Instead of looking at absolute membership totals, lets see how growth percentages have changed over time. The average from 2013 through 2019 was never above 4 converts to every missionary. But according to Jim Bennett, a current Saint who met me in the basement of the Salt . churchnewsroom. A former investment manager for the church has filed . In 1998, Stark said that the LDS Church had already grown faster than his prognosis and his numbers may have underestimated his figures from 16 years before. Eight of the bottom 10 are blue and voted for Joe Biden. Matthew Bowman, the Howard W. Hunter Chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University, suspects this is the real reason for most of the churchs recent reforms. (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) Note that I didnt say staying active in the church. Those numbers are lower. Its whether the church is willing to adopt more diverse cultural perspectives, or whether they want to hold to this 100-year-old idea of what Mormonism is. (Rick Bowmer | AP) The angel Moroni statue atop the Salt Lake Temple is silhouetted against a cloud-covered sky, at Temple . All rights reserved. You've read 0 of 5 of todays most popular posts. Brazil, which accounted for more than 14% of the churchs growth in 2019, nearly eclipsed the U.S. with respect to new memberships. The percentages for the past three decades have gone down for the first time in the history of the LDS Church. It does not store any personal data. What will really make the church successful, Mason posits, is whether it will identify and emphasize that which has made it most successfulthe strength of its local congregations, called wards. Lets examine differences in growth. One returned missionary wrote me to confirm my suspicion. Performance cookies are used to understand and analyze the key performance indexes of the website which helps in delivering a better user experience for the visitors. Mormonism, Smith says, has mechanisms that prevent you from being a mediocre Mormon. Members meet annually with church leaders to determine if they have maintained their faith and continued in religious behaviors, such as wearing special clothing and giving 10 percent of their income to the church. The Salt Lake Tribune, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) public charity and contributions are tax Mormon missionaries only had the first 75 days of the year to do their work with no hinderances, but most were ordered to return home in mid-March. We know that, not just because of the three nationally representative studies Ive mentioned here (Pew, GSS, NSYR), but because of the churchs own internal data. The Mormon Church has over 17,000 chapels across the world. What has Caused the Church Growth to Decline? The other just magnifies their sense of guilt. Use of and/or registration on any portion of this site constitutes acceptance of our. From 1990-96, there were more than 6 converts for every missionary on the field. Feminism, gender bias and sexism. Those have been archived at the research site Cumorah.com. Patrick Mason, head of Mormon history and culture at Utah State University told the Salt Lake Tribune, We know that there continues to be an exodus from the church. It appears that most people today have access to multiple sources of information thanks to modern technology. Members of the church recorded just 94,266 births in 2019, and President Dallin Oaks, the second highest ranking official in the church, noted in an October 2018 speech that the average LDS woman now marries two years later than in the recent past. People are waking up to problematic aspects of Christian origins. Whatever name you give it, that group has been growing. If the categories are extremely religious, very religious and none, they move toward the middle category. Its unrealistic to expect that there has been a major turnaround in the churchs fortunes in the years since 2008 since religious inactivity has become more pronounced in the intervening years, and not just in this country. They either stay involved, theyre totally committed, or they just go to the far side and completely bail, he said. It wasnt until my mission in the early 90s that I learned that I was identified as a convert. This is the first time I have heard a general authority openly admit the church is currently losing a lot of its members. Some people say the best thing to do is to accommodate modern cultureaccept gays, ordain women. Even in the fall and winter, few missionaries were unleashed to do the work they would normally accomplish in many countries, including canvassing homes and making calls on potential converts. See. In the below graph, when there is a larger gap between reports than one year, I calculate the annualized compound growth year to year the goal is to compare apples to apples as much as possible. sltrib.com 1996-2023 The Salt Lake Tribune. Was it because their oldest son didnt serve a mission? Here are some factors that should be considered: One can only imagine how many of the 126,000 convert baptisms in 2020 were performed on those baptized after 8 but before the age of 17. Many reach out to QuitMormon out of desperation, Sorensen says. Posting videos of their campus interviews, the Black Menaces are prompting Brigham Young University students to confront the thorny issues of racism and inequality at the Provo school and in the church. Those members who rarely (if ever) go to church services, refuse to accept church callings, and fail to tithe are still counted the same way as those who do everything the church requires, including prioritizing regular attendance at the temple. Online communities and even conventions for individuals who identify as ex-Mormon have sprung up and gained followings through social media such as Facebook and Reddit, giving those who leave an instant connectionand platformthat simply didnt exist in the past. Where, they want to know, did they go wrong? On top of this, Smith says, Mormonism remains an unusual faith, with unique teachings not found in other Christian sectsfor example, the belief that all other churches abandoned the true teachings of Christ in a great apostasy. These beliefs have, in some cases, led more mainstream Christian churches to actively shun Mormonismwhich can isolate adherents and make it more difficult for youth to find friends outside the LDS faith community. 20210m5m10m15m20m. Meanwhile, the church membership would be 2 million more (18,555,000) than the 2019 church membership number of 16,565,000. We dont have access to tithing records or the percentage of members today with a current temple recommend compared to past generations, so its possible that those are also strong. By 2018, 95% of all Americans owned a cell phone while 77% owned a smartphone. 13) Building Cleaning One place the church does not use its money for is janitors. In the LDS stronghold Utah, where more than half the population is raised LDS, protests and mass resignations tied to controversial church policies have made the news in recent yearsfrom the news Religion Unplugged reported that the church has amassed a $100 billion stockpile using member tithes in the last 22 years, to the now-revoked 2015 policy banning the baptism of children with gay parents. However, there are some things that a sociologist like Stark could not have been able to predict unless he had a crystal ball, which we will discuss in a moment. Larger societal trends play a key role in this dynamic, but so too does the number of young members who leave the church before their childbearing years due, experts believe, to the demanding nature of church culture. The wealth of the religion, especially since one insider report says that the church possesses $100 billion in a rainy day savings account, causing many members to wonder why they are required to continue to tithe. Although its difficult to obtain good data on this front, scholars believe the number of LDS members who no longer attend is growing. Think of those parents. Some of this is due to a decrease in the efficacy of LDS missionaries, who in 1989 each baptized an average of 8 converts on their missions, compared to an average of 3.5 in 2017, according to the Cumorah Foundation. All teens are expected to attend LDS seminary; each adult member has a volunteer position within the church they are expected to perform. The number of members of the church as late as 1950 was only 1 million. One of the main parties to this phenomenon, the online legal service QuitMormon, has processed over 30,000 resignations for former members of the church. Church leadership is seeing this global church that is not able to sustain the sort of intense, demanding community that Mormons who grew up in Utah in the middle of the 20th century took for granted., The real question the LDS Church faces, Bowman says, is not whether to adopt more progressive social stances. The number of members removing their names from the records of the Church has always been very small and is significantly less in recent years than in the past. Over the first weekend of April, LDS Church leaders announced their lowest baptismal convert rate number in many decades due to COVID-19 sidelining thousands of its missionaries. Utah did have the largest percentage of any state who went to church at least once per week, at 52% of the overall population. Saddleback Church doubles down on support for female pastors, Mormonisms slow shift away from demonizing working mothers, Faith leaders urge Biden to sign executive order for reparations study by Juneteenth, For many congregations, wiping out medical debt has become a popular calling, More Jesus, less touching: 14 changes to the Mormon temple endowment ceremony, Real Housewife Heather Gay pens a juicy ex-Mormon memoir, How to stay Mormon after a faith crisis (if staying is what you want), Copyright 2020, Religion News Service. Is controversy driving members away from the church? There are many solutions to retain members in a church denomination, but one of the most effective is to provide a sense of community. In the end, 55% of the Utahns they spoke to identified themselves as Latter-day Saints, while between 64% and 68% of Utahs population were on the churchs official rolls during that time period, according to their reports. This dynamic is especially strong in some areas of Utah where the church is most insular, Martinich says. The Mormon Church is growing at an astounding rate in just about every metric available. A former investment manager alleges in a whistleblower complaint to the Internal Revenue Service that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has amassed about $100 billion in accounts. Andy Larsen: The LDS Church is losing member share in most of the U.S. and other things I learned when researching the rolls 21 states have fewer Latter-day Saints than they did two. But after about 1997, you do see a more consistent decline in growth rates over the past 25 years, from about 2% a year annually to about 0.5% annually now. Address your letter to: Member Records Division, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 50 E North Temple Room 1372, Salt Lake City UT 84150-5310. The LDS Church and its support of a marriage bill, Projected Church Membership at the end of that decade (millions), total stakes/missions/districts/wards and branches, the total membership number (as of that year), new children of record and baptized converts, missionary totals, both full-time as well as church-service, temples that were dedicated or rededicated along with the total temples in operation. Riess believes that this is a cultural phenomenon, not a trend unique to the LDS Church. Here is a chart comparing the two years: Throughout the decade of the 1990s, all but three years had more than 300,000 converts. There is a slow, slow move toward decentralization in decision-making on issues like how worship services function that is designed to foster a more active membership outside the U.S., Bowman says. (KUTV) Nearly 60 percent of all millennials raised in a church have stopped going.They're not in search of a new faith, they simply want out.The mass exodus from church pews nationwide has been . Yet local leaders were also given direction to divide mens church services into more than one group as required by local activity levels. The church continues to count this person as a member until they would have reached the age of 110, an obvious attempt to artificially inflate numbers. A few months later, the church also announced that it would do away with its standardized hymnbook in favor of regional hymnals designed to reflect local languages and musical customs. But the bigger factor affecting growth, according to Martinich, is falling birthrates. Yet the church has never grown by more than 300,000 converts even once in the 21st century. Today, the information that was requested would take someone with a computer or smart phone less than 5 minutes to find (if that!). The LDS church is losing members at record numbers. As can be seen in the graph above, the LDS Church grew by a record 331,000 baptized converts in 1990, moving the membership at that time to a total of 7.76 million. A lack of diversity in the churchs highest leadership, as many observe the lack of minorities in the ranks of the general authorities. And when they leave, they are less inclined to go quietly. (Personal email to me, 2/17/2021). But for others, resigning is an act of symbolic protest because they know their names are being reported, and dont want to be counted and dont want to be part of this, Sorensen says. New Jersey, Idaho and North Dakota were the three biggest losers when compared to population change, while South Dakota, Washington, D.C., and Arkansas saw Latter-day Saints become a larger share of their communities. The 6 in 10 rough estimate is just those people who, on a survey, choose the identity of Latter-day Saint or Mormon as their stated religious affiliation. They move away from the intensity They dont become total atheists, totally disconnected from the church. Lets go back to Starks prediction and his belief that he may have underestimated the growth of the church a decade and a half after laying out the numbers of 60 to 267 million. If people leave this Church, they will usually end up traveling down one of two paths either they will become a church unto themselves (because they will never find another church that has more truth than they already have) or . First, its just not statistically true, at least in the United States, and it wasnt even true five years ago. Another factor that ought to be considered is the publication of the Gospel Topics Essays found on the church website between 2013-2015. Although the Church in Mexico reports approximately 68,000 more members than the Church in Brazil, the Church in Brazil currently operates 38 more wards and branches and 35 more stakes than the Church in Mexico. Since 1981, retention has fallen to 46 percent. No suprises there. This certainly resulted in doubling up of missionaries around the United States, which provided a beefed-up recruiting force but with not enough interested potential converts to go around. These issues will certainly be a challenge in the next years: How will the leadership handle these issues? When their children grow up, theyre among the highest of all religious groups of youth staying in the church, says Christian Smith, a professor of sociology at the University of Notre Dame. And few public libraries would have had a large array of materials on a singular subject of critical books on Mormonism. Old Man says: October 8, 2021 at 9:11 am. The largest percentage winners were South Dakota (up 6.48%), Arkansas (plus 5.32%) and Tennessee (up 4.79%). In Utah, U.S. growth is now just under a percentage point, but as Daves article pointed out, there are 21 states, plus the District of Columbia, which now have fewer members than the last report for the end of 2019. Salt Lake Tribune columnist Gordon Monson has some advice for members who feel unworthy, stating that sometimes the only cleanse you need is eliminating the feeling like you should do one.. The mormon church is excellent with marketing, so many assume it's just a slightly strange but happy family filled religion. The founder of the church, one Joseph Smith, was a fraud and conjurer well known to the authorities of upstate New York. As LDS Physician mentioned, there are lots of reasons. Functional cookies help to perform certain functionalities like sharing the content of the website on social media platforms, collect feedbacks, and other third-party features. He made those predictions on there being decade growth between 30 to 50%. Theres no doubt that growth in places overseas, especially Africa, tells a more optimistic story for the churchs membership tallies. While other theologically conservative and liberal churches alike have seen an increase in disaffected members leaving their ranks, the Church has maintained its membership: "One-quarter of Americans are religiously unaffiliated today, a roughly fourfold increase from a couple of decades earlier. With meetings, temple attendance, food storage, the strive to be perfect - it's overwhelming and far from having peace in knowing Christ. Congregational leaders were also directed to delegate more responsibilities to other volunteer leaders to allow the ward bishop essentially the priest or pastor of an LDS Wardto spend more time with local youth.