Where Have the Mormon Converts Gone?

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.

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

Data source:  http://ldsstatistics.com/