Jump to content
Seriously No Politics ×

Linear growth in church membership


Recommended Posts

21 hours ago, Physics Guy said:

That the data is fake is one hypothesis. It's an obvious possibility in principle. I make no claim that it's necessarily true. In fact I'd bet a coffee that the data is genuine, but not a beer. That's my level of confidence. I think it could well be fake, but probably isn't.

Anyway, "hypothesis" is all I've said here about the fake possibility. Perhaps you are recalling my posts on another board a few months ago, when I was more inclined to believe the data couldn't be genuine. I've thought more about this point since, and what I've posted here has been different accordingly. I think you should read more carefully before misrepresenting someone's posts in such strong terms.

Whether real or fake, the data is linear growth, and it's weird. If the data isn't fake, then something strange has been going on with church growth—for thirty years. This is my statement.

I'd agree that it is weird.  What I can say is rates of growth in various areas of the membership has decreased over the past 20 years.  That is, for instance, the rate of children of record (COR) has decreased.  There are far less children being added, as a percentage of the whole, these days than there were 20 years ago.  Are births coming at a lower rate?  It seems so, but it also suggests there are tons of members on the rolls having kids and those kids aren't getting added to the membership--that number of families having kids and not having those kids added, seems to be increasing.   It is suggestive of younger people leaving at a higher rate than they used to.  

overall increase coincides with the number of converts.  You mention the 300,000 increase, well the number of converts has been a little lower but close to 300,000 over the past couple of decades as well.  

Over the past half decade the thing that has leveled each other out is the number of COR and the number of people who either decease, get ex'd, or have their names removed (DENr).  So you add the number of COR, converts and the previous year's membership and then subtract the number of reported members the current year, and you get the number of DENr.  the first reliable year that could be calculated, based on what the Church has been willing to provide, was 2000.  In 2000 that number was incredibly low considering possible death rates alone.  That number, though, if calculated each year, based on what the Church does provide, has increased 165% since 2000.  Now the number represents something not far below an estimated death rate.  That is the DENr for 2017 is 104,748 but the death rate calculated based on world death rate (which is similar to the death rate for the US and seems a reasonable figure) would be 129,000.  So either DENr as calculated does not include anything but deaths, and the death rate for Mormons is incredibly low, or there is something else going into counting members.  Yet, as the Church has revealed, the Church holds onto members on the rolls until that member is or would be 110, unless the church is notified that person had died already.  Fewf! confusing mouth full if you ask me.  This may mean, the Church does not expunge members who get excommunicated, nor does it remove those who request their names to be removed.  It could also be that the Church refuses to expunge all members from the rolls after death.  Or it could mean by virtue of members being members they outlive everyone to incredibly high ages.  

Truly the problem with the claim that the Church is growing is in the numbers that are reported. 

1.  Most members on the rolls don't go to Church, perhaps many of them don't think of themselves as members in any sense. 

2. When families have children those children don't get added, because there's no record created for these little ones.  

3. The # of converts is basically the same as the # of increase in the membership from year to year.  Convert rates have decreased for 30 years which has resulted in the overall growth being linear.  

Link to comment
1 hour ago, JulieM said:

That has not at all been my experience and I’ve known many go through a faith crisis (and a few who left but not over obedience).  I know several who are struggling now but not with disobedience.

Im interested in seeing your response about polygamy and polyandry.  How are members misinterpreting what they are reading (including info in the essays)?  How about you put your theory into providing some examples of relating to what some members are actually experiencing?

 

I guess you have different experiences than I do. As far as polygamy, etcetera, it is a non-issue IMO.

Link to comment
1 hour ago, ALarson said:

Not at all (kind of an odd response).

How about you respond to my questions?  I'd be interested to see some specific thoughts from you regarding what you believe members are misinterpreting on those topics.

How about you ask them?

Link to comment
Just now, CAS said:

How about you ask them?

I'm not the one making that claim.  You are the one who is claiming that members are misinterpreting the information that is on the internet.   So, how about you give some specific examples?  Otherwise, it's difficult to even know what you are accusing members of doing.

What are they misinterpreting regarding online information they are reading about how Joseph practiced polygamy and polyandry?

Link to comment
16 minutes ago, CAS said:

As far as polygamy, etcetera, it is a non-issue IMO.

Maybe for you, but your accusation was against members who are leaving.

I know you’re new here, but you’ll learn you can’t come on and make definite claims (for example about EVERY member who has left the church) and then not back that claim up with some examples.

So what are these members not interpreting correctly about what is a big issue for many who first read about it?  (Polygamy and polyandry).

Edited by JulieM
Link to comment
19 hours ago, CAS said:

You have your opinion, I have mine. Saying that my statement is not true because you have a differing opinion is what is not true. I find your rhetoric unkind and lacking in leadership skill. My opinion is based on over 44 years, adult years-I was 19 when I joined, of watching people come into the church and go out of the church. If your opinion is more valid than that or if you have some facts to prove my statement untrue I welcome the info. Otherwise, as I said, you are not very kind and I suppose you wish to make me overreact, that is immature.

EVERY person that I have watched leave the church had issues before they left. Then something came along that they took hold of and used to justify their departure. EVERY one of them. I have never seen a person leave the church under conditions different than that (I am not talking about people who merely become inactive or less-active). The issue could have been that they based their testimony on someone else's testimony, or, they THOUGHT they felt something at different times, or they THOUGHT the church could be proven by logic and reason rather than by faith and interaction with the Almighty. ECETERA. EVERY person I have read about and studied in church history had a similar type of pre-existing issue or at least there is evidence that they did, on many occasions this is borne out in the D&C when a particular person is corrected and then later they apostatize. My opinion is thus based on fact and could very well be true that they had a weak testimony or no testimony of the fact that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is the legitimate church. Am I saying it is true in every case, no, I am saying that it is based on MY observation. I am certain that some of them go deeper and that they are actually evil and have chosen evil over good. But, I think that is actually quite rare. Now you can belabor this all you want and pick apart various points of what I state, but I am not trying to make a perfect statement, this is just my opinion please don't say that it is not true unless you can back that up with insurmountable facts that prove it never happens.

I'm guessing EVERY person that you have watched leave the Church would likely say you are misrepresenting them when you tell others the whys and hows of their departures. No offense, but my experience says that in most cases members who feel the need to explain for others why they have left, have no clue what those who they claim to speak for think and feel.  

Link to comment
On 2/17/2019 at 9:58 AM, Physics Guy said:

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.

I am not going to present a bunch of statistics but will offer a few observations, which I think partially account for the trend you are observing. 

When I first joined the Church more than 40 years ago, I think the Church was on a parabolic growth pattern for reasons you note here:

On 2/16/2019 at 2:08 PM, 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.

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.

***

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.

Had societal trends not changed, we would no doubt have seen a continuing parabolic pattern. But, society did change at about the time you note the parabolic growth pattern ended, and the Church entered a linear pattern. The Church was able to gain some converts from disillusioned Christians from other sects, but unfortunately, most just left Christianity altogether to increasing ranks of agnostics and atheists. When I joined the Church in my area it had little presence. Over the next decade it continued to grow, and add new ward buildings and stakes, but I don't think that trend has continued so much since then. Growth in the U.S. has slowed dramatically. However, growth in some areas of the world has continued in a parabolic fashion, so these two areas have tended to offset one another. Growth in my current area continues. I just got booted out of my ward building, and my ward was moved to our stake center because it is designed to be able to house 4 wards - this points to a new ward building being needed in my area soon.  I have watched ward buildings continue to pop up in the local towns because they are growing. In some areas of the United States, growth has not been as expected. 

One of the societal trends was the advent of the internet, which changed how people learn. It made anti-Church ideas and presentations much more accessible and prominent. I believe this too slowed the growth of the Church - at least in N. America. However, as compared to other Christian sects in N. America which entered a stage of decline, the Church has at least been able to continue growth. This is because LDS Christians are family oriented and dedicated to having children when much of America has decided to have no more than two, and growth has only been maintained through immigration. The second reason is that the American education system has changed. It has become much more liberal, and has presented challenges to Christian thought and values. Old sources of converts have dried up. Europe has become largely agnostic or atheistic. The last three decades have seen the utter secularization of Europe, and converts have dropped there as well, when once it was a fertile ground for new Church membership. This trend has only been offset because the Church has continued missionary efforts in N. America and Europe to win over disaffected Christians to the truths of the restored gospel. Even sects such as the Seventh Day Adventists which have similar growth patterns to the Church, have suffered in growth in the U.S. So rather than the expected parabolic growth, the trend has flattened out.

Quote

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.

The Church is definitely not shrinking, but most of the growth has shifted to other foreign countries. The Church has definitely noticed the trend, and I think that was part of the impetus behind making female missionary callings more available. Yet, as you note, the absolute numbers of growth have not changed much despite the increased missionary efforts. Without those increased efforts, I believe you would see more of a downward trend. It is now taking more missionaries to gain the same number of converts, which translates to fewer converts per missionary, and I think some increasing challenges in the missionary field. So what you are seeing is not some "fluke" but a result of increasing efforts of the Church to counteract societal trends which have been occurring over the last three decades. Nevertheless, rest assured the Church is not making up the numbers. The Church continues to grow - even if at a somewhat slower clip. It is just increasing efforts to offset societal trends  and keep the numbers from dropping lower, which is why I think you see the curve flattening into a linear line - at least it hasn't become a negative growth curve like elsewhere. New temples continue to be announced, and the restored gospel continues to penetrate into the far reaches of the globe. These are all encouraging, and I think prophesied. The Lord knew the Church would spread throughout the world, but remain small in numbers until the time of the New Jerusalem. 

1 Nephi 14:12

12 And it came to pass that I beheld the church of the Lamb of God, and its numbers were afew, because of the wickedness and abominations of the whore who sat upon many waters; nevertheless, I beheld that the church of the Lamb, who were the saints of God, were also upon ball the face of the earth; and their dominions upon the face of the earth were small, because of the wickedness of the great whore whom I saw.

Edited by RevTestament
Link to comment
32 minutes ago, stemelbow said:

I'm guessing EVERY person that you have watched leave the Church would likely say you are misrepresenting them when you tell others the whys and hows of their departures. No offense, but my experience says that in most cases members who feel the need to explain for others why they have left, have no clue what those who they claim to speak for think and feel.  

I think it’s possible that CAS has just made the wrong assumptions and unfair judgements against those who have left like many others have done (and still do).  This will be an opportunity for him to really discuss it here with some who have gone through it and learn how wrong the old accusations are of EVERY member who leaves does so to sin, or has read and believed anti Mormon literature or are just weak.  He is so wrong about that.

Edited by JulieM
Link to comment
2 hours ago, LoudmouthMormon said:

Just because I like charts so much, here's a random chart on a random tangent.  You're reading correctly - for a couple years there, the church excommunicated more than it baptized.

2018297408_baptismsvsexcommunications.JPG.46494a113e6183d7678c782ef54f7c47.JPG

You have charted evidence of the reformation of the mid-fifties. It was a time of judgement, house cleaning, and calling the folks to repentance. Things were pretty strident in those mid-fifties under Jedediah Grant, George A. Smith and others. That there were more excommunications than baptisms during those years doesn't surprise me.

Link to comment
3 hours ago, stemelbow said:

 

Over the past half decade the thing that has leveled each other out is the number of COR and the number of people who either decease, get ex'd, or have their names removed (DENr).  So you add the number of COR, converts and the previous year's membership and then subtract the number of reported members the current year, and you get the number of DENr.  the first reliable year that could be calculated, based on what the Church has been willing to provide, was 2000.  In 2000 that number was incredibly low considering possible death rates alone.  That number, though, if calculated each year, based on what the Church does provide, has increased 165% since 2000.  Now the number represents something not far below an estimated death rate.  That is the DENr for 2017 is 104,748 but the death rate calculated based on world death rate (which is similar to the death rate for the US and seems a reasonable figure) would be 129,000.  So either DENr as calculated does not include anything but deaths, and the death rate for Mormons is incredibly low, or there is something else going into counting members.  Yet, as the Church has revealed, the Church holds onto members on the rolls until that member is or would be 110, unless the church is notified that person had died already.  Fewf! confusing mouth full if you ask me.  This may mean, the Church does not expunge members who get excommunicated, nor does it remove those who request their names to be removed.  It could also be that the Church refuses to expunge all members from the rolls after death.  Or it could mean by virtue of members being members they outlive everyone to incredibly high ages.  

 

In response to the your statement that I bolded:

Do we know when the church started keeping all missing-in-action (MIA) members of the roles until 110?  Is it possible that the age used to be lower, but then a change was made during that period?  If the policy on keeping MIA members on the roles changed to 110 from a lower age (say 95), then we would expect that there would be a lower reported "death rate" of MIA church members for 15 years.  

I know I"m preaching to the choir, but I wish the church would give more information on membership counting.  It can be difficult to tell what is happening when we can't see the whole picture.  

Link to comment
8 hours ago, Physics Guy said:

Interesting. I didn't know that about the US population, but it's true. The growth hasn't been a perfectly straight line over the past century-plus, but it has had several very straight sections that each lasted decades, and even overall it has been pretty close to straight. It definitely hasn't been exponential.

That's kind of weird, too; but one thing makes it easier to understand...

One more idea. The following graph shows the growth of the U.S. population by age cohort.

US-Population-by-Age.jpg

Each area shows the total population for a cohort--ages 0-4, 5-9, 10-14, and so forth. As you can see, the total number of people under the age of 20 has reached a steady state. However, the total population is continuing to rise. This is partly due to immigration (the gradual increase in people from 20-59), but is mainly being driven by people living longer (the relatively steep increase of people in the 60+ cohort).

Perhaps there is a similar trend in Mormonism? If most of the growth in the Church is in the 60+ cohort and the inactive cohort, the church would maintain its ability to keep growing (at a rate of 300,000 per year), but wouldn't be increasing its ability to grow faster--i.e. would be experiencing nominal linear growth rather than exponential.

 

Link to comment

Saw this on another board. Wow, I feel bad for the person who wrote the article, and how devastated they must be about these forecasted numbers not coming about.

https://www.lds.org/study/ensign/1993/08/news-of-the-church/church-notes-1992-growth?lang=eng

Church Notes 1992 Growth

Worldwide membership of the Church totaled 8.4 million as of 1 January 1993. That figure represents an increase of 317,000 or 3.9 percent during 1992. Officials now estimate current membership at more than 8.5 million and climbing.

Worldwide, someone joins the Church every minute and 55 seconds, said W. Larry Elkington, manager of the Church’s Management Information Center.

Organized in 1830, the Church created the 500th stake in 1970, the 1,000th stake in 1979, and the 1,500th stake in 1984. The 2,000th stake could be organized before the end of this year. Of the 1919 stakes at the first of the year, eighty-two were formed in 1992.

“Thirty years ago, 90 percent of Church members lived in the United States and Canada,” Brother Elkington said. “That percentage continues to shrink annually. The percentage was down to 73 percent in 1980, 67 percent in 1985, and 57 percent in 1990. Today it is at 54 percent.”

There are now more than 1.5 million members of the Church in South America. Since 1980, membership in Brazil has risen from 99,000 to more than 400,000. Church membership in the Philippines has gone from 43,000 to more than 280,000, added Brother Elkington.

In addition to the United States, which has more than 4.4 million members, nine other countries have more than 100,000 members. Thirty-eight countries have at least 10,000 members.

The ratio of Church members in the national populations varies widely, from a low of less than .1 per thousand in several countries to more than 330 per thousand in Tonga. In eight countries, at least 1 percent of the population are members of the LDS Church.

If growth rates for the past decade remain constant, membership will increase to 12 million by the year 2000, to 35 million by 2020, and to 157 million by the mid-twenty-first century.

There are approximately 48,000 full-time missionaries teaching in 69 languages, serving in 110 nations throughout the world. The Church had 295 missions in May 1993.

States with the highest number of Latter-day Saints are Utah, 1,363,000; California, 721,000; Idaho, 303,000; Arizona, 244,000; Washington, 194,000; Texas, 158,000; Oregon, 115,000; and Nevada, 112,000.

In the state of Utah, the percentage of residents who are members of the Church is the greatest in the following counties: Rich, 98.6 percent; Sanpete, 91.6; Morgan, 90.9; Utah, 89.9; Millard, 89.2; Sevier, 87.3; Wayne, 86.1; Juab, 85.7; Cache, 85.5; and Garfield, 85.5. The percentage in Salt Lake County is 64.3, with the overall state average at 71.8 percent.

Link to comment
21 minutes ago, Tacenda said:

Saw this on another board. Wow, I feel bad for the person who wrote the article, and how devastated they must be about these forecasted numbers not coming about.

https://www.lds.org/study/ensign/1993/08/news-of-the-church/church-notes-1992-growth?lang=eng

Church Notes 1992 Growth

Worldwide membership of the Church totaled 8.4 million as of 1 January 1993. That figure represents an increase of 317,000 or 3.9 percent during 1992. Officials now estimate current membership at more than 8.5 million and climbing.

Worldwide, someone joins the Church every minute and 55 seconds, said W. Larry Elkington, manager of the Church’s Management Information Center.

Organized in 1830, the Church created the 500th stake in 1970, the 1,000th stake in 1979, and the 1,500th stake in 1984. The 2,000th stake could be organized before the end of this year. Of the 1919 stakes at the first of the year, eighty-two were formed in 1992.

“Thirty years ago, 90 percent of Church members lived in the United States and Canada,” Brother Elkington said. “That percentage continues to shrink annually. The percentage was down to 73 percent in 1980, 67 percent in 1985, and 57 percent in 1990. Today it is at 54 percent.”

There are now more than 1.5 million members of the Church in South America. Since 1980, membership in Brazil has risen from 99,000 to more than 400,000. Church membership in the Philippines has gone from 43,000 to more than 280,000, added Brother Elkington.

In addition to the United States, which has more than 4.4 million members, nine other countries have more than 100,000 members. Thirty-eight countries have at least 10,000 members.

The ratio of Church members in the national populations varies widely, from a low of less than .1 per thousand in several countries to more than 330 per thousand in Tonga. In eight countries, at least 1 percent of the population are members of the LDS Church.

If growth rates for the past decade remain constant, membership will increase to 12 million by the year 2000, to 35 million by 2020, and to 157 million by the mid-twenty-first century.

There are approximately 48,000 full-time missionaries teaching in 69 languages, serving in 110 nations throughout the world. The Church had 295 missions in May 1993.

States with the highest number of Latter-day Saints are Utah, 1,363,000; California, 721,000; Idaho, 303,000; Arizona, 244,000; Washington, 194,000; Texas, 158,000; Oregon, 115,000; and Nevada, 112,000.

In the state of Utah, the percentage of residents who are members of the Church is the greatest in the following counties: Rich, 98.6 percent; Sanpete, 91.6; Morgan, 90.9; Utah, 89.9; Millard, 89.2; Sevier, 87.3; Wayne, 86.1; Juab, 85.7; Cache, 85.5; and Garfield, 85.5. The percentage in Salt Lake County is 64.3, with the overall state average at 71.8 percent.

Wow.  Did they figure that correctly?  

Edited by ALarson
Link to comment
6 hours ago, changed said:

Looks like doctored data to me.  

That was my first reaction as well, when I first saw the bar charts on churchistrue's website. I had second thoughts, though, when I saw a separate chart of just the annual increase, rather than the cumulative total. The annual increase bounces around a steady average, but it bounces around a fair bit. If someone were doctoring the numbers, you would think they'd be avoiding the kind of embarrassingly large year-over-year drops that do sometimes show up in the data. 

Someone did suggest to me a refinement of the "fake data" hypothesis, in which the faking was being done at low level, independently for each ward or stake or whatever, rather than by someone in central headquarters massaging the big picture. If there were a general tendency for low-level reporters to break a run of disappointing years by bumping up their reported numbers, but if the low-level reporters were not coordinating with each other, then that might produce a noisy pattern with a floor, like what we see.

This hypothesis is not really a conspiracy theory, because it assumes that all these low-level fakers are acting independently, but it does have the weakness of a big conspiracy theory: with so many people involved, it's hard to believe that nobody would ever have blown the whistle over all these years.

So I'm inclined to believe the data are basically real. The steadiness of the linear growth might perhaps have been artificially increased by some reporting bias.

Link to comment
6 hours ago, Analytics said:

If most of the growth in the Church is in the 60+ cohort and the inactive cohort, the church would maintain its ability to keep growing (at a rate of 300,000 per year), but wouldn't be increasing its ability to grow faster--i.e. would be experiencing nominal linear growth rather than exponential.

I'd be surprised if conversion rates were especially high among seniors, but I guess that's just because I think of religious conversion as a thing for young people. I imagine that most sixty-year-olds have already settled on a religious outlook. I'm still in my 50s myself, so I don't really know that—but I'm not so far off that I have no idea. I guess I also figure that by age sixty a person will have lived through a lot of news cycles about religious frauds, and this makes it easier to dismiss Mormon claims about Joseph Smith.

So if the church's 60+ cohort is growing, I'm guessing that it's mostly growing by existing church members aging into it.

If my naive expectation is true, however, and only young people convert, then the stability of younger cohorts in the general population would help explain linear growth in the church. The total US population may have grown a lot in the past thirty years, but perhaps the critical demographic slice of impressionable young people has not grown in this time. (It's hard to see from that colored chart, because its yellow cohort stops at 19 and its blue cohort extends to 39, while I would guess that the critical cohort for conversion would be the 20s.) If conversions only come from this critical cohort, then that would help explain why conversions have held a steady pace.

Link to comment
13 hours ago, Analytics said:

One more idea. The following graph shows the growth of the U.S. population by age cohort.

US-Population-by-Age.jpg

Each area shows the total population for a cohort--ages 0-4, 5-9, 10-14, and so forth. As you can see, the total number of people under the age of 20 has reached a steady state. However, the total population is continuing to rise. This is partly due to immigration (the gradual increase in people from 20-59), but is mainly being driven by people living longer (the relatively steep increase of people in the 60+ cohort).

Perhaps there is a similar trend in Mormonism? If most of the growth in the Church is in the 60+ cohort and the inactive cohort, the church would maintain its ability to keep growing (at a rate of 300,000 per year), but wouldn't be increasing its ability to grow faster--i.e. would be experiencing nominal linear growth rather than exponential.

 

Let's look at just the royal blue 0-4. 

1. I bet it's not truly linear, even though it appears linear to the eye. There are probably micro trends up and down and an overall trend that is something different than perfect linear. But again, let's get past that and agree that it is "linear like".

2. The explanation for why this data is "linear like"is probably something very similar to why church membership data is "linear like". The growth rate has slowed over that time period in a way that roughly correlates to linear absolute growth. ie in 1950 there were less adults but they had more babies than today. For example if at beginning of a data set, the total is 100 and growth is 10%, then raw growth is 10. At the end of the data set, the total has grown to 200 over time but the growth has slowed to 5%, so the raw growth is still 10. If during the time period of the data set, growth adjusts down smoothly from 10% to 5%, the annual raw growth will be about 10 every year, ie linear.

It would be extremely random for any dataset that's undergoing this trend, ie decreasing growth, to perfectly line up so that the data is linear. The real trend is going to be a curve, it's just that the curve is flat enough to "appear" linear with your eyes on a chart, especially when charted a certain way (ie bars on the total--not the increments). 

 

 

 

Link to comment
9 hours ago, Exiled said:

I wonder if anyone has tried to quantify the growth in the availability of church information on the internet vs. the slowing growth in converts, etc.  The two seem to be correlated. 

20 years ago in 1997 the Church added 3.16% to its membership through conversions.  That rate went fairly quickly down to 2% in 2003, stuck around there  for a few more years.  in 2009 it started dropping and has since.  We're at 1.45% in 2017.  I don't know how to tie that explicitly with the availability of church information on the internet, but I will say by 1997 internet was pretty broadly available in America.  

 

Year Converts/Members
1997 3.16%
1998 2.89%
1999 2.85%
2000 2.48%
2001 2.57%
2002 2.42%
2003 2.03%
2004 1.97%
2005 1.94%
2006 2.12%
2007 2.12%
2008 1.97%
2009 2.03%
2010 1.93%
2011 1.95%
2012 1.84%
2013 1.88%
2014 1.93%
2015 1.65%
2016 1.51%
2017 1.45%
Edited by stemelbow
Link to comment

PS Analytics and PhysicsGuy I partially apologize for being aggressive with dissing on your analysis. This area is my core competency in my career, so I'm too prideful to fully apologize. I got clouded in my review of this due to a) the accusation that is so linear that the data looks fake and b) the visual of tall bar charts with little incremental change as evidence (eyes can't determine that). Also, I made a mistake by at one point in this by confusing the delta for the delta of the delta when discussing whether or not the dataset is linear.  Anyway, I do agree now that the data is "linear like" over the time period in question.

Edited by churchistrue
Link to comment

OK, one more post on this. Here's the chart of just the increments. I included a few more years at the beginning of the data set to show the trend of what I think is the proper way to view this. This is classic data set of slowing growth. If the slowing over time is gradual enough, the curve will be stretched out and appear flat or linear at the peak of this curve, which is what we have in the time period late 80's up to a couple years ago.  

membership-growth.jpg

 

Here's the chart on growth as %. 

 

growth2.jpg

Link to comment
1 hour ago, stemelbow said:

20 years ago in 1997 the Church added 3.16% to its membership through conversions.  That rate went fairly quickly down to 2% in 2003, stuck around there  for a few more years.  in 2009 it started dropping and has since.  We're at 1.45% in 2017.  I don't know how to tie that explicitly with the availability of church information on the internet, but I will say by 1997 internet was pretty broadly available in America.  

 

Year Converts/Members
1997 3.16%
1998 2.89%
1999 2.85%
2000 2.48%
2001 2.57%
2002 2.42%
2003 2.03%
2004 1.97%
2005 1.94%
2006 2.12%
2007 2.12%
2008 1.97%
2009 2.03%
2010 1.93%
2011 1.95%
2012 1.84%
2013 1.88%
2014 1.93%
2015 1.65%
2016 1.51%
2017 1.45%

I wonder if one could somehow count the number of bits of information of any and all sites that discussed the church on the internet, good and bad, from 1997 to the present? That is the way it would have to be done, I would think.

Link to comment

For the period about which I've been talking, roughly 1985-2015, I agree that the dotted arch fits the data about as well as a flat line does. I'd put that the other way around, though: the dotted arch is no better fit than a flat line. One can always fit data to more complicated curves, but this is only really meaningful when a modest increase in complexity of fitting provides a significant improvement in fit. I wouldn't say that's the case here. For this thirty-year period, a flat line fits as well as anything does, short of complicated functions that try to represent the 1989-90 peaks. To me that's what linear growth means in the noisy real world, where no long-term trends are free of short-term blips.

Another point is that one really has to look at both the annual changes and the cumulative absolute numbers. Large base membership of several millions makes annual variation in growth hard to see on the cumulative chart, but if you only look at annual change, you lose track of whether the change is adding to a base of millions, or of hundreds of millions. If a population of hundreds of millions were growing by 300,000 per year, then you couldn't say whether the growth was linear or exponential until you looked over centuries. When you know that the total number changed from six million to sixteen million over a time frame, however, then you know that exponential growth and linear growth would have to look totally different over that time frame.

To me the main point is that thinking in terms of percentage growth can blind one to what is really going on, because it artificially turns a simple situation (linear growth) into something more complicated (logarithmically falling percentage growth rate). This can get you looking in the wrong directions for explanations. One looks for things that have been changing over time to slow the growth rate down. If you focus on linear growth, on the other hand, then that says that growth is actually being determined by something that has NOT been changing. So one looks for factors that have remained constant, which might be playing a stronger role in church growth than one thought.

For example there is Analytics's suggestion that the sizes of younger age cohorts have been staying constant for quite a long time now, with population only growing in older ages. If the US population in the 20's age range has been staying constant, and if the church membership within that age range has also been staying constant, then this suggests that church growth has stayed flat simply because church growth is all about young people. If that were the real explanation, then one might decide to feel fine about flat growth, instead of being disturbed by falling growth, and stop looking for ways to boost missionary effectiveness. Or, if one did want to boost growth, one might look for ways to attract more older people, instead of trying to squeeze more young converts out of the non-growing pool.

I don't know whether that explanation about growth being all about youth will really hold up under closer examination, but it's an example of the different kind of explanation one finds when one thinks in terms of linear growth instead of percentages. 

Edited by Physics Guy
Link to comment
Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...