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I was looking at something recently on Esperanto. Don’t know if any of you have heard about it, but it was set up as an attempt to produce a neutral international language. However, it has suffered from schisms, and failed mostly in its objectives to become the global language, though it’s far spread.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto Sounds familiar? Well, I’ve seen a number of different estimates as to how many speakers this language actually has. But there is simply no way to know how many there are, and how fluent speakers are. The only number which can be calculated are society memberships, attendance at conventions etc.
I think if we want to calculate LDS membership, we should look at how many folk currently go to the temple, and then work out from there.
Yes Temple attendance is monitored since the TRs have to be scanned in. Someone out there in the organizational structure knows how many people are using temples right now. I think TR holders are a fraction of the genuine membership, (but what fraction?) yet this would at least give us a hard figure to work from. The remainder of genuine membership is much harder to calculate, as we’ve pointed out, especially as none of the other figures e.g. priesthood meeting attendance are fully related to membership. You can skip priesthood/RS etc and still be a proper member.
The people on the fringes are the hardest to calculate because of definitions and many of us have been there.
The problem with using temple attendance numbers is two-fold: 1) It really has nothing whatsoever to do with total membership numbers, which is the focus of the actual post;
2) There isn’t a comparable calculation in any other Christian denomination of which I am aware, which also is a main point of the actual post.
Discussing temple attendance numbers is an important topic – but it is important for VERY different reasons than the purpose of this post.
Try this — one thing most denominations have is a weekly, Sunday Worship meeting. If they don’t have a comparable meeting, then exclude them from the comparison. Calculate a participation level as Average Weekly Worship Meeting Attendance/Total Members of Record.
Both are hard numbers. It gets around the need for determining how is active, or who is not.
I agree with that sort of comparison, SD – and I’ve seen attempts to do that. The LDS Church actually stacks up really well. It’s not the top, but it is closer to the top than to the bottom, by a significant degree. (I can’t remember the exact ranking, so I won’t try to guess.) That’s surprising in a way, since the commitment asked is higher in many ways than a lot of other churches. Old-Timer wrote:I came across the following article through some Presbyterian friends who are lamenting the decreasing membership of their denomination. I thought everyone here should see it – NOT as an “all is well in Zion” comparison (since you all know I don’t believe that) but simply to reinforce that
some things that seem particularly challenging to the LDS Church (or, to some people, even seem unique to the LDS Church) are not isolated to us. In fact, using only sheer membership numbers and growth rate, the LDS Church still is doing fairly well in comparison to most other denominations…From the article, “The membership total of the newly formed PCUSA in 1983 was 3,131,228.” Now it is 1,849,496. That is a decrease of 1,281,732 – or 41% in the last 30 years…There is NO other message in this post; I am not trying to say anything other than what I said above. I just think perspective is important in any discussion. It looks like the trend in the US is that an increasing percentage of people are becoming less interested in organized religion in general compared to past decades. Also there are various Pentecostal/evangelical churches that have quickly grown to over 200 million worldwide since the early 1900s. So these are a few of the alternatives that some of the more traditional churches have to compete against and it doesn’t surprise me if these Presbyterian churches would not be as appealing as some of the other options to many people nowadays. Also, it sounds like maybe these Presbyterian churches count their numbers differently than the LDS Church because they periodically take people off the membership rolls whereas the LDS Church continues to count millions of people that have effectively left the Church sometimes until they would have been 110 years old. The official census numbers versus the numbers the Church reports show that there are literally millions of Church members in various Latin American countries that no longer consider themselves LDS at all.
That is fine if the Church doesn’t want to give up on members and write them off and they would rather continue to hold out hope that they will return to the fold. However, when they get up in conference and talk about “15 million strong” it is very misleading to say the least when it is probably less than 5 million that are active members worldwide and many of these don’t have current temple recommends, are children that are only there because of their parents, or aren’t really on board with the official doctrines and are mostly there because of family/social ties or to keep up appearances, etc. Another question is whether numbers should be the primary measurement of success to begin with. Personally I don’t think numbers like this prove that the LDS Church is better than these Presbyterian churches, it could simply mean that they are better at pressuring people into joining and/or staying in the Church not necessarily because they want to be there but in many cases because they feel obligated to because it is supposedly the “one true church” and/or they are afraid of what other members will think about them if they don’t go along with what they are expected to by others.
Suppose a Presbyterian gets married to a Baptist, Methodist, Lutheran, Episcopalian, etc.; which church will they attend and which church will their children attend, if any? By comparison most practicing Mormons only marry other practicing Mormons and raise their children to be Mormon as well thanks in large part to the eternal family doctrine plus Mormon families have traditionally had more children on average. Also, the Church has over 80,000 full-time missionaries trying to recruit new followers whereas some of these mainstream churches don’t really actively recruit new members at all. So it only makes sense that the LDS Church would have better numbers than some of these churches that aren’t as focused on that as a specific goal. Personally I think that some of these factors that help boost the overall numbers shouldn’t be measured as success at all but are actually shortcuts to get around and overcompensate for the fact that the LDS Church only appeals to a very limited number of people nowadays and the costs greatly outweigh the benefits for many members/investigators if you discount future promised rewards that could easily never be realized as far as we know.
I think you misunderstand me, Ray. There are two ways to calculate membership:
– *Inclusive, which the church uses i.e. all baptized.
*- Exclusive, where we start from TRs and work from there.
With the inclusive, we have to remove layers eg long term inactive. With the exclusive we add layers as appropriate. TR holders are definite church members, whose numbers are recorded whereas the opposite approach starts with the fuzziest of definitions.
I understand, Sam – and I have no problem at all with that approach to determining multiple, different scope membership figures. I just think using total baptized minus total removal requests is about as accurate as is possible to get for total membership (really, the ONLY semi-objective measure), while once a month Sacrament Meeting attendance is a pretty good measure for active membership (which is the way it’s done currently). That measure of activity was the one that was praised by the Southern Baptist Convention committee that was studying their own activity rate, since they determined that annual attendance (what they were using) was far too lax a measure. In their words, the Mormon way was both more accurate and more honest.
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