Parkerplace

It takes a bit of work to determine whether the Mormon Church is growing as fast as it claims. If you accept its membership numbers at face value, the growth since 1981 is impressive: 8.6 million new converts and an overall increase in membership of 219%.

But outside obvservers don’t trust those numbers, and here is one of the reasons why:

The church likes to limit the size of its wards (congregations) to about 500 members, partly so that each adult will have an assignment—or sometimes two or three—from babysitter to Sunday School teacher or choirister to bishop (lay pastor).

From 1981 through 1999, the church added 5.8 million members overall (gray on the graphic). As a result, 13,002 new congregations were created. That works out to an average of 441 members per congregation—pretty close to the 500-member mark, and about what would be expected.

But since 1998-1999, something seems to be askew.

From 2000 to 2012, another 3.5 million people were converted, and in order to accommodate them, the church needed to create an additional 7,939 congregations* (shown in black on the graphic). But only 3,221 new congregations were created. So even though 3.5 million new converts now show up in the membership statistics, the increase in congregations only accounts for 1.4 million of them.** Where are the other 2.1 million?

Without the 2.1 million missing converts, the church’s growth since 1981 is 174%. Still not shabby, but 2.1 million is a lot of people to lose.

The question posed by many an observer is whether the internet is responsible, given that elsewhere on this blog there is a graphic showing that the number of new-member baptisms is on the decline—going from about four percent a year to about 1% just when the internet was really picking up steam in 1989-1999.

Based on anecdotes, the decline in conversions is thought to be because people meet the missionaries and hear the message, then fire up their computers, do a search on Google and discover that Mormonism has a dark side which the church leaders had been able—until the internet came along—to keep fairly secret. Once investigators read the truth about Mormonism, it is theorized that some of them lose all interest in the church.

But in this case, we’re referring to people who never reached the point where they might have been baptized. The 2.2 million people seem to have disappeared after they were baptized:

· Did they do a Google search early on, but felt pressured by the missionaries and went ahead with baptism?

· Did they do a Google search after they were baptised and then withdraw from participation?

· Did they withdraw because they had friends who had done a Google search and told them about Mormonism?

· Are the missionaries under the kind of pressure that led to some apparent “phantam” baptisms in the 1970s?

· Is it possible that not as many new wards/branches are needed because so many long-time believers are leaving the church?

It’s a mystery looking for an explanation.

--

* (3.5 milllion divided by 441)
** (3,221 times 441).

Data source: http://ldsstatistics.com/

Mormons and the Impact of the Internet

If the internet was having an impact on the Mormon Church (as suggested by Simon Southerton*), what might have happened in 1998-1999? That’s when the creation of new wards (congregations) went from an average of about 4% a year to an average of 1%.*

Growth of the church might have started trending downward earlier, but as shown in the graphic, the decline becomes striking in 1998-1999 when several major factors might have been coalescing:

1) The number of internet users had surged to 147 million worldwide and soon would surpass 200 million. By 2000, 70 million computers were connected to the internet.

2) The World Wide Web had taken off, and by 1999, there were some 2.2 million websites.

3) While Google wasn’t the first search engine, it was widely promoted as part of its launching in 1998 and would soon be hosting millions of daily searches. Disney.com was also launched in 1998, while Amazon.com, Yahoo.com, Ebay.com and MSN.com were already up and running.

4) Perhaps of particular relevance for potential investigators of the church, AOL was creating a great deal of
buzz through saturation marketing and user-friendly software.

Beginning in 1993, AOL disks flooded the mail and were ubiquitous in stores. By 1994, AOL had a million subscribers.

In 1996, AOL introduced flat-rate pricing of $19.95 a month, leading to so many new subscriptions that its access numbers too often rang busy (as many of you might remember). Its subscription base that year reached 5 million. By 1999, just three years later, AOL’s subscriber base had reached ten million and would top out in 2002 at more than 35 million.

So in less than ten years, AOL went from a million to more than 35 million subscribers.

AOL would fade in importance almost as fast as it appeared, but a lot of people cut their teeth on AOL. And no doubt it wasn’t long before some of them were linking to Google and beginning to learn a great deal about Mormonism.

5) Ironically, it appears that the church was celebrating its success just about the time its growth was slumping.

The church had an incredible 306,171 conversions in 1998, which President Gordon B. Hinckley said in General Conference was “tremendously significant.” He also said the number of new stakes (dioceses) required to accommodate that many converts would be 120. The actual number created in 1998 was 81.

In 1999, another 299,134 people were baptized. Yet the number of new stakes created dropped to 39. The figures suggest that a lot of people who are baptized don’t become active members. And, of course, growth slumped growth slumped thereafter to an average of about 1% a year.

Finally, there is evidence that comes from the church itself. “We realize that people get their information basically from Google,” the former church historian, Marlin K. Jensen, said during a tape-recorded Q&A with college students a couple of years ago.

He made the statement based on anecdotal information but also said the church regularly relies on consultants who do public-opinion surveys and run focus groups. Manuals are being developed, materials are being updated, and a new employee has been hired who is “in charge of search engine optimization, “ Jensen said.

“And with good reason,” Jensen also stated, “because we are suffering a loss, both in terms of our new converts that come in that don't get really established … as well as very faithful members who … are losing their faith in the process. It is one of our biggest concerns right now."

______

* Southerton, author of "Losing a Lost Tribe: Native Americans, DNA, and the Mormon Church," was an early adopter of the internet-impact theory. He posted a graphic last year that suggested a link between the growth of the internet in

Australia

and

New Zealand

and the flattening of church growth in those two countries. Note that the flattening might have occur-red in about 1998.

Southerton also has discussed the growth in the

U.S.

of the internet and the church.

http://simonsoutherton.blogspot.com.au/2012/02/google-apostasy-in-australia-and-new.html

http://simonsoutherton.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/google-apostasy-spreads-to-united.html

Sources

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/31/us-mormonchurch-idUSTRE80T1CM20120131

https://www.lds.org/general-conference/1999/04/find-the-lambs-feed-the-sheep?lang=eng