Revisit Of Loomis'S Growth Predictions 10-Years Later

[noel00]

Oh brother... Xander - the scholar of all things Mormonism has conveniently forgotten the raising of the bar for missionaries and the effort to improve the quality over quantity of teaching.

My son experienced this first hand as he worked hard to prepare himself to be worthy of a mission. He was well received by the Filipino people and convert baptisms and member reactivation was in full swing. I'm sure this experience is repeated world wide as people either join the LDS church or at least learn more about the Gospel as missionaries teach and serve.

Now that my son is completing his Army training he sees his mission as a foundation of his faith experience that is now being built upon.

Mr. Graham and his family will not experience this great blessing as he has made the choice to leave the Church and take his descendants with him. All he is left with is mocking and straining to find the least little flaw or imperfection and expand upon it as though it is the ultimate fate of all Mormons.

KevinG.

You said your son served a mission in the Phil. On Cumorah.com has these figures for SDA and LDS

SDA Total adherants 1607714 active members 803857

LDS 594655 148663

A lot of churches in their theological colleges offer degrees in intercultural studies (use to be called Missiology) where one studies sociology., urban studies , theology etc before being sent on a mission which usually is for a much longer period than 2 years.Would an LDS church use its church on a Sunday night to set up a large screen to watch the football finals. A lot of Pentecostal churches do this and their members invite their nonchristian friends along. Also frankly the music in LDS churches does not appeal to young people. I watch the Wesley Mission in Sydney have its Easter sunrise service on TV. Many of the people were young people, many of Asian origin and Asians who were born here.While I find some of the preaching at Hillsong not what i prefer, that church is growing and has annex churchs in London, Kiev, Paris.

[Analytics]

Analytics,

Your overall membership prediction for 2011 was pretty close to the truth, but I wouldn’t be congratulating myself too much if I were you. It seems like a fluke to me. Some of what I’m saying here is a reaction to the uncritical reception your article got from the Tribune and some web sites several years ago.

First, it’s worth pointing out that your paper was simply a conference presentation, and had no peer review. You did not publish your paper in an academic venue. I don’t think any sociological journal would have accepted it for publication. It’s a stretch to call this an ‘academic response to Stark.’

I agree that it isn't good enough to be published as-is, which is why I never submitted it to a journal. But it is certainly a response to Stark, and being invited to present it at an academic conference must make it academic in some way.

Stark’s analysis was pretty simplistic, and I’m not too impressed with it either. Your model is only more sophisticated in that it uses a decaying growth rate instead of a constant growth rate. But your prediction for 2011 is about half-way between Stark’s low value and his high value. So his point estimate for 2011 would have been about the same as yours.

I totally agree that my growth model is quite simplistic, but that isn't the main point of the paper. The main point was to analyze the nature of exponential growth and whether Stark's assumption that exponential growth was continuing was warranted. My growth model is not intended to be anything other than a simplistic growth model that is consistent with my arguments that the growth rate is slowing down.

Your decaying growth rate analysis focused on a small (and apparently carefully selected) period of time in the growth of the church (1979-2001) during which growth rates displayed the downward trend you wanted. As you can see from the attached graph, church growth rates over the past century have fluctuated, with short- and long-term stochastic patterns up and down. You completely ignored these patterns by focusing on your favorite 22-year time-period.

Carefully selected on the basis that it was the most recent. Note that the last 32 years of data now support my views. But that's only part of the paper's argument. The bigger point is an analysis of the nature of exponential growth. Over the last 32-years, full-time missionary productivity has gone down, member-missionary productivity has gone down, the percentage of members serving missions has gone down, and the ratio of new "members of record" to total membership has gone down.

Clearly, something is going on more than the ebbs and flows of demographics.

Your model also completely ignored the dynamic age structure of the church – which is changing dramatically as (for example) baby boomers mature. You didn’t even consider age structure when you discussed ‘drivers of church growth’.

That is a fair point. I wish I would have had the data needed to incorporate that into my analysis, but I didn't. This is one of the main reasons I lost interest in the project, by the way.

Your graph ‘growth of children in church’ is amusing, and not just because of the title. You act as if stochastic drift in birth rates somehow reflects badly on the church.

Now you are just being defensive. I'm not attacking the church here--I'm attacking the notion that it is growing exponentially.

In your footnotes, you said that you adjusted your regressions for autocorrelation, but I don’t really think you did. At least not the 22-year series of growth rates.

That footnote is in reference to the following sentence:

"Running this regression on data from years 1860 to 1999, the result of this is Alpha = 0.0262 an Beta = 5.78." I assure you that I did in fact adjust this regression for autocorrelation just as I said. I never said nor implied I did so on the 22-year series of growth rates.

For future reference, if you are going to make implications about somebody’s honesty, it’s always a good idea to be sure to carefully read what it is you are critiquing.

Hence there is much more uncertainty than you are willing to admit. A more sophisticated analysis is needed.

Just out of curiosity, how much uncertainty do you think I am willing to admit?

I established that as-of 2001, the church’s exponential growth had been decaying for a couple of decades. I suggested that there weren’t any clear reasons to think that the decaying growth was temporary, and provided a simple growth model that reflected continued decay.

Over the subsequent 10 years, the decay continued.

Certainly, ARIMA models are more sophisticated and make better projections of year-to-year growth over the short term. And of course if somebody has detailed demographical data, they can make much more sophisticated forecasts. Competing with such models wasn’t the point of the paper.

My argument was to explore whether or not the euphoria everybody had in 2000 about over 280 million Mormons in 2080 was warranted. Do you think it was?

Edited April 9, 2012 by Analytics

[Analytics]

The unexpected response to this thread by BYU Statistics Professor Bruce Schaalje inspired me to take a second look at what’s going on here and give a more detailed response.

Dr. Schaalje said,

Your prediction for 2011 is about half-way between Stark’s low value and his high value. So his point estimate for 2011 would have been about the same as yours.

Your decaying growth rate analysis focused on a small (and apparently carefully selected) period of time in the growth of the church (1979-2001) during which growth rates displayed the downward trend you wanted. As you can see from the attached graph, church growth rates over the past century have fluctuated, with short- and long-term stochastic patterns up and down. You completely ignored these patterns by focusing on your favorite 22-year time-period.

Could you clarify your point? Are you suggesting that the steady decline in the growth rate that we’ve observed for the past 30+ years is not indicative of a long-term trend, but rather is best explained by autocorrelation, short- and long-term stochastic patterns, and/or dynamic age structure?

I think it's a long-term trend. My main point is that just because the church has followed distinct growth patterns in the past doesn’t mean that it’s going to follow the same patterns in the future. The objective here is to predict the future, not use sophisticated models to simplistically extrapolate whatever has happened in the past. Sure, I could have made my model as arbitrarily sophisticated as I wanted to, but that doesn’t necessarily make its predictive power any better.

More specifically, to understand my forecast you need to understand why I take issue with Stark’s forecast. First, absolutely nothing in the real world grows exponentially forever—it just can’t happen. That being the case, Dr. Stark’s was making a huge, huge, assumption that the long-term trend of the church’s growth will be exponential for the next 100 years, even within the wide range of 30% to 50% per decade. Likewise, I find your insinuation to be terribly naïve that the last 100 years of growth necessarily has bearing on the next 100 years of growth.

The main thrust of my paper was to examine what forces and conditions cause and allow exponential growth to take place, and the LDS Church’s growth was essentially a case-study. My analysis made me believe the continued exponential growth of the church was dubious. I didn’t choose 1979 as the beginning date because that date gave me the results that I wanted. I chose it because that is when the growth began to slow down.

The things you suggest my model needs (autocorrelation, incorporation of long-term and short-term stochastic patterns, dynamic age structure) would all distract from the underlying point of the paper—exponential growth must end, and there are multiple reasons to believe that the 30-50% exponential growth that the church enjoyed in the past wouldn’t continue for another 80 years.

Pointing out that Stark’s point-estimate is in line with mine is being obtuse. Sure, Stark’s wide forecast puts the church in the 10,000,000 to 16,000,0000 range by 2011, and it is in fact in that range. But his strongest assumption on his 100-year forecast is continued exponential growth. The last 30 years of data have corroborated my main point—even though the total membership is in Stark’s wide range, the growth rate has continued to go down. For 9 years in a row, the growth rate has been below the lower-bound of Stark’s range, and is still decreasing. For the past 30 years, the church has not grown exponentially.

The fact that you missed the main point and criticize the paper for things like autocorrelation and lack of dynamic age structure illustrates that the paper has real scholastic merit and certainly would have deserved publication after some refinement.

[Xander]

For the record, that sharp spike in Roger's graph had nothing to do with actual Church growth that year. Ten years ago I was doing my own apologetic response to Dr. Shades (with the help of FAIR's Jan Anderson) and I contacted the church to see if they could explain the huge increase in membership in 1989. They explained that this was the year when the Church began automating their record keeping, which involved migrating all their paper and microfiche based records to digital. The process cleared up past mistakes and the result was a sharp increase in overall members on record.

Now back to Roger...

[Bruce Schaalje]

I agree that it isn't good enough to be published as-is, which is why I never submitted it to a journal. But it is certainly a response to Stark, and being invited to present it at an academic conference must make it academic in some way.

Yes, it is academic in some way. It’s not your fault, but I’m still put off by the way it was treated by the Tribune (and others) which took the article for more than it was. The results were far too preliminary to lead to musings about what the church should do now that this paper had supposedly established that the growth rate of the church is systematically decaying.

I totally agree that my growth model is quite simplistic, but that isn't the main point of the paper. The main point was to analyze the nature of exponential growth and whether Stark's assumption that exponential growth was continuing was warranted. My growth model is not intended to be anything other than a simplistic growth model that is consistent with my arguments that the growth rate is slowing down.

I know, but a simplistic model can be dangerous. It might not properly characterize the dynamics and randomness of the situation. If you had left your analysis at simply that, glomming all the random dynamics of church growth into a simplistic decaying growth rate, I would be fine with what you did. But you proceeded to draw conclusions about what the church is doing a good job at and what it is doing a bad job at. These are not conclusions that are derivable from your simplistic model.

Carefully selected on the basis that it was the most recent. Note that the last 32 years of data now support my views. But that's only part of the paper's argument. The bigger point is an analysis of the nature of exponential growth. Over the last 32-years, full-time missionary productivity has gone down, member-missionary productivity has gone down, the percentage of members serving missions has gone down, and the ratio of new "members of record" to total membership has gone down.

Clearly, something is going on more than the ebbs and flows of demographics.

I don’t think that is so clear. Your model was selectively based on an ebb in the process, and the possibility of a flow was denied for no apparent reason. Dramatic ebbs and flows have occurred previously in the last century.

I really don’t see why your model was based only on the 1979-2001 data. They were the most recent values, but so what? The growth of the church had specific unique dynamics during that period: the revelation on the priesthood and the subsequent explosion of membership in Africa, the demise of the Soviet Union, the temporary reduction in the missionary force due to 1.5 year missions. As an actuary you must be acutely aware that the effect of the baby boomer generation is uniquely larger than normal “ebbs and flows of demographics.”

And I’m not so sure that your figures for missionary productivity are correct. Do you have references for those? I would like to see such figures for the US and Canada over the last 32 years. Because international growth was so erratic during that period, US and Canadian growth rates would seem to be more indicative of the productivity conclusions you want to draw.

Now you are just being defensive. I'm not attacking the church here--I'm attacking the notion that it is growing exponentially.

Apologies for being rude. What I meant is that your graph suggests that birth rates were inconsistent with any kind of exponential growth, regardless of the exponential growth parameter. You seemed to have chosen the highest possible growth rate as a standard so that the church, in some weird way, would look bad. But the yearly growth rate of the church has never been constant.

For future reference, if you are going to make implications about somebody’s honesty, it’s always a good idea to be sure to carefully read what it is you are critiquing.

Sorry about the implication of dishonesty. However, I do think you should consider the implications of autocorrelation in the 22-year series of growth rates.

Just out of curiosity, how much uncertainty do you think I am willing to admit?

Not enough. Your model implies that the worldwide growth rate of the church is systematically decaying at a fixed rate, with only small independent deviations from the trend each year. You predict it to do so through 2080. A spatially and temporally heterogeneous organization like the church, with growth subject to random international economics and other events (sometimes of huge magnitude) is just not like that.

I established that as-of 2001, the church’s exponential growth had been decaying for a couple of decades. I suggested that there weren’t any clear reasons to think that the decaying growth was temporary, and provided a simple growth model that reflected continued decay.

I guess that’s the crux of our disagreement. I believe that there are reasons to believe that the decay is due in large part to demographic, political and economic factors. The growth rate has decreased previously and it has increased previously.

In spite of a decreasing birth rate in the US and Canada, the church has grown consistently in these countries. This can only be due to an increased conversion rate.

Certainly, ARIMA models are more sophisticated and make better projections of year-to-year growth over the short term. And of course if somebody has detailed demographical data, they can make much more sophisticated forecasts. Competing with such models wasn’t the point of the paper.

My argument was to explore whether or not the euphoria everybody had in 2000 about over 280 million Mormons in 2080 was warranted. Do you think it was?

If that was not the point of your paper, then why all the noise about missionary productivity, member effectiveness, parental failure, etc.? I can accept your simplistic model as a crude description of the overall pattern, but it does not have the sophistication to warrant your advice. If you had simply concluded that the church has exhibited an overall decline in growth rate worldwide, and that it may be due to a variety of unspecified forces hidden in the crude parameters of the model, I would have been fine. I feel the same way about your model as I do about Stark’s crude prediction – the euphoria about that model was no more warranted than the negative gloating associated with your model.

Edited April 10, 2012 by Bruce Schaalje

[Analytics]

Hi Bruce,

I want to thank you for taking the time to respond--this is a good conversation. I’ll try to just focus on your main points.

First of all, are you sure that it was covered by the Tribune? I hadn’t heard.

I do agree that the paper should have emphasized that my forecast was just an example of a simplistic decaying growth model. I’m quite willing to stand by that approach as being superior to continual exponential growth, but the limitations should have been emphasized, as well as the significant ways it could have been enhanced.

Regarding my choice of using 1979-2001 data, every time period has its own unique dynamics. I agree in principle that it’s possible that the slowdown we saw during that period was due to some temporary fluctuation, the reversal of which could have been predicted. From the limited data I had available, I didn’t see how that was the case, and I made the judgement call that that the slowdown was indicative of larger trends.

Regarding missionary productivity, according to General Conference reports, consider the following:

Year Converts Missionaries Converts/Missionaries

1980 221,000 29,953 7.4

1990 330,877 43,651 7.6

2000 273,973 60,784 4.5

2011 281,312 55,410 5.1

<<If anybody has any tips to entering tables, I'd greatly appreciate it.>>

I guess that’s the crux of our disagreement. I believe that there are reasons to believe that the decay is due in large part to demographic, political and economic factors. The growth rate has decreased previously and it has increased previously.

In spite of a decreasing birth rate in the US and Canada, the church has grown consistently in these countries. This can only be due to an increased conversion rate.

A decrease in the mortality rate is another possible explanation.

I’m not claiming that demographic, political, and economic factors aren’t in play with what we’ve seen over the last 30 years. Rather, I’m simply forecasting that such forces will continue to lower the growth rate.

I would take the same approach with forecasting the growth of anything, by the way. Say a small company grows into a mid-sized company. At that point should you project that the same growth rate will propel it into the Fortune 500 and then to the top of the Fortune 100? No. Continued exponential growth is the very rare exception, not the rule.

If that was not the point of your paper, then why all the noise about missionary productivity, member effectiveness, parental failure, etc.?

The point has to do with looking at the nature of exponential growth. An average pioneer-stock Mormon will have a certain number of kids, a certain percentage of which will go on missions, etc. Will a convert in Chile have the same number of kids, and send the same number on missions? If not, that in and of itself is a reason to doubt exponential growth.

Lower birth rates and lower conversion rates are just measures of the same decreasing growth rate.

Edited April 10, 2012 by Analytics

[Xander]

US and Canadian growth rates would seem to be more indicative of the productivity conclusions you want to draw.

OK, let's do that. According to Cumorah.com, which is managed by LDS researcher David Stewart: "The U.S. LDS growth rate reported for the decade of 1990-2000 was 19%, or 1.76% per year, compounded: a respectable figure in an industrialized nation with a low birth rate, but hardly a dynamic one."

Apparently, growth rates in the USA are no better than the Church's global growth rate.

In spite of a decreasing birth rate in the US and Canada, the church has grown consistently in these countries. This can only be due to an increased conversion rate.

Do you have any hard data to support this theory?

Are you saying there is a decreasing birth rate among Mormons in North America? Not from where I'm sitting.

Based on Almanac numbers, the number of LDS children of record (worldwide) fluctuated between 69,000 and 94,000 during the decade of 1997-2007, but that number has increased dramatically to 120,000 in each of the past three years.

Edited April 10, 2012 by Xander

[Robert F. Smith]

I oppose (at least implicitly) all organized efforts to promote belief in things that I don't believe are true.

I believe that the nontrivial supernatural beliefs of Mormonism are false and I am of the opinion that believing them doesn't on the whole help people or society.

OK? Why is that creepy?

The thing is, the late Sterling McMurrin, who also did not believe in the "nontrivial supernatural beliefs of Mormonism," thought that the Mormon culture was nonetheless very admirable and a positive influence in society -- and said so on many occasions.

[Bruce Schaalje]

I have a graph I want to show here, but I can't figure out how. How do you do it?

Bruce

[wenglund]

I have a graph I want to show here, but I can't figure out how. How do you do it?

Bruce

I can suggest a several step process:

First, convert the graph to an image formate/file such as like jpg.

Second, upload the image file to an image hosting site like tinypic.com

Third, copy the relevant URL for the file and paste it into your post on this thread.

Thanks, -Wade Englund-

[Okrahomer]

Do you have any hard data to support this theory?

Are you saying there is a decreasing birth rate among Mormons in North America? Not from where I'm sitting.

Based on Almanac numbers, the number of LDS children of record (worldwide) fluctuated between 69,000 and 94,000 during the decade of 1997-2007, but that number has increased dramatically to 120,000 in each of the past three years.

This is the 2^nd time you have made this assertion; however, the fact that you limit your view to a single decade seems to make Professor Schaalje’s point rather nicely. There are “ebb’s and flow’s” in all of these numbers. Since you mentioned “children of record”, please note the graph above:

Note: there was no report either of Blessings or "New children of record" from 1988 - 1996

Edited April 10, 2012 by Okrahomer

[Bruce Schaalje]

http://tinypic.com/r/1z2myj8/5

I can't tell if the graph actually is here. But if it is, this shows the longer-term pattern (1900 to 2011) for the overall yearly growth rate for the church. I think it illustrates clearly why I am hesitant to accept the pattern for 1979 to 2011 as the permanent trend in growth rate until 2080.

[Scott Lloyd]

http://tinypic.com/r/1z2myj8/5

I can't tell if the graph actually is here. But if it is, this shows the longer-term pattern (1900 to 2011) for the overall yearly growth rate for the church. I think it illustrates clearly why I am hesitant to accept the pattern for 1979 to 2011 as the permanent trend in growth rate until 2080.

Never mind.

I was trying to figure out a way to help Bruce get the graphic into his post, but I couldn't make it work. And I now see that Wade evidently has a better handle on this than I do.

Edited April 10, 2012 by Scott Lloyd

[wenglund]

http://tinypic.com/r/1z2myj8/5

I can't tell if the graph actually is here. But if it is, this shows the longer-term pattern (1900 to 2011) for the overall yearly growth rate for the church. I think it illustrates clearly why I am hesitant to accept the pattern for 1979 to 2011 as the permanent trend in growth rate until 2080.

Bruce,

I should have mentioned this, but to get the graph to show in your post, the URL for the image needs to be enclosed within image brackets (click on the "Image" button on your post editor and paste the URL into the data field.

Either that, or just attach the image file on your computer to your post.

Thanks, -Wade Englund-

Edited April 10, 2012 by wenglund

[Bruce Schaalje]

The graph is atached.

[Analytics]

As many of you probably know, Russia is facing an existential crisis: its population is shrinking. This is caused primarily by a low birthrate, although a high mortality rate is also an important factor. The birthrate in Russia is only 11.8 (births per thousand—these numbers all come from the UN). That is even lower than China’s 11.9. The United States is doing a little better, coming in at 13.7.

Pretend the Church was a nation with a population equal to its membership count. Say the “new members of record” represented this nation’s births. If this new nation was added to the UN’s list of 199 other countries, the Church’s birth rate of 8.3 (120k births/14.4MM members * 1000) would come in 199^th place out of 200, with a birth rate lower than Japan’s (8.5), and slightly higher than that of Bosnia (8.2).

With a birthrate of 8.3 births per thousand, is the church growing exponentially?

Of course the birthrate of Mormons is really much greater than that of the Japanese. The real truth of the matter is that of the 14.4 million people on the church’s records, many are actually dead, and many more are so inactive that the children they had were not added as members of record. This significant baggage of non-participating members is a major reason why this nominal membership number we’re talking about isn’t going to grow exponentially for the next 70 years.

Edited April 10, 2012 by Analytics

[Analytics]

http://tinypic.com/r/1z2myj8/5

I can't tell if the graph actually is here. But if it is, this shows the longer-term pattern (1900 to 2011) for the overall yearly growth rate for the church. I think it illustrates clearly why I am hesitant to accept the pattern for 1979 to 2011 as the permanent trend in growth rate until 2080.

Thanks Bruce. I'm going to stick by my point--just because the growth rate has bounced around between 30% and 50% for the last 100 years doesn't mean that that is a likely forecast for the next 100 years.

Edited April 10, 2012 by Analytics

[Zakuska]

Really? So this was an Academic paper? Where was it published? Which organization backed it? How will it be used to better society?

JMS

Better yet. "Was it peer reviewed?"

[Analytics]

This is the 2^nd time you have made this assertion; however, the fact that you limit your view to a single decade seems to make Professor Schaalje’s point rather nicely. There are “ebb’s and flow’s” in all of these numbers. Since you mentioned “children of record”, please note the graph above:

Note: there was no report either of Blessings or "New children of record" from 1988 - 1996

This graph nicely illustrates that the church is growing nominally. But the real story here is the number of children blessed divided by the total membership. Over the course of this graph, the birthrate has gone from about 24 to 8.3. If the Church's 14.4 million members were all subject to the United States' mortality rate, the church would now be shrinking with only 120,000 new members of record.

[Jaybear]

Question for the statisticians.

What explain for the jump in children from 2007 to 2008-11?

When you have a broad population base of 13 to 14 million .... is that jump statistically possible, or does it reflect that a change in reporting methodology?

[Zakuska]

Question for the statisticians.

What explain for the jump in children from 2007 to 2008-11?

When you have a broad population base of 13 to 14 million .... is that jump statistically possible, or does it reflect that a change in reporting methodology?

Or perhaps a conference talk was given and the Bishops and home teachers got out and made it a point to focus on getting babies blessed in that period of time. I seem to remember the lessons reflecting such things.

[Analytics]

Question for the statisticians.

What explain for the jump in children from 2007 to 2008-11?

When you have a broad population base of 13 to 14 million .... is that jump statistically possible, or does it reflect that a change in reporting methodology?

It's interesting that from 75 to 87 the statistic changed smoothly, but then from 2003 to 2011 it's been quite choppy. It's not the increase per se that looks weird--it's that it increased and then has stayed almost level for three years.

From a pure statistics point of view, the number of new children of record would be the mean, plus or minus say, a thousand. Being steady at 90,000 and then suddenly jumping to 120,000 isn't random chance. Maybe 30,000 Mormon soldiers all got back from Iraq in 2007?

Edited April 10, 2012 by Analytics

[Bruce Schaalje]

Thanks Bruce. I'm going to stick by my point--just because the growth rate has bounced around between 30% and 50% for the last 100 years doesn't mean that that is a likely forecast for the next 100 years.

Do you mean between 2% and 6%?

Is there a mathematical reason why you are going to stick by your point? Or do you feel, from other nonmathematical considerations, that the church is approaching its worldwide carrying capacity? Obviously the church can't grow exponentially forever, but why do you think the current (relatively modest) decrease in growth rate is a permanent trend that started in 1979?

Attached (I still don't know how to make them show up here) are 2 interesting graphs. They are from a church growth projection commissioned by the church and BYU in 1957. The first shows the projected birth and death rates of the church, Utah and the USA from 1957 to 2000. I superimposed the actual USA and Utah birth rates in red and green. The projected death rates for Utah and the USA were dead on (so to speak).

The second shows the age distribution of the church and of the USA in 1957. I superimposed the age distribution of the USA in 2000.

Bruce

[Analytics]

Do you mean between 2% and 6%?

Essentially. 30% to 50% per decade is the way Stark represents this time period.

Is there a mathematical reason why you are going to stick by your point? Or do you feel, from other nonmathematical considerations, that the church is approaching its worldwide carrying capacity? Obviously the church can't grow exponentially forever, but why do you think the current (relatively modest) decrease in growth rate is a permanent trend that started in 1979?

My thinnking on this entails non-mathematical considerations. Lot's of things go into my reasoning here. First, the bigger something gets, the harder it gets to continue growing. Most organizations stop growing long before they reach an ultimate "carrying capacity." They just carve out their market share and settle down into it. I'd suggest that after 20 to 30 years of continual declining growth during a period of unremittingly intense missionary activity, the null hypothesis should be that the slowdown is a long-term trend--not a short-term blip.

An important thing to understand is that a large percentage of converts (perhaps over 50%?), are people who quickly become inactive and won't self-identify as members into the future, won't pay tithing, won't convert their friends and family, won't send their kids on missions, and won't even have their kids blessed in the church. In terms of strengthening the church, they are dead weight. So if 75% of all new members are converts, and perhaps a majority of converts fall into this category of being dead-weight, then a larger and larger percentage of the church is dead-weight, which makes it harder and harder to keep this nominal membership number growing exponentially.

So I'm certainly not saying anything like statistics prove that my forecast is correct within some confidence interval (although I can see how the way I came up with my forecast could look like I meant to imply something like that). My point is that if you look at what causes and allows for exponential growth, there are more reasons to think the church won't grow exponentially than to think that it will. Having established that, my forecast is just a judgement-based, simple extrapolation that is consistent with my anticipation of sub-exponential growth.

Attached (I still don't know how to make them show up here) are 2 interesting graphs. They are from a church growth projection commissioned by the church and BYU in 1957. The first shows the projected birth and death rates of the church, Utah and the USA from 1957 to 2000. I superimposed the actual USA and Utah birth rates in red and green. The projected death rates for Utah and the USA were dead on (so to speak).

The second shows the age distribution of the church and of the USA in 1957. I superimposed the age distribution of the USA in 2000.

Bruce

Those are interesting graphs. What would be cool is to get the membership of the church broken down by age, sex, country of residence, and level of church activity. Along with that, get information about conversion rates by country, and information about how likely members are to stay active (which is going to be a function of how long they've been members). Throw in some birth rates and death rates, and we could make a really cool forecast.

I'm guessing that the church has that information and that they have internal forecasts that incorporate it. I'd also presume that they have no interest in sharing it with a researcher like me, which takes me back to my simplistic projections that are consistent with the declining growth rate which I believe is likely to continue.

Edited April 11, 2012 by Analytics

[Xander]

This is the 2nd time you have made this assertion;

And it is an assertion supported by the available data. The fact is the birth rates have nearly doubled over the past decade, and I was always very clear that the past decade was the point of interest. Critics have been maintaining that the drop in conversion rates has occured over the past decade, primarily due to easier access to critical information about the Church. The Church has circumvented this problem to some extent by expanding mission efforts to countries where internet access it extremely limited. They've been shuffling the mission field a lot over the past twenty years, trying to find that "sweet spot" but the fact is the number of missions has decreased because of limited success in membership retention in these areas. There was the flood of missionaries into Eastern Europe in the 90's, and then the mass exodus once the Church realized how hard it was in that area. It can always expect increases in conversion rates by funneling more missionaries to countries like Mexico or Africa. But it also knows now that retention rates in these countries are ridiculously low.

however, the fact that you limit your view to a single decade seems to make Professor Schaalje’s point rather nicely.

It does no such thing. Schaalje hasn't even begun to support his point that I addressed. That LDS conversion rates must be going up. All indicators suggest the exact opposite. Notice that I also provided data from David Stewart that flies in the face of Schaalje's assumption, which is not data driven. All he has done really is point to decreased birth rates compared to the pre-1960 era, but so what? How does this change the fact that converts per missionary has dropped dramatically, as has the number of missionaries and now even the missions? These three categories are those that weigh on the question of conversion rates.

There are “ebb’s and flow’s” in all of these numbers. Since you mentioned “children of record”, please note the graph above:

You might want to take a look at this chart I created about ten years ago. Somehow it ended up on this website and someone has been updating the information.

So I'm fully aware of the data, but I do not see Schaalje making a good argument that conversion rates have been on the increase. The fact is the Church has been nothing short of dishonest in its annual Statistical Report, claiming that there are many more "millions" of people in the Church, than there really are. Back in 1997 I remember the Hinckley interviews prompted numerous media appearance by LDS PR spokespersons who claimed there were "10 million strong" at the time. In reality, there are no more "10 million strong" today than there were back in 1997.

Schaalje has been complaining that Roger's analysis wasn't academic enough for his taste, but he still cannot change the fact that Roger's predictions were dead on. So who cares if it was academic, when we know now that he was right in his projections? That means something.

Edited April 11, 2012 by Xander