Official LDS Numbers Prospective: Is The Church Growing?
Looking at the data released in the official audit report at General Conference
Introduction
A sensitive topic of interest to many latter-day saints and ex-LDS is growth figures in the church. This week and next week I will post different perspectives from two different data sources to try and answer this question: Is the LDS church growing?
Data
For this week, we are looking at the official numbers of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Every April General Conference, the church releases numbers from the audit report that are read over the pulpit. Looking online, I found a source that has compiled these numbers over the years. Feel free to look at this source and explore; they have a lot of interesting graphs and data joined in.
Charts
First, let’s take a peak at the overall growth since the year 1900.
As we can see, there are strong trends of growth that appear exponential-like for a significant part of the time period. In the last few years, we see some deviation from the previous growth almost as if a bell-curve is beginning to form. But, overall, looking at a long period of time over 100 years, there is strong, consistent membership growth.
When we look specifically at the rate of change - though more volatile early on - the rate of change seemed to increase up until the early 1980s. From this point, it steadily decreased which could suggest eventual decrease in church membership…
Another way we can look at this is growth of wards and branches and looking at the rate of change of wards and branches.
Wards steadily increase, but there seemed to be a shift around the late 1990s where things slowed down. Since then, the rate of change has never really recovered. This is more clearly seen in the figure below.
For these data, the church only starting releasing wards and branches in 1973. Early on, they released wards and branches separately, but since 1990 have released just one number totaling wards and branches. It would indeed be nice to see this separately as branches have fewer members than wards, but we do not have this.
As the subtitle highlights, remember the rate of change is still positive - just not as high as it was in the past.
Caveats & Things to Remember
As church growth continues, large percent changes in growth will be harder to achieve because it represents a lot more people. For example, a 10% increase when there are 100 members is just 10 more members, but when you have 15 million members that number is a lot higher.
Also, we must remember that fewer people are identifying with religion, at least in the US (more mormons live in the US than other countries). So many other churches and denominations have a negative rate of change (see below), but the LDS church maintains the positive rate of change. Coincidentally, this rise in “no religion“ Americans movement started around the time the LDS rate of change began to decrease.
Another thing remember is how church membership is defined. Many people are on Church records who do not identify as Mormons, but do not actively remove their church records. This means that church numbers are inflated with these individuals who no longer associate with the church, but are too lazy or do not even know to remove their records.
Discussion
What caused the decrease in the rate of change in church growth? Is this something that will continue or is it just part of the typical ebb and flow?