianity at the end of a chain.
oasis wrote:Back to the point about church growth predictions. In 2010 I took a year sabbatical but got bored and took a job with the U.S. Census Bureau for the the decennial census. I was a crew leader for a fairly white section of my city, and I had to review dozens of census forms that my enumerators turned in each day. I was absolutely stunned at the number of multiracial children here. You keep hearing how the majority of Californians will be Hispanic by 2050. Utter hogwash. The majority of Californians will have Hispanic surnames, but
many of them will be multiracial.I believe the same future awaits the Mormon church. …
I agree. But I think it will be the future of all religions and pretty well the entire United States in general. There are some pretty good data and graphs about interracial marriage within the United States. Since the 70’s when it became socially acceptable, these marriages have had astronomical growth and will continue to do so, IMO. The blonde and blue eyed gene will become rarer and rarer…and mulatto will the be the “norm.”
And my gene pool is way ahead of the curve.
Quote:Oh… and one other shaping force is in play here. Atheists have really low birth rates. I guess atheists stick to this nutty idea that we live briefly and then kick the bucket with no more meaning or importance than a squashed cockroach. Well, yeah, if I believed that, I would gravitate toward hedonism and away from changing diapers, too. (There are a lot of negative aspects of atheism that are not reported; apparently sexual harassment of women at atheist conventions is a real problem.)…
No.
If Mormons want others to quit generalizing and falsely demeaning their religion and morals and values and practices…than Mormons need to quit doing the same thing to other groups of people they don’t understand.
-sigh-
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