L D S Membership Numbers

[canard78]

Did you get an answer yet?

LDS.org states:

Persons who are presumed dead. You may have temple ordinances performed for a person who is presumed dead after 10 years have passed since the time of the presumed death. This policy applies to (1) persons who are missing in action or lost at sea or who have been declared legally dead and (2) persons who disappeared under circumstances where death is apparent but no body has been recovered. In all other cases of missing persons, temple ordinances may not be performed until 110 years have passed from the time of the person’s birth.

https://www.lds.org/manual/members-guide-to-temple-and-family-history-work/chapter-7-providing-temple-ordinances?lang=eng

And a non-friendly site that I won't grace with a link says:

The LDS Church counts members until they are 110 years old. Members who are excommunicated or have their membership removed are still counted among the membership of the Church. Inactive members and those who have moved on to other Churches are also still counted among the membership.

I think they may be getting their lines crossed with the temple work requires age. Of maybe 110 is the age for taking 'lost sheep/no address' off the list. If so, that would explain the church's extraordinarily low death rate (last reported as 4/1000 compared to a Utah average of 7/1000 for example).

If that has been a long term policy then it wouldn't explain growth or activity rate changes but would give a slight overestimate on total membership.

[ERayR]

LDS.org states:

https://www.lds.org/...nances?lang=eng

And a non-friendly site that I won't grace with a link says:

I think they may be getting their lines crossed with the temple work requires age. Of maybe 110 is the age for taking 'lost sheep/no address' off the list. If so, that would explain the church's extraordinarily low death rate (last reported as 4/1000 compared to a Utah average of 7/1000 for example).

If that has been a long term policy then it wouldn't explain growth or activity rate changes but would give a slight overestimate on total membership.

Those references were to perform temple work and not for statistical purposes. These may be found in genealogical records and not membership records. Once a death date is entered they are no longer counted for statistical purposes. It would seem silly to count dead people in the membership and reduce attendance percentages.

Edited June 8, 2013 by ERayR

[omni]

Thanks for the CFR, (can't believe I'm saying that) because it keeps me on my toes. I'd read it from somewhere and can't remember where now. I have mentioned it on here, before fairly recently.

Okay, so I went to this site and on there they have a contact email available, so I asked them point blank and am now waiting for their official response. Thanks for keeping me honest ERayR!

Until then here is the site and the bolded is something to think about, I guess.

http://www.cumorah.com/index.php?target=contact_us

"Before 1984, the Church released a wider range of data regarding membership, including the number of deacons, teachers, priests, elders, and high priests, the number of living endowments performed, and demographic information, including birth and death rates. Although these statistics did not include data on church attendance, they offered insight into measures more specifically associated with member activity. After 1984, this ancillary data was dropped from annual reports."

I've heard the 110 year policy many times, in fact I didn't even realize it was in dispute. That being said, I've never read it on any official church website, of course I don't think that's something they would publish for the general public to see.

[canard78]

Those references were to perform temple work and not for statistical purposes. These may be found in genealogical records and not membership records. Once a death date is entered they are no longer counted for statistical purposes. It would seem silly to count dead people in the membership and reduce attendance percentages.

I wasn't disagreeing with you. I don't think a known dead person is counted. But of a member is inactive or no address they are counted as members until they are known to be dead. At some point a lost sheep would have to be 'presumed dead' and removed from the list. The age I've read for that is 110 on several sites, but none of them provide a source so I remain sceptical about this being the case and fairly ambivalent to it either way.

[Tacenda]

I wasn't disagreeing with you. I don't think a known dead person is counted. But of a member is inactive or no address they are counted as members until they are known to be dead. At some point a lost sheep would have to be 'presumed dead' and removed from the list. The age I've read for that is 110 on several sites, but none of them provide a source so I remain sceptical about this being the case and fairly ambivalent to it either way.

I'll let you know as soon as they reply:

[ERayR]

I wasn't disagreeing with you. I don't think a known dead person is counted. But of a member is inactive or no address they are counted as members until they are known to be dead. At some point a lost sheep would have to be 'presumed dead' and removed from the list. The age I've read for that is 110 on several sites, but none of them provide a source so I remain sceptical about this being the case and fairly ambivalent to it either way.

I was just noting for clarity that what was posted referred to genealogy not statistical and yes for lost members there would have to be a point where they would be declared dead.

Edited June 9, 2013 by ERayR

[Bikeemikey]

Is it posible to ask afew questions, request a few answers and suggest accountability without being called to repentance or accused of pot stirring?

Why is it such a sensitive touchy thing to ask simple. questions and accountibility of those in authority over you?

I thought you made it clear they were not in authority over you!

You can ask us to ask, but most of us don't care to ask; you demanding on our behalf is just obnoxious :-)

Edited June 9, 2013 by Bikeemikey

[ERayR]

I thought you made it clear they were not in authority over you!

You can ask us to ask, but most of us don't care to ask; you demanding on our behalf is just obnoxious :-)

I could only give one rep point but you deserve more for this answer. Isn't it nice how some are so concerned for our welfare and are not pot stirrers? Warms ones heart. That it does.

[thatjimguy]

Does anyone have numbers of active members> I know we must since we categorize people as inactive and keep records of it right?

How about TR holders?

[canard78]

Does anyone have numbers of active members> I know we must since we categorize people as inactive and keep records of it right?

How about TR holders?

We keep a record of Sacrament Attendance via the church reporting system (called 'MLS'). Each quarter it is reported to the church head office (with some reports more frequent).

TR holders would also be reported.

We do not however report an individual's activity rate. When the attendance is reported it is done at an overall level.

Also, we report a new member's individual progress for the first 2 (still?) years. This would include whether they attend church, have a calling, have had the new member lessons etc.

So yes, the church has a record of how many people 'participate' actively. But they choose to not report it for reasons best known to themselves.

[Storm Rider]

We keep a record of Sacrament Attendance via the church reporting system (called 'MLS'). Each quarter it is reported to the church head office (with some reports more frequent).

TR holders would also be reported.

We do not however report an individual's activity rate. When the attendance is reported it is done at an overall level.

Also, we report a new member's individual progress for the first 2 (still?) years. This would include whether they attend church, have a calling, have had the new member lessons etc.

So yes, the church has a record of how many people 'participate' actively. But they choose to not report it for reasons best known to themselves.

Why should it report everything it gathers? Who's business is it to know every scrap of information the LDS Church has on its members? Why privacy obligations does it have toward its members and the public? Who gets to decide when an organization has revealed everything sufficiently? Once a decision is made, who slaps the peewadden out of the individual that continues to whine that the numbers and the information are not enough, not real, etc.?

[Calm]

who slaps the peewadden out of the individual that continues to whine

Oh, I will remember that line....I wonder if my grandkids would make the connection, it could be very useful.

[canard78]

Why should it report everything it gathers? Who's business is it to know every scrap of information the LDS Church has on its members? Why privacy obligations does it have toward its members and the public? Who gets to decide when an organization has revealed everything sufficiently? Once a decision is made, who slaps the peewadden out of the individual that continues to whine that the numbers and the information are not enough, not real, etc.?

I think that a weekly sacrament attendance would be a far more accurate reflection of membership than the 'on the list but they might be dead/completely uninterested.'

[Storm Rider]

I think that a weekly sacrament attendance would be a far more accurate reflection of membership than the 'on the list but they might be dead/completely uninterested.'

So you think that only those who attend Sacrament meetings are the only ones that count as real members? Do you see any problems with that or do you think that any exceptions would be minimal or insignificant?

[Calm]

So you think that only those who attend Sacrament meetings are the only ones that count as real members? Do you see any problems with that or do you think that any exceptions would be minimal or insignificant?

There is a significant portion of our ward (of which two members in my familly contribute) to low or nonattending devout members due to health. I'll have to see if I can remember to get a percentage from my husband, the ward clerk.

[canard78]

So you think that only those who attend Sacrament meetings are the only ones that count as real members? Do you see any problems with that or do you think that any exceptions would be minimal or insignificant?

Of course I don't. I recognise that there sometimes unavoidable circumstances leading to non-attendance. Working in public, sickness etc. but even with the non-counted minority that can't make it my original comment still stands. Weeku sacrament attendance would be a more accurate indication of membership than a report of every member currently on the list.

[Hamba Tuhan]

So yes, the church has a record of how many people 'participate' actively. But they choose to not report it for reasons best known to themselves.

Actually, the Church has no record of how many people '"participate" actively' to report. Average quarterly sacrament meeting attendance numbers do not supply this mythical (but supposedly hidden) information, as you've implied. Let me use the example of my ward to illustrate some of the reasons why:

For the first quarter of this year, we reported an average sacrament meeting attendance of 184. Since our ward currently has 482 members on our rolls, this would suggest that the participation rate in our ward is 38%.

The first problem, however, is that viewing the average this way assumes that roughly the same 184 members are attending across the course of the quarter. Attendance actually varies considerably, with a different mix of people attending each week. Because I sit on the stand and also because I'm the bishopric member who helps our asigned deacon with the counting each week, I have a pretty good idea of who attends and who doesn't, so I just quickly ran over our membership list and counted up all of the members which I am certain attended sacrament meeting during the first quarter. I counted 265. Inevitably I will have missed a few, but using that number alone gives us a participation rate in our ward of 55%. That's a significantly larger figure than the 38% suggested by our average weekly sacrament meeting attendance -- nearly 45% larger! -- and one the Church doesn't even have access to.

The difference between the two numbers can be explained by a number of factors: sickness (we easily had 20 people home sick or with sick children yesterday), travel (we're a new city with a transient population, so people often leave for holidays and family events), work (we have doctors, ambulance drivers, bus drivers, security guards, and other shift workers in our ward), and lower-than-ideal participation. But even in the case of poor attendance, people who actually do participate now and then are far, far removed from your hypothesised 'dead/completely uninterested' demographic.

At the same time, I'm well aware that our membership rolls themselves are far from accurate. I just did another quick count, and I know there are at least 34 people who have moved from our ward but whose membership records are still with us. Obviously, some of these were inactive when they left the ward, but some of them were active, and I don't know why we have their records still. In addition, we have three fulltime missionaries serving, and someone moved a brother's records into our ward a couple of weeks ago, but when we went to visit him, it was a person with the same name but not even the same birthdate. This means that, at minimum, we should adjust our denominator down by 38 in order to get to an even more accurate number. This means that, of the people on our rolls who actually live in our ward, 60% of them were at church during the first quarter of this year -- 58% larger than the number you think the Church should be reporting as an indication of how many members are participating -- and once again not a figure that the Church actually has access to.

And this is just the beginning of the problems. For example, average sacrament meeting attendance numbers are not actually generated across the quarter but during the last month of the quarter only. Because, as indicated above, we are a new city with residents who've mostly moved here from elsewhere, we take significant hits to attendance in December because sometimes more than half of our members travel to be with family for at least part of the month.

I think that a weekly sacrament attendance would be a far more accurate reflection of membership than the 'on the list but they might be dead/completely uninterested.'

Are there people on our ward list who might be dead and we don't know it? I don't think so. We've visited nearly all of them at some point. Are there some who are currently 'completely uninterested'? Absolutely. I home teach a number of these. Of course, when I started home teaching our current Sunday school president nearly nine years ago, he too was uninterested -- though 'antagonistic' might be a better desription. Now he and his wife are both members of our ward council. Two years ago the first counsellor in our elders quorum presidency was a completely inactive alcoholic whose wife once yelled, 'Hamba, I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!' when I bumped into her at the markets and said that I'd like to see them and their kids at church. Now their eldest son is one of our three missionaries. Can you explain to me why exactly the Church should not have counted or reported these individuals as members in years past?

Might there be members in our ward who have shed their self-identification as Latter-day Saints and are never coming back? Possibly, but unless they make the effort to remove themselves from the Church officially, how are we to know who they are? I certainly don't think it's my prerogative to make that call. On this point, I'm reminded of an exerience I had as a fulltime missionary. My companion and I were able to track down a member who'd been in the Lost Member File. He was an old man who hadn't been to church in over two decades. We asked him if he'd like to come back to church? No, he said. Would he enjoy having home teachers? No. Would he accept a visit from a bishopric member? Again, no. Finally, in a bit of exasperation, I asked him if he still wanted to be a member of the Church. I fully expected him to say no; instead, he teared up and invited us into his tiny, dark home. There was an upholstered chair where he obviously spent much of his time, and next to this was a lamp, a TV remote, a glass of water, and a pile of books. The topmost book was the Book of Mormon. He picked it up, clutched it to his chest, and said, 'This is the most precious thing I own. Why would you want to take it from me?'

To this day, I don't understand this man or his situation. What I do know is that he would have found it offensive for someone to be suggesting that he shouldn't be counted amongst the Saints.

Edited June 10, 2013 by Hamba Tuhan

[Hamba Tuhan]

Fascinating. What are the implications of this? If the m/c ratio is increasing that would suggest one of two things:

1) Congregations are being left to get bigger before splitting.

2) Inactivity rates are increasing

I've just had a look at my ward's quarterly report from ten years ago and then again from this year. In Q1 2003, we had 218 members on our rolls, with average sacrament meeting attendance at 35%. As mentioned above, we now have more than double that number of members on our rolls, but our sacrament meeting attendance has increased by 8.5% to 38%. I would say that, locally at least, congregations are growing bigger whilst inactivity rates are slowly declining.

[Thinking]

I've just had a look at my ward's quarterly report from ten years ago and then again from this year. In Q1 2003, we had 218 members on our rolls, with average sacrament meeting attendance at 35%. As mentioned above, we now have more than double that number of members on our rolls, but our sacrament meeting attendance has increased by 8.5% to 38%. I would say that, locally at least, congregations are growing bigger whilst inactivity rates are slowly declining.

Now if we can just get similar information about the other 29,013 congregations then we wouldn't have to speculate.

[What] privacy obligations does it have toward its members and the public?

Releasing attendance figures doesn't violate any privacy obligations.

Edited June 10, 2013 by Thinking

[Tacenda]

So you think that only those who attend Sacrament meetings are the only ones that count as real members? Do you see any problems with that or do you think that any exceptions would be minimal or insignificant?

This comment made me think about my days as a Sunday School secretary back in the 80's. I wonder why they discontinued counting adults in Sunday School? ETA: ran out of posts for the moment. Cal, if you read this, I meant that they no longer have a secretary take roll in GD, or GE class. Or do they? I've never seen it. I use to go to the class and stand there and check off members names that were attending SS. Edited June 10, 2013 by Tacenda

[canard78]

Actually, the Church has no record of how many people '"participate" actively' to report. Average quarterly sacrament meeting attendance numbers do not supply this mythical (but supposedly hidden) information, as you've implied. Let me use the example of my ward to illustrate some of the reasons why:

For the first quarter of this year, we reported an average sacrament meeting attendance of 184. Since our ward currently has 482 members on our rolls, this would suggest that the participation rate in our ward is 38%.

The first problem, however, is that viewing the average this way assumes that roughly the same 184 members are attending across the course of the quarter. Attendance actually varies considerably, with a different mix of people attending each week. Because I sit on the stand and also because I'm the bishopric member who helps our asigned deacon with the counting each week, I have a pretty good idea of who attends and who doesn't, so I just quickly ran over our membership list and counted up all of the members which I am certain attended sacrament meeting during the first quarter. I counted 265. Inevitably I will have missed a few, but using that number alone gives us a participation rate in our ward of 55%. That's a significantly larger figure than the 38% suggested by our average weekly sacrament meeting attendance -- nearly 45% larger! -- and one the Church doesn't even have access to.

The difference between the two numbers can be explained by a number of factors: sickness (we easily had 20 people home sick or with sick children yesterday), travel (we're a new city with a transient population, so people often leave for holidays and family events), work (we have doctors, ambulance drivers, bus drivers, security guards, and other shift workers in our ward), and lower-than-ideal participation. But even in the case of poor attendance, people who actually do participate now and then are far, far removed from your hypothesised 'dead/completely uninterested' demographic.

At the same time, I'm well aware that our membership rolls themselves are far from accurate. I just did another quick count, and I know there are at least 34 people who have moved from our ward but whose membership records are still with us. Obviously, some of these were inactive when they left the ward, but some of them were active, and I don't know why we have their records still. In addition, we have three fulltime missionaries serving, and someone moved a brother's records into our ward a couple of weeks ago, but when we went to visit him, it was a person with the same name but not even the same birthdate. This means that, at minimum, we should adjust our denominator down by 38 in order to get to an even more accurate number. This means that, of the people on our rolls who actually live in our ward, 60% of them were at church during the first quarter of this year -- 58% larger than the number you think the Church should be reporting as an indication of how many members are participating -- and once again not a figure that the Church actually has access to.

And this is just the beginning of the problems. For example, average sacrament meeting attendance numbers are not actually generated across the quarter but during the last month of the quarter only. Because, as indicated above, we are a new city with residents who've mostly moved here from elsewhere, we take significant hits to attendance in December because sometimes more than half of our members travel to be with family for at least part of the month.

Are there people on our ward list who might be dead and we don't know it? I don't think so. We've visited nearly all of them at some point. Are there some who are currently 'completely uninterested'? Absolutely. I home teach a number of these. Of course, when I started home teaching our current Sunday school president nearly nine years ago, he too was uninterested -- though 'antagonistic' might be a better desription. Now he and his wife are both members of our ward council. Two years ago the first counsellor in our elders quorum presidency was a completely inactive alcoholic whose wife once yelled, 'Hamba, I hate you, I hate you, I hate you!' when I bumped into her at the markets and said that I'd like to see them and their kids at church. Now their eldest son is one of our three missionaries. Can you explain to me why exactly the Church should not have counted or reported these individuals as members in years past?

Might there be members in our ward who have shed their self-identification as Latter-day Saints and are never coming back? Possibly, but unless they make the effort to remove themselves from the Church officially, how are we to know who they are? I certainly don't think it's my prerogative to make that call. On this point, I'm reminded of an exerience I had as a fulltime missionary. My companion and I were able to track down a member who'd been in the Lost Member File. He was an old man who hadn't been to church in over two decades. We asked him if he'd like to come back to church? No, he said. Would he enjoy having home teachers? No. Would he accept a visit from a bishopric member? Again, no. Finally, in a bit of exasperation, I asked him if he still wanted to be a member of the Church. I fully expected him to say no; instead, he teared up and invited us into his tiny, dark home. There was an upholstered chair where he obviously spent much of his time, and next to this was a lamp, a TV remote, a glass of water, and a pile of books. The topmost book was the Book of Mormon. He picked it up, clutched it to his chest, and said, 'This is the most precious thing I own. Why would you want to take it from me?'

To this day, I don't understand this man or his situation. What I do know is that he would have found it offensive for someone to be suggesting that he shouldn't be counted amongst the Saints.

Thanks for the stories. As a branch president I used to have a similar mental checklist of members. I'm sure every unit has members who only attend 1 in 4 or 2 in 4. I think the count we had was about 90 who we considered at least prospective attendees and an average weekly attendance of about 60-70.

If you want to measure growth, bums on seats on a Sunday is still the best measure though. The 1/4 or 2/4 attendees are of course welcomed and embraced... but by golly they make for frustrating primary class teachers. A unit's growth can only be measured by whether the attendance is consistent.

[Buzzard]

And a non-friendly site that I won't grace with a link says:

Quote

The LDS Church counts members until they are 110 years old. Members who are excommunicated or have their membership removed are still counted among the membership of the Church. Inactive members and those who have moved on to other Churches are also still counted among the membership.

Say what????

That's something I have never heard before, and would consider with a fair degree of certainty to be inaccurate.

BTW, this is probably less true the further you get away from Utah, but there are "cultural Mormons" by the bucketload in most wards. Even if they just show up every other year to the Christmas dinner, or stand on the doorstep and chat with the home teachers without siccing the dogs on them, if you were to ask what religion they were, they would definitely say LDS. Most even go active for a month or so right around their kids eighth birthday so that their children can be rock solid inactive LDS as well. Try pinning that number down.

[Storm Rider]

What is the real purpose of gathering numbers? Frankly, I think we put far less confidence in them than our friendly Exmos that make all the fuss about membership numbers. They create a standard no organization meets, cry foul at how brazenly the LDS Church does not meet their standard, while of persecution should another dare demonstrate how stupid their pursuit for these specific numbers, and then if they were created just to shut them up, they would tell the story of how controlling the LDS Church is. This is black while of whining that will never end. The Church handles it well by firmly ignoring them.

[Calm]

This comment made me think about my days as a Sunday School secretary back in the 80's. I wonder why they discontinued counting adults in Sunday School?

They take rolls, why would they need to do another count?

[Johnnie Cake]

For those that support the current reporting status quo...and would prefer that things be left just the way they are, that you have all the information that you or anyone else would ever need... I ask these questions:

What exactly are you afraid of? When is releasing additional information not a good thing? When is light shown into a dark place a bad thing...unless there is something that needs to be hidden. So what is the reason to hide this information? Would you be ok with your government hidding its statistics and financial information and just saying trust us...we have your best interests in mind.

I just don't understand the push back...I would think that we all could agree that making more information about the realities of the church more available to the public would be a good policy...unless there is a something they are trying to hide from the membership.

Edited June 10, 2013 by Johnnie Cake