Linear growth in church membership

[Physics Guy]

According to the numbers listed in the Wikipedia article on Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints membership history, the church's membership numbers have been growing linearly for nearly thirty years. Any spreadsheet can reproduce this bar chart I made from the data given there, with a straight trend line added.

I'm not trying to talk about whether the church is growing a lot or a little. I'd like to discuss the apparent fact that it has been growing by remarkably close to the same absolute number of people each year for nearly thirty years.

The growth each year has by no means been strictly constant. It has been higher in some years and lower in others. But from the late 1980s to the present the annual membership increase has bounced around about 300,000 or so per year. In all this time there has been no discernible trend for the number added each year to steadily grow or decrease. During these three decades the world population has increased by about 50% and church membership has more than doubled. Nonetheless the rate of church membership growth—in absolute numbers of people—has not appreciably changed.

All the discussions that I've seen of membership number changes for religious denominations have been in terms of percentage growth rates. In the present case those percentage growth rates have been slowly falling, from consistently over 4% in the late 1980s to consistently below 2% in the past few years. In fact this slow decline in percentage growth rates is just an awkward way to express the simpler numerical fact that the growth rate as an absolute number, rather than a percentage has been steady—so steady, in fact, that a single straight line seems to clip the top of almost every bar in the bar chart. 300K more people per year was 5% when the church numbered six million; today the same 300K people per year would be under 2% of the current sixteen million members. So the growth in percentage has been falling, but the absolute growth has been amazingly steady.

The steadiness of absolute growth really is amazing. That's what I'd like to discuss, because I don't understand it.

There are good reasons why growth (or decline) of denominational numbers is usually discussed in terms of percentages, because most of the reasons for membership change are factors that scale with the current number of members. The number of births in any year will be higher if there are more member parents. The number of deaths will be higher if there are more older members. The number of converts will presumably be higher if there are more missionaries, and there will be more missionaries if there are more young adult members.

If more members are born or converted than leave or die, then this should lead in the next few years to even more children being born and more missionaries teaching, in a self-amplifying cycle that makes membership take off exponentially: growing by a steady percentage each year. Or if there are more deaths and departures than births and conversions, then in the following years there should be steadily fewer and fewer births and conversions, so that membership shrinks by a percentage each year. There are a lot of competing factors, but they all tend to amplify with the number of members.

It would take an amazing fluke for the losses and gains to balance exactly, year after year, and leave the number of church members constant. We don't see such an extreme fluke in this case. But we do see quite a large apparent fluke, in that it's so close to the same number of members gained every year, year after year, even though the total number of members has more than doubled. There has been no discernible trend over thirty years for the growth to self-amplify.

Do LDS families today have exactly 40% as many children as they used to have thirty years ago when LDS membership was 40% as large as it now is? Are missionaries now exactly 40% as effective as they used to be then? Why the exact cancellation? It's not just a coincidence in the statistics of a couple of years. It's been thirty years that all the self-reinforcing factors have apparently been cancelling each other out almost exactly.

It's hard to think how this could have happened.

One hypothesis is that the reported numbers are all bogus: for thirty years the numbers have been fudged to avoid ever admitting that one year was too much worse than last year, but nobody has dared to fudge as far as exponential growth, so the average fake growth has been steady.

Another hypothesis is that neither proselytizing nor childbirth by average members actually produces new members reliably, but that new members are essentially all generated by some other activity whose scale has not changed with the size of the church. What that activity might be is not clear. Perhaps it's enrollment at BYU. Perhaps it's sending missionaries to previously uncontacted areas, as opposed to regions that have already heard the message.

Even if most membership growth is due to some previously unidentified activity that has not itself grown with church numbers, it still seems weird to me that growth hasn't been made exponential just from childbirth. In a world of naturally exponential factors, how can growth stay so linear for so long? Church membership growth seems to have hit a terminal velocity thirty years ago. Why on earth has that happened?

I repeat that I am not trying to make any point about whether the growth is large or small. Nobody can say the church is shrinking, and on the other hand nobody is claiming that it's growing by explosive leaps and bounds. I'm a skeptic myself, and not a church member, but I'm not trying to make anti-Mormon hay out of linear growth. I'm just curious now about what's going on. Long-term linear growth just seems weird.

[CAS]

This is what I think and by no means am I certain that I am correct. IMO the reason for high growth, steady growth and for lack of growth or even negative growth has to do with opposition. The more we are opposed the more we grow (except extreme opposition of the murdering kind), the less we are opposed growth declines and can decline greatly. This does not mean I want to encourage opposition, I hate it. There has been no year (that I know of) when growth was over 10% since the 1850s and a few years in the early 1800s numbers actually went down. As the church stabilized (got a permanent  home) and opposition went down (acceptance as here-to-stay), numbers also went down, but not to the point where the church was not growing. Since you are not a member of the church I recommend that you join and help increase our numbers. When I joined the Church in 1974 I was told that the more work you did on behalf of the church's missionary efforts the more you would find yourself in difficult circumstances and direct opposition. I have been a missionary thrice and I have experienced this opposition, it is quite surprising (since I was not harming anyone), but the work went on and was always successful. People come out of the woodwork and you are guided to them, it is one of the most wonderful and spiritual things I have ever experienced.

[katherine the great]

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." -Benjamin Disraeli

 

Edited February 17, 2019 by katherine the great
autocorrect

[CAS]

1 hour ago, katherine the great said:

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statics." -Benjamin Disraeli

 

Statistics.  There is also deflection, obfuscation, emotional rhetoric, and really big lies.

[Robert F. Smith]

6 hours ago, Physics Guy said:

According to the numbers listed in the Wikipedia article on Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints membership history, the church's membership numbers have been growing linearly for nearly thirty years. Any spreadsheet can reproduce this bar chart I made from the data given there, with a straight trend line added.

I'm not trying to talk about whether the church is growing a lot or a little. I'd like to discuss the apparent fact that it has been growing by remarkably close to the same absolute number of people each year for nearly thirty years.

........................................

Even if most membership growth is due to some previously unidentified activity that has not itself grown with church numbers, it still seems weird to me that growth hasn't been made exponential just from childbirth. In a world of naturally exponential factors, how can growth stay so linear for so long? Church membership growth seems to have hit a terminal velocity thirty years ago. Why on earth has that happened?

I repeat that I am not trying to make any point about whether the growth is large or small. Nobody can say the church is shrinking, and on the other hand nobody is claiming that it's growing by explosive leaps and bounds. I'm a skeptic myself, and not a church member, but I'm not trying to make anti-Mormon hay out of linear growth. I'm just curious now about what's going on. Long-term linear growth just seems weird........................................................

We have discussions about statistical growth from time to time on this board.  Perhaps you could make some sense of additional stats:

 http://www.churchistrue.com/blog/lds-membership-statistics-report-2017/ .

http://www.mormondialogue.org/topic/68838-church-measures-and-treands/ .

 

 

[Thinking]

8 hours ago, Physics Guy said:

I'd like to discuss the apparent fact that it has been growing by remarkably close to the same absolute number of people each year for nearly thirty years. 

The growth each year has by no means been strictly constant. It has been higher in some years and lower in others.

Why the exact cancellation?

The mean growth for the 31 years (1987 to 2017) is about 321,000 and the standard deviation is about 67,000. That's hardly remarkably close to the same absolute number of people each year for nearly thirty years.

Create a bar graph using yearly growth instead of total membership and you see what I mean.

[stemelbow]

The church hasn’t added 300,000 people to its roles since 2012–the year of the attempted missionary surge.  On top of that the number is declining as we move o forward.  These have been some really fascinating years—these in the past decade.  I do not think the church will recover to where it was.  It is likely declining in influence as more people seem to be disappearing in various parts of the world from its pews.  The overall number goes up each year but there are so few, relatively speaking, of those who maintain participation that it’s hard to qualify or quantify or even justify a claim of growth.  

[MustardSeed]

It is my understanding *****no cfr here****that religion in general is losing its appeal. 

At youth conference one of the speakers mentioned a trip to Europe and how sparse the attendance was in cathedrals and how most of not all attendees were elderly.  ***no cfr 

To me, sad. 

Edited February 17, 2019 by MustardSeed

[LoudmouthMormon]

9 hours ago, Thinking said:

Create a bar graph using yearly growth instead of total membership and you see what I mean.

The cited wiki article does that in several different ways, and sort of reinforces PG's data -  barring the occasional outlier, since 1987, we've seen remarkably uniform steadiness.  Similar absolute numbers, decreasing percentages.

 

 

Cool observation PhysicsGuy - I don't know what's happening either.

[Navidad]

My understanding from researching confusing data here in Mexico is that once a baby is blessed or given a new name, he or she is added to the rolls of church membership, more or less eight years before baptism. Is that true?

[Physics Guy]

10 hours ago, Thinking said:

The mean growth for the 31 years (1987 to 2017) is about 321,000 and the standard deviation is about 67,000. That's hardly remarkably close to the same absolute number of people each year for nearly thirty years.

As I said:

19 hours ago, Physics Guy said:

The growth each year has by no means been strictly constant. It has been higher in some years and lower in others.

The point is still:

Quote

But from the late 1980s to the present the annual membership increase has bounced around about 300,000 or so per year. In all this time there has been no discernible trend for the number added each year to steadily grow or decrease.

The year-to-year fluctuations in membership gain have been like day-to-day weather. In any season there are warmer and cooler days. The change from one day to the next can be quite large, especially in Spring or Fall. Over weeks and months, though, slow but large trends are quite clear. What counted for a rare warm day in early Spring becomes a typical day in late Spring, and by early Summer days like that are unusually cool. By the middle of Summer days that cold never happen. Day-to-day temperatures still vary, regardless of season, but the average around which the days vary? It steadily shifts as the seasons advance.

In the case of church membership there has been year-to-year weather—good years and bad. There do not seem to have been any seasons. It is not the case that a good year from the 1990s resembles an average year from the 2000's and a bad year from the 2010's, like warm days as Spring becomes Summer. On the contrary, good years from all three decades have all been much alike; bad years from all three decades have been much alike; and average years from all three decades have been much alike. The average annual gain has held amazingly steady. There has been no climate change.

At least, perhaps until recently. The last few years may have finally seen a break in the trend as annual gain falls below 300,000 and stays there. We'll see; but whether that's happening or not is not the topic I intended to raise. I'm curious why the growth stayed so season-less for about thirty years.

[Physics Guy]

18 hours ago, CAS said:

IMO the reason for high growth, steady growth and for lack of growth or even negative growth has to do with opposition. The more we are opposed the more we grow ...

Back in the day, meaning early CE, they used to say the blood of martyrs was the seed of the church. I'm not sure opposition is really the best fuel for growth, but the general point is a plausible one, that there exist feedback mechanisms that actively respond to the rate of church growth.

Perhaps whenever growth rises, mockery increases in reaction and makes growth fall again, while whenever growth falls, society lays off the church, and it grows more the next year. Or perhaps when growth falls there are more sermons preached about evangelism, leading to more growth, while complacency sets in when growth rises and makes growth fall back again.

It would still be surprising to me if stabilizing tendencies like those had really managed to keep growth so steady over a period in which so much else has changed. A certain inertia is one thing, but linear growth over thirty years seems like a step beyond that.

Edited February 17, 2019 by Physics Guy

[Robert F. Smith]

10 hours ago, stemelbow said:

The church hasn’t added 300,000 people to its roles since 2012–the year of the attempted missionary surge.  On top of that the number is declining as we move o forward.  These have been some really fascinating years—these in the past decade.  I do not think the church will recover to where it was.  It is likely declining in influence as more people seem to be disappearing in various parts of the world from its pews.  The overall number goes up each year but there are so few, relatively speaking, of those who maintain participation that it’s hard to qualify or quantify or even justify a claim of growth.  

I would like to see some hard evidence for those assertions, with separate figures for each area or nation.  I am well aware of stasis in some areas, and rapid growth in others.  We also must be able to distinguish loss of members in one area, but growth in areas to which those "lost" members moved.  If declining participation is real, I would like to see those figures arranged by area and by age.  We have had some discussions of this in the recent past.  Is it to those discussions that you refer?  If so, please cite them.

Your own personal experience in your area/stake/ward is of interest.  Are young people drifting away in large numbers (what is the percentage?) in your area of concern?  To what do you attribute that tendency, if it actually exists?

[bluebell]

2 hours ago, Navidad said:

My understanding from researching confusing data here in Mexico is that once a baby is blessed or given a new name, he or she is added to the rolls of church membership, more or less eight years before baptism. Is that true?

They exist as a Child of Record but they are not counted as a member.

[Robert F. Smith]

4 hours ago, MustardSeed said:

It is my understanding *****no cfr here****that religion in general is losing its appeal. 

At youth conference one of the speakers mentioned a trip to Europe and how sparse the attendance was in cathedrals and how most of not all attendees were elderly.  ***no cfr 

To me, sad. 

Correct.  England, Ireland, and Western Europe generally have been moving into a secular funk or torpor.  My bro-in-law was Pres of a mission in Germany in the early 2000s and found very little interest in religion among the Germans.  However, his missionaries were able to make converts among the mainland Chinese students studying in German universities.  Once baptized and endowed, they returned to China and baptized their own families, and got married in the Hong Kong Temple.

[CAS]

2 hours ago, Physics Guy said:

Back in the day, meaning early CE, they used to say the blood of martyrs was the seed of the church. I'm not sure opposition is really the best fuel for growth, but the general point is a plausible one, that there exist feedback mechanisms that actively respond to the rate of church growth.

Perhaps whenever growth rises, mockery increases in reaction and makes growth fall again, while whenever growth falls, society lays off the church, and it grows more the next year. Or perhaps when growth falls there are more sermons preached about evangelism, leading to more growth, while complacency sets in when growth rises and makes growth fall back again.

It would still be surprising to me if stabilizing tendencies like those had really managed to keep growth so steady over a period in which so much else has changed. A certain inertia is one thing, but linear growth over thirty years seems like a step beyond that.

Personally what I noticed when I was being a missionary was that there was this awareness of the Church at times and less of an awareness at other times. Some people joined the Church after getting curious about something negative they heard or because a friend they always liked turned out to be a member (etcetera). The awareness caused by negative voices, in my experience through my personal lens, has always helped the Church grow. But, I could be misperceiving, it could be that any type of awareness helps the Church grow or that only certain types help it grow and other types stunt growth.

[ALarson]

8 minutes ago, CAS said:

The awareness caused by negative voices, in my experience through my personal lens, has always helped the Church grow. 

Maybe that was once true, but IMO, it is definitely not the case now.   The age of the internet and the information available there regarding some of the difficult details from church history and past doctrines, have hurt missionary work and also caused once some active members to stop attending.  That's been my observation.  

[Physics Guy]

16 hours ago, Robert F. Smith said:

We have discussions about statistical growth from time to time on this board.  Perhaps you could make some sense of additional stats:

http://www.churchistrue.com/blog/lds-membership-statistics-report-2017/ .

http://www.mormondialogue.org/topic/68838-church-measures-and-treands/ .

That first link is the site where I first noticed this linear trend. People on boards and blogs were talking about percentage growth rates but to me the linear pattern jumped out big. It didn't actually make sense to talk about percentages when the behavior was so non-exponential. I forgot where I'd seen those charts, though, so I reconstructed my own from the Wikipedia numbers. Thanks for reminding me.

The thread about missionary effectiveness was also interesting but I have no insights to add to it.

Edited February 17, 2019 by Physics Guy

[Hamba Tuhan]

2 hours ago, CAS said:

The awareness caused by negative voices, in my experience through my personal lens, has always helped the Church grow. But, I could be misperceiving, it could be that any type of awareness helps the Church grow or that only certain types help it grow and other types stunt growth.

We had a senior couple in my mission whose previous mission had been at the Hill Cumorah Visitors Centre. They said a local man would hand out photocopied tracts across the street from the entry each day, warning people away from what they would be told once in the centre. One day, no visitors in the centre seemed interested at all, and nothing the missionaries said could change that. When this senior couple left for lunch, they noticed that the local 'anti' was missing. I can't remember if he was gone for just a day or maybe a few more, but he came back, and immediately interest amongst visitors picked up. The senior missionary couple asked him where he'd been, and he said he'd run out of money to make more photocopies. They then told him that if that ever happened again, to let them know, and they'd pay for his tracts since they were an essential part of their work in the visitors centre. They said he hadn't enjoyed hearing that!

[JAHS]

The annual world growth rate has been slowing down since 1960(red) and is projected to continue to decrease in years to come(blue)
I am sure this is and will also have some small effect on church growth rate.

[Gray]

4 hours ago, bluebell said:

They exist as a Child of Record but they are not counted as a member.

Children of record are counted as members. They are only removed if not baptized.

You can see them counted in the annual stats:

https://www.lds.org/church/news/2017-statistical-report-for-2018-april-general-conference?lang=eng

https://www.mormonnewsroom.org/article/2016-statistical-report-2017-april-conference

Edited February 18, 2019 by Gray

[Robert F. Smith]

2 hours ago, JAHS said:

The annual world growth rate has been slowing down since 1960(red) and is projected to continue to decrease in years to come(blue)
I am sure this is and will also have some small effect on church growth rate............................

There is a difference between growth and the growth rate.

Quote

Until the time of Napoleon, there were less than 1 billion people on Earth at any one time. Since the Second World War, we have been adding a billion people to the global population every 12-15 years. Our population is more than double today what it was in 1970...................

Every two years, the United Nations makes projections for future population growth. In 2017, its main, "median" projection was a population of 9.8bn in 2050 and 11.2bn in 2100. Because many factors affect population growth, it makes a range of projections depending on different assumptions. Within its 95% certainty range, the difference in population in 2100 from the highest to lowest projection is almost 4bn people - more than half the population we have today.  https://populationmatters.org/the-facts/the-numbers?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI64ug46bE4AIVA1cNCh0KcAdREAAYASAAEgIllvD_BwE .

Take a look at the charts in the above citation.

Edited February 18, 2019 by Robert F. Smith

[Tacenda]

3 hours ago, Hamba Tuhan said:

We had a senior couple in my mission whose previous mission had been at the Hill Cumorah Visitors Centre. They said a local man would hand out photocopied tracts across the street from the entry each day, warning people away from what they would be told once in the centre. One day, no visitors in the centre seemed interested at all, and nothing the missionaries said could change that. When this senior couple left for lunch, they noticed that the local 'anti' was missing. I can't remember if he was gone for just a day or maybe a few more, but he came back, and immediately interest amongst visitors picked up. The senior missionary couple asked him where he'd been, and he said he'd run out of money to make more photocopies. They then told him that if that ever happened again, to let them know, and they'd pay for his tracts since they were an essential part of their work in the visitors centre. They said he hadn't enjoyed hearing that!

I can this happening. When I've been to Nauvoo and the Manti Pageant's they were the biggest turnoff, and they made you feel sorry for the LDS and regard them as the underdog and endeared you to them.

[JAHS]

9 minutes ago, Robert F. Smith said:

There is a difference between growth and the growth rate.

Yes I know that. It's still an indication that population growth will eventually slow down as well, as indicated in this projected population rate and growth graph.

[Calm]

There is a lot that can change in 80 years affecting growth rates and absolute population.

I wonder how accurate in prediction growth charts were in 1940.