The Mormon church really loves to talk about how they are such a fast growing church and they think this is a huge sign from God, but what are the REAL statistics on their membership?

Apparently the amount of membership papers they have is around 14 million, but considering the amount of people who are actually active or even consider themselves Mormon is more accurately around 4 million.

Apparently most converts usually stop attending within a year of membership after their baptism.

Does anyone have any sources to give me a better reference point on these numbers?

(Also, it's really easy to double your numbers when you only have around 500,000 people and every single one of them has a huge family. Even a family with two kids is a double in numbers)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/20/2012 02:15PM by nickson.

6 memberships read in Sunday 0 in attendance

It's useful to remember that the church considers that attending only one Sunday per month means "active".

For their statistics. However, attending only once a month will not get you a temple recommend, as you would be considered inactive.

Are you sure, Coke? My BiL in San Diego, who is something or other on the Stake level, is the one who gave me the statistic for worthy actives. But I could have misunderstood him on that point.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/21/2012 03:46AM by jaredsotherbrother.

As a previous ward clerk...."active" means attendance once per quarter.

lol that is WEAK! Does any other church take roll? I'm wondering how the mo's stack up to the catholics etc....hmmmm

In my mission 10% of the people on the records of a ward actually came at least once in a given year. If thats at all indicative of the LDS church as a whole, I would guess their true numbers are closer to 2 million. Except there are places like Utah and Idaho, where almost everyone goes to church to avoid being a social pariah in their neighborhood/ward, so the actual numbers will maybe be up in the 3-5 million range. I would be shocked to find that more than 5 million people ever go to the LDS church.

But keep in mind, this isn't a uniquely Mormon issue. All religions do this. Muslims, for example claim 1.6 billion adherents, but only a fraction of those people ever set foot in a mosque. For example, more than half of "Muslims" in Europe never go to the mosque.

Quick side note which I found humorous: In 2007, there were an estimated 53 million Muslims in Europe, half of them never go to mosque, so thats 27 million "inactive" Muslims living in Europe. Which means that there are far more inactive European Muslims then the entire worldwide Mormon population claimed by the LDS church!

In my opinion if you self identify as Mormon then you should be counted. You can get a pretty good idea of the number of Mormons by national polls taken by different countries. Its surprising how inflated the church's membership claims are when compared to these polls.

For example, the 2010 Brazilian census only had 226,509 people claim to be Mormon compared to the church's claim of over 1 million. That's 750,000 people who don't consider themselves Mormon but are counted in the LDS church's membership totals! That's not even including members who are believers but aren't active. Do that with each country and you get a pretty good idea of how many Mormons there REALLY are in the world.

http://exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,546571,546571#msg-546571

We will never know the true numbers because the church keeps it a secret.

What's that? They don't keep secrets?

We will never know the true numbers because the church lies about it.

What's that? The church never lies?

We will never know the true numbers because...

Aw, c'mon! The true numbers aren't secret, they're SACRED!

Dear mormon church, will you please start telling us the truth about membership numbers? Why doth thou lie and keep secrets and twist the facts to further your deceptive ways? Oh, yeah, there are billions of dollars involved. You would not want people who actually pay tithes to realize that actual membership numbers are drastically declining, then they might stop paying. If you want to put an end to so many people leaving and complaining about the church, than don't hide behind the "non profit/charity" and "I don't have to tell anyone how much money we have an what we do with it." Honesty, transparency and straightforwardness are not a part of your teachings.

I think nickson (OP) is about right with 4 million members..

11 years ago I would have known the statistics, by country, for western Europe. Now I don't recall the detail, (why would I even be interested?) and I suspect activity has declined due to the information age expansion.

Here, however, are some guesses. Wiki state UK membership at 186k, although this includes Falklands Islands and Channel Islands which are not part of UK.

There used to be 100k in the "address unknown" file meaning they were not only inactive, hadn't attended in years, nobody knew where they lived. They had literally moved on. This stat was always an embarrassment for the church and was not unique to the UK. Stakes and wards were reluctant to include these numbers in their membership totals as it affected activity percentages. So these "members" were dropped into an "unknown address" file - the biggest "stake" in the church.

If this still applies, and I cannot see why not, the membership in the UK is 186k less 100k = 86k (out of a population of 60 million). Applying an activity rate of 25% (fair assumption in 2001) you get 21.5k active members, 65 per congregation. My own ward had an attendance of 250 but that was very unusual so the 65, with so many small units, looks realistic. Maybe the membership is actually 286k less the 100k unknowns but that is not the way I remember it. The church wants to show the maximum number (inflated) of members whereas local leaders, judged on percentages, want to reduce the number they report on. Easy solution, dump them in another file so that they can be included in the church's claim for total members but be ignored by local leaders in their stats.

Bear in mind the UK was the strongest country in Europe for the church. Other countries would have lower membership numbers and activity. On the above, the active members in the UK would be 21.5k or 11.56% of membership total.

Worldwide, and assuming 6 million of the 16 million claimed members are in the U.S., this would mean 1.156 million non U.S. members. If U.S. activity rate is as high as 50% then total active members would be just over 4 million, in line with Lorraine aka síóg's figures. This could still be high as the UK activity rate is higher than most non U.S. countries and we haven't taken into account "address unknown" numbers for U.S. I know it is high but probably not as high a percentage as U.K.

My guess is, therefore, 4 million active members out of a claimed 16m. Also, they include dead people and probably those who have resigned. They probably put resignees in another file and still include them in total membership numbers. For proof of this comare stats given at General Conference with numbers of baptisms etc. Doesn't seem to reflect the hundreds of thousands who are resigning.

Tom Phillips

With the exception of the 30% convert retention rate cited below (a rate which can be easily verified via other statistical sources, and is probably too generous because some sources put it as low as 10%), all of the following statistics come directly from the Monson church, as reported by them for the 2011 calendar year in their 2012 April conference. These stats show an accelerating decline, as you will see:

Claimed membership went from 14,131,467 to 14,441,346, which would be an increase of 309,879.

The church says they had "Children of Record" (COR) additions of 119,917.

The church claims 281,312 new converts were baptized during 2011.

119,917 (COR) + 281,312 (CONVERTS) = 401,229 total increase, which is 91,350 higher than their claimed increase of 309,879. Presumably this difference of 91,350 is due to deaths, because even if they are all deaths, it still isn't enough statistical deaths for that large of a population. So, I will label the 91,350 as DEATHS, even though the church does not explicitly identify this group.

With a convert retention rate of 30%, the 281,312 converts will result in 84,394 remaining converts after the first year.

84,394 (CONVERTS) + 119,917 (COR) - 91,350 (DEATHS) = 112,961 (INCREASE). This does not include removal requests (where people resign from the church), and also is about 7,000 fewer that the similar 2010 calculation showed, again not counting removal requests.

Even if you do not include the 30% convert retention rate calculation, but instead list ALL converts, it results in a "growth" rate of 2.19%, which is the lowest growth rate since 1947, using their own statistics.

Their 2011 statistics show an increase in wards & branches (UNITS) of 124. If you take their reported increase of 309,879 divided by 124, it means that each new UNIT averaged 2,499 members. But when you take the total reported members of 14,441,346 divided by the total reported UNITS of 28,784, you only get 501.7 members per UNIT. Comparing 501.7 to 2,499 strongly suggests bad data is being reported by them somewhere-- or, at the very least, it is strongly indicative of a convert retention problem that is not otherwise being reported. Also reporting DEATHS at a rate significantly lower than census statistics indicates bad data is being reported by them somewhere. And the total lack of resignation data in their current records reports again indicates bad data is being reported by them somewhere.

Thus, their numbers do not add up. But even if you accept them just as they are, and give the most optimistic view (towards the church) of the records possible, it shows a decline relative to the population (USA as well as the world's).

And that's when using the Monsonite's own reported numbers.

Nevin Pratt

P.S. One more thing... a coorelation between the number of converts and missionary numbers can also be demonstrated. Also, the lowering of the missionary age can easily be shown will result in a temporary increase, or "spike", in the number of missionaries, before once again settling back down to pre-change numbers. But as that happens, it will in turn result in a spike in church membership numbers, which I'm sure they will brag to the moon about when it happens as "evidence" of "the one true church", when in reality it all can be easily predicted mathematically.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/21/2012 03:15PM by nevinpratt.

In this talk, ex Chile mission president Ted Lyon speaks of 5 million 'active and participating' worldwide. He also talks about baseball baptism type programs and trying to clean up after it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzCcCacfnfU

One thing of interest that I read on a comment board (supposidly from one who worked for church in membership) was that they assume people are dead and take them off the count when they are over 110 years old!!! Now that is being conservative to ensure the highest possible membership and retain the fastest growing church title.

There is safety in fake numbers.

Here is a copy of comment I made earlier this year in reference to a New Zealand radio piece calling out mormonism, and where the local area director had bragged that he was appalled that the radio piece would attack the faith of 14 million members.

I have now done this sort of compilation in a number of areas of the world and the pattern is very similar. (some of you helped me recently when I was researching the membership numbers in Italy for a TV show there: http://exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,690695,690695#msg-690695)

BTW it is my opinion that exposing the membership number fraud is a very important effort that is very troubling to TBMs and very hard to refute if they are at all honest. To really get that the "stone rolling forth to fill the whole earth" is in reality a dying, failing organization that can't even keep its own members is a shocker that's a rocker! Worse, what does Jesus' true church do in response? Yep, build a multi-billion dollar luxury shopping mall.

Take a look at this. We should build a database country by country.

Here's my comment on the New Zealand radio piece:

"Mormon Area Director Hunter can barely get through the first sentence of his arrogant dismissal of this very accurate portrayal of mormonism and its problems, without telling a lie -- but this is a well-known hallmark of mind-control cults.

If I were you, Dick, I wouldn't continue to tell that whopper about having 14 million members. It is easily shown to be false by independent studies and national census figures -- every time you tell this obvious lie, you look like a fool.

For example, consider the Mormon church claims and the actual truth about the Mormon membership in New Zealand alone.

The Mormon church claimed to have 96,064 members (2011 = 104,115) in New Zealand in 2006, however in the last 2006 census only 43,539 people were willing to self-report themselves as Mormons. This huge disparity in membership numbers turns up time and again all around the world when looking at Mormon membership claims.

In contrast, the Adventist church claims a membership of 17,183, while the 2006 New Zealand census reported that 16,191 people self-identified as Adventists. Similarly the Baptist Church claimed to have 22,947 active members last year, while the 2006 census reported that nearly 57,000 people self-identified as Baptists in 2006.

It is certainly completely obvious that any independent census should produce membership numbers that approximate or exceed any truthful claims by any one group (such as in the cases of the Adventists and the Baptists cited), since there are always many more adherents to a religious tradition than there people who actually attend.

The Mormons arrogantly claim 100,000 members, but they cannot get even half that number to tell a census worker that they are members.

Doubters can use an even simpler method to double check these figures. The Mormon church claims to have 207 congregations in New Zealand: about 160 are wards, and the rest are smaller branches. Simply ask any local Mormon what the average attendance is. In New Zealand wards the number is far less than 200, and in branches the number is less than 50.

Doing the most generous math yields (200 * 160) + (47 * 50) = 35,250 actual attending members. In actual fact two out of every three Mormons are former Mormons in New Zealand."

(Spanner could perhaps comment on this thread, thanks!)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/22/2012 12:28AM by rodolfo.