I was talking with some TBM's about the 500 people that resigned from the church over Kate Kelly being exed. I said that is like 5 wards leaving all at once. One of the TBM's said, our ward has more than 100 people. To which I said, you might have 600 names on your list but you only have about 100 people that attend. The TBM said - yes we have about 100 that attend but we have 700 names on our ward list.

700 names with 600 of them not attending. Is 700 a common number now for names on a ward's list of those who used to attend? 6 out of 7 not going is higher than I thought.

Does anyone know if this is correct?

I believe my home ward is in the 500-550 range on the books.

About 100-120 attending is pretty accurate (If you count all the children and infants too)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/27/2014 06:38PM by nonsequiter.

A TBM acquaintance here in Kentucky told me that only 10 percent of members of record in his ward boundaries attend regularly. He also mentioned that a dozen or so members have tendered their resignations in the last six months.

The local news said only 100 people showed up for that resignation fest, and only a subset of those actually resigned.

http://fox13now.com/2014/07/24/mormon-group-plans-mass-resignation-to-protest-excommunications/

Fenwick.... Nice name... NOT!

I've been in 10 wards in Australia over 25 years, ours was like that, although more like 140-160 / 600-700

I've observed similar numbers in all of my wards outside of Utah...attendance of ~120, ~600 on the rolls.

The ward here in Utah has over 50% attendance though. They'll likely split and have two well attended wards, each with less than 400 on the rolls.

How Does The Corp spell Do-Do?

several ways, that's how.


2014: WORST YEAR EVER!

If the 'church part' of the Corp was a for-profit ... Heads would Roll.

The ward numbers do not include all of the "members" in the giant "address unknown" file in Salt Lake.

I don't know what fraction of the church is in this file, but I'm sure it's significant.

East Coast Exmo Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> The ward numbers do not include all of the
> "members" in the giant "address unknown" file in
> Salt Lake.



I've been called twice by people trying to find an address for a relative of mine. The first time was for my gay son who worked/lived on a cruise ship at that time. The second time was for my brother who either lives with gullible women or out of his truck.

Needless to say I wasn't any help at all. I wouldn't have helped them even if my brother and son had a permanent address.

Down south: ward - 600+ range, 100 or so attend average; branch - 230+ range, 40 attend average; stake-wide - 3,000-4,000+ range, 600 attend average. It looks better on paper. Just alot of dots.

This is about the average in our ward / stake

I often wondered, in my youth, why so few wanted to join "the church". The local branch wanted for years to build a new church but couldn't get attendance about about 40 each Sunday (wonder why?). Finally, after above a dozen years, they got to build. It makes you wonder what they had to tell SLC and stake in order to get the go ahead. Fudged numbers? Count visitors and missionaries in attendance? Pretend the invalids were there? Get someone to count who couldn't count? Some members walk through the doors twice?

I just counted our directory and got 230 households..say an average of 3 or 4 per household..vs average attendance...no way even close to 600 or 800 and im near end of corridor...

topazgirl Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> .say an average of 3 or 4 per household.

I'd bet that's a bit high. A lot of the inactive members are
people the mishies dunked and who then said, "nah, this isn't
for me."

Those people tend to be single. I'd bet that a LOT of the
inactive "households" on the list are single people who got
dunked then came to their senses.

In Europe and Latin America, most wards are lucky if attendance is 10%. Big city wards can easily have one or two thousand names on the list, with about a hundred attending, and most of those are investigators, eternal investigators, and new members who don't last beyond the first year. In fact, I've known wards that appeared to be thriving, but if you crossed out the names of the bishop, his counselors, the Relief Society president, the Primary president and the music leader, you wouldn't find a single temple recommend holder who wasn't related or married to them!

And those are the real super duper wards. The branches are often pure works of fiction, with no other active members than the mishies and one or two long-time members. Moreover, while I never actually checked boundaries on maps, I have a feeling that the boundaries of the branches can be gerrymandered to include some active members. I remember two TBM families (the wives were cousins) living within one-hundred metres from each other. They belonged to two different branches, and the chapels were about forty kilometres away from each other. There was a third chapel a few kilometres from their houses, but that was not their ward or branch. I was stunned. Nobody else was. This was around 2003 though, and in a part of Spain I only passed through.

I've mentioned this before, but my first ward in Brazil had attendance of ~1%...1,200 plus on the rolls, and ~15 attending, including the missionaries. The bishop was the only priesthood holder...no counselors, EQ president, etc... I don't know if they ever had the attendance to become a ward, but they definitely shouldn't have been classified as a ward. They probably could have been combined with the 7 or 8 other units in the city to form one decently attended ward.

I know of one ward which is a combined ward, two wards were joined about 5 years ago. The smaller ward had a list of 450, and SM attendance in the 40s. No idea of the list size of the larger ward, but SM attendance was about the same, so I'd guess that the combined ward list is probably about 1000.

A recent ward newsletter announced new high average SM attendance of 120, with 60 TR holders. However the ward is heavily populated with very long standing 3rd generation families who are populating.

Really 500? I didn't know that.
Awesome.

I don't think that number is accurate.

So, out comes the ward clerk hat -

In 1997, the average ward had 416 members (total membership / total # of wards), and 4,155 members per stake.

Last year, the average ward had 516 members of record, and 4,945 in the stake. Number of wards per stake stayed static at 8.1.

So, yes, wards are getting larger, with nominal membership increasing at 2x the rate of increase of wards.

Average reported membership, across 29K+ units, is ~516. This makes it pretty clear that the 15 million number reported by the church is overstating membership by at least 200%. 5 million active members would be the very high end of my estimate. There MIGHT be 5 million self-identified mormons. Considering that average attendance in the U.S. is less than 200 and average attendance in many areas is <50, I wouldn't be suprised if active membership worldwide is closer to 3 million, with a huge percentage of that number coming from the Moridor. The church is truly insignificant on the world stage.

The LDS church as setup in my small country in 1968. I was one of the pioneer members- baptised in 1969. Church membership grew from a handful to almost 3000 in 1990. The church became a stake with 5 wards. The ward I attend had about 600 members on the register, but only about 250 are active then.

Yesterday I happen to come across one lds member's FB, I was close to them once. LDS never allow this before but now Stake and ward FB page show membership strength - so I took a look at the numbers. I was stunned - total ward members is now 66. Stake membership is only 711. This is 10 years after I left.

Mormonism is on the decline, there is no doubt about that.

I also think of the 66 members in that ward I used to go, maybe only 1/2 are believers , the rest are very old members who are still there but mostly for social reasons. They got no other friends outside of the mormon circle.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/28/2014 07:25AM by joho.

What country or area of the world are you in?

...I too would like to know what area of the world you live in.

There was a leaked report from the Europe Area Presidency which stated that average Sacrament attendance across Europe ran at around 100,000 members. Out of a claimed membership of 500,000.

Those are the Church's own figures.

Yesterday I think fewer than one hundred at SM the ward i am forced to attend



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/28/2014 01:29PM by thedesertrat1.

Last Halloween, I took my daughter to a "Trunk or Treat" party at my TBM neighbor's church. I asked her and her husband at one point how many people are in their ward. (This is in a large suburb of the SF Bay Area.)

Her husband said, "About 200 people." She said, "No, definitely more than that."

"Well," he said, "there are probably about 600 on our rolls, but only about 200 who regularly attend."

They are pretty hardcore TBM, so I was a bit surprised he'd feel comfortable admitting that to a non-Mormon. My neighbor has also mentioned to me within the last year or so that they are thinking of "reorganizing" ward boundaries, though whether that is due to declining membership or not I wouldn't know.

...in Alabama and Tennessee from 1978 to 1987. In all three wards, attendance ran about 35-40% of total membership. If the attendance percentages that some posters on this thread relate are close to accurate, that is quite a decrease from when I was privy to the stats.

Maybe part of what's happening currently is that fewer members of *any* religion attend church anymore. Since the LDS Church keeps everyone on the rolls even if they haven't darkened the door for decades, then an increasing number of non-attenders would bring their percentages down even more.

Having left the church in 1998, the only anecdote I can contribute to this subject is to note that the local stake was split in 1996. The church rented a historic theater to hold the conference during which the split was made. They obviously anticipated a large attendance because of the interest and excitement of a new stake creation, so they rented a venue larger than the stake center.

The theater's seating capacity is about 1600. It was about 3/4 full for the conference, so about 1200 attendees. That was the total attendees from BOTH STAKES---with 7-8 wards & branches in each stake. So, about 1200 attendees for about 16 units.

...that hints at how church growth is really going in my area: the metro population of my city was about 600,000 when the stake was split in 1996. But only about 1200 Mormons were active or interested enough to attend the conference in which the stake was split.

Now, I concede that the church might have grown more in my area since that time, but my area is economically stable and has grown a lot as well. The metro population is currently 837,000.

Let's look at some numbers in California.

In 1991 there were 157 Stakes in California.

In 2012 there were 156 Stakes in California.

In 1991 the population of California was 30.6 million.

In 2012 the population of California was 37.7 million.

It's all bad news for the Mormon cult.

http://cumorah.com/index.php?target=countries&cnt_res=2&wid=231&wid_state=266&cmdfind=Search