Church Growth In 2024 Plotted: Which Countries Grew? Which Declined?
Next week, we'll look at growth & decline by US state
Introduction
A week or two ago, I posted analysis of the overall church membership changes in 2024:
This week, I saw that the church updated its official statistics page showing stats by country. I originally scraped it in 2024 showing 2023 data. Now, I scraped it again with the new 2024 data, so we have a comparison by country how things changed from 2023 to 2024.
With this data, we’ll look at growth by country. Next week, I plan to post about US state-level changes in a similar style. So stay tuned!
Want access to country-level and state-level church data for your own projects? I have all the code I used to scrape the data and the data files saved in this github repository. Feel free to use as you like! Also, at the end of all my posts, I post a link to the specific script that I used for that post.
Charts
Let’s first look at a percent change in membership from 2023 to 2024 on official church records.
Overall, we see a lot of green and yellow.
First, thing I noticed is that Russia is green. I’ll talk about this later in the post.
Second, Southern Africa seems very green. Indicating percent changes of >= 10% in official membership. Some of these African countries already had a large number of members, so these findings are meaningful and aren’t just a reflection of low baseline numbers boosting percent changes.
Third, I do notice a few countries with negative change in membership specifically in Eastern Europe. This could be a result of migration from the Russia - Ukraine war.
Now let’s look at the number change in congregations.
Remember congregations are a sum of all wards and branches in a country.
We see a more nuanced picture looking at congregation changes. Let me point out a few things…
Russia is Yellow actually losing 1 congregation between 2023 and 2024 (though you can’t tell in this chart). The membership growth in Russia was actually over 300% going from 5101 members in 2023 to 18132 in 2024. Not sure what is going on there (unless someone knows something I don’t). Seems like some sort of church data error. (Just to be sure, I manually verified my scraped data using the Wayback Machine and sure enough my scraper was correct. Those were the numbers listed on the Church website.)
Brazil lost a net of 76 wards or branches which is far and above any country lost. Interestingly, Brazil had a positive 2% Year over Year increase in membership. To me this indicates a major church restructuring in Brazil in 2024.
We also see larger negative congregation changes in the US, Australia, and New Zealand.
To get a better image of whether country gained or lost congregations, I created the categorical plot below.
Chart edited 5:55pm May 8th, 2025. I made a small error in the original chart where countries that had gained one congregation were coded as no change when they should have been coded as “Increase.“ This bug is now fixed in the chart above and the code I link below.
Europe seems like a mixed bag in recent years. Some countries increasing and others decreasing and staying the same. For example, Spain and Portugal had healthier numbers this last year than the US. They both gained 2 congregations and Spain increased in membership by +4% compared with the +0.89% increase in the US. However, looking at other countries in Europe like the the UK, Germany, and Italy, they all lost congregations.
Not sure if this means anything but, I do notice that the US and countries most similar to the US (UK, Australia, New Zealand) had some of the worst numbers worldwide in 2024. Perhaps there was something culturally or otherwise that caused a systematic decline in these countries. This is purely a conjecture. Would be interested in others thoughts on this. Notably, Canada (another country similar to the US) did not follow this trend.
I created a ranking system using congregation change and percent change in membership to rank the top 10 and bottom 10 countries for growth in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Like we observed above, we see strong growth in many countries specifically in Africa. Some Africa countries are starting with lower member baselines, but Nigeria and D.R. Congo already had over 100,000 members, so these represent significant increases!
There were 2 countries measured that had both negative percent change in members and lost congregations: Ukraine and Japan. Ukraine likely because more people emigrating. Japan could be a mixture of low performance and low birth rates.
Japan and Taiwan low growth rates may not be as surprising as the low growth rates in Guatemala and El Salvador. Growth was more common in Central and South America decades previously. Things have largely flattened in these regions or show a slower pace.
Conclusions
Most all countries saw a positive year over year change in members - particularly in Southern African countries.
We perhaps see some evidence of emigration in some Eastern European countries as membership has declined in Ukraine and a few countries surrounding.
The US and countries most similar to the US (UK, Australia, and New Zealand) saw some of the largest declines in congregations and reported very slow or no growth. Though, Canada is not included in this list.
Pushing against the narrative - some European countries (Spain + Portugal) saw more growth and healthier numbers than the US.
Also, in recent years, we have seen some stagnating numbers in central and South America - 2 countries made the bottom 10 list! Growth in these regions isn't like it once was.
Thanks for following along. Let me know if you have any thoughts, comments, or otherwise in the comments below. Is there anything I missed in these charts? See you next week where we talk in a similar fashion about US states!
Code available here. Data repository available here which was scraped on Monday April 28th 2025 from here.