I believe everyone agrees TSCC keeps dead folks on their membership list until the age of 110. Most people seem to die way before 110 years of age, usually between 80 and 95 years of age.

Just assuming TSCC is adding 25 extra years to most members actually being alive as an extra 25% life span, then if we deduct 25% from the 14,000,000 members they claim, then the real number is more like 10,500 alive members. My best guess is about 66% either do not attend or very rarely attend.

The brain washed members that actually attend every week is most likely about 3.5 million. Add those that show up once in awhile and you only have a 5 million member church world wide. Heck, there are some mega church's that have more people attending their single building than TSCC has world wide.

I expect some of you math wizards can get a closer number by taking out the dead.

Fast growing church or biggest liar church. You decide.

LD$ Inc. has about 5 million active members.

Three to five million has been the range I find consistent.

I think the first announcement that the Mormon church shrank would be shocking to the TBMs, but a complete admission to faking the count, don't see how that could be done by Mormons. Just external, credible sources.

pewsitter Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I believe everyone agrees TSCC keeps dead folks on
> their membership list until the age of 110.

No, that is incorrect, although it is a common misconception.

Here is the fact that so many people misinterpret:

If - and ONLY IF - a member becomes inactive and the church loses track of that member (no address, no way of finding the member), then the member is not removed until the church can definitely assume the member has died. Which is when the member's birth was 110 years previous.

Members who die, and whose death is known to the church, are removed from the membership list.

Please stop spreading misinformation.

Another lie: the church counts among its 14 +/- million members all the dead people who have been baptized into the church by proxy.

What is your opinion about members that resign, do they remove them from the total count?

Source?

RPackham, do you have info on the official number of active members out of that 14 million. I doubt the church would cough that information up.

If the consensus can be that Mormons cook their membership count, how can anyone claim that they are consistent on

Not counting

active, but dead members
Proxy baptisms (I've never heard this claimed to be part of their made up numbers)
Resigned members
Made up members

I do agree that the subordinates at the ward clerk level remove these people from their local wards, and there is likely a policy somewhere in the mountain tops of the COB to remove these members as well.

The truth, the consensus, is that the 14 million number is made up. So who is counted in that made up number of 14 million. At some point they have to concede, they don't have a membership count that is based on a credible accounting.

That 14 million count says it all, it's a fraud count. Who cares how they get to that fraud. They certainly don't care, they just want that number to keep growing and get bigger and to have the Mormons in Utah feel validated somehow.

The real number is buildings. I think they are getting better at deceiving there too, but that's the number. Buildings.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/30/2013 02:42PM by gentlestrength.

RPackHam wrote "If - and ONLY IF - a member becomes inactive and the church loses track of that member (no address, no way of finding the member), then the member is not removed until the church can definitely assume the member has died. Which is when the member's birth was 110 years previous.

Members who die, and whose death is known to the church, are removed from the membership list.

Please stop spreading misinformation.

Another lie: the church counts among its 14 +/- million members all the dead people who have been baptized into the church by proxy."

I disagree with RPackHam's statement. I believe it is incorrect. While it is true that if an active member dies and has a boring lds funeral and the membership clerk is on top of things, then maybe their membership record will be changed to dead.

More likely is the fact that older members cannot sit through 3 hours of meetings, the pew seats are too hard, etc and older people simply quit attending. They move away to live on the beach, with one of their children, etc and then onto a nursing home and finally they die. The current ward clerk has no knowledge of them, does not care and never does the paperwork to let SLC know they died. SLC spends no effort, time or money to locate old possibly dead members so they just count them as being alive until they are 110.

I believe there are more ALIVE/DEAD members of TSCC than ones that have been removed from the alive record. If you have proof otherwise, please furnish it.

I have never heard a serious claim that TSCC counts dead dunking as members of the church. Did you make that one up?

pewsitter Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------

> More likely is the fact that older members cannot
> sit through 3 hours of meetings... They move away to live on the beach,
> with one of their children, etc and then onto a
> nursing home and finally they die. The current
> ward clerk has no knowledge of them, does not care...
> I believe there are more ALIVE/DEAD members of
> TSCC than ones that have been removed from the
> alive record.

Just my personal opinion but, most active LDS people don't simply go inactive because they are getting old and retire on some beach. Most LDS members who were active until they reached an elderly age, stick with it (its their life). Its people who are young are the ones who go inactive. If they reach the point that they are too debilitated (either their body or in their mind) then they usually have at least one active child or members of the ward who would ensure that they are taken care of in regards to matters of the church. I.e. the Bishop would still have members do their hometeaching and/or give them sacrament in their home. If they died, the ward would be well aware of it.

I believe the 14 million is a fairly accurate "membership" number. They simply include anyone that's ever been baptized and is still alive (aside from the small amount of inactives that can't be found and have died). Obviously this number is a distortion of who is REALLY a believing and practicing member.

I believe that of that number, about 3-5 million are active members. Maybe another 3-5 million are inactive but still believing members. And the rest maybe 3-4 million are people who were baptized at some point but no longer believe in it or were "converts" who were never really converts in the first place and went inactive soon after baptism (which consist of most convert baptisms).

Obviously having 3000 stakes and 20,000 ward & branches in the world, 14,000,000 is a reasonable number. Its just not indicative of the true number of practicing Mormons.

RPackham Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> If - and ONLY IF - a member becomes inactive and
> the church loses track of that member (no address,
> no way of finding the member), then the member is
> not removed until the church can definitely assume
> the member has died. Which is when the member's
> birth was 110 years previous.
>
> Members who die, and whose death is known to the
> church, are removed from the membership list.


Alright then, but how hard does the cult try to find out if a person born in the 1920s who went inactive in the 1940s died somewhere on the globe in the years since then?

LDS Inc is known for their oppressive reactivation efforts. They have committees who search for members of record in an effort to locate them and assign them to a ward with hometeachers, etc. The church most certainly tries to find them.

LDS ind is also know for a fraud count of 14 million plus membership.

So let's reconcile

Fastidious tracking and counting of most anyone that has ever looked at a Mormon building including newborns, born to a Mormon

And

A big fraud number

What accounting method gets them to 14 million?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/30/2013 09:28PM by gentlestrength.

>>>What accounting method gets them to 14 million?

By including all "members of record." They consider anyone who was a child of record or baptized, and hasn't resigned, a member of the church. If they can't find them and they haven't reached the age of 110, then they still keep them in the total.

I have no reason to believe that is accurate. They do not represent a membership of 14 million plus using that accounting method.

Nothing personal. They fudge their numbers, big time.

You might even be able to produce a high-level policy statement on membership counts, that does not mean that is what they follow to get to their media number.

They keep detailed records, they just don't care to let others know how few of them there really are. Utah, Idaho, and Arizona Mormins may see growth, but that's not the entire picture, just the source of the cancer.

So what do YOU think think the membership numbers are then? I think 3-5 million active and 9-11 million believing and non-believing inactives makes sense.

I have no idea how they rationalize the extra 9 to 11 million. People who looked at a Mormon church, played in a Mormon baseball or basketball game in (Chile, Japan, Phillipines, or Southern California), friends of Mormons that are no longer friends because they converted Mormonism.), who knows how they rationalize their membership list. I have no reason to believe they are growing or have a membership of 14 million. Isn't Utah still less than 3 million people, that's the core right there, and they have non-Mormons in that state too.

The burden is on them. I kind of think it's like claiming to have in the bank every dollar you've ever had or touched, but not counting any of the dollars you have spent, lost, or gave away.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/30/2013 06:08PM by gentlestrength.

I don't doubt those 9-11 million were baptized LDS at some point in time. You have to remember that 4 out of 5 "converts" never return and there are plenty of members of record who simply go inactive never to return either.

What do I have to remember about Mormon church record keeping? Baptism equals membership?

The point of this thread is that there is no honest, standard accounting process that can get Mormons to 14 million.

If you are saying that over the history of time there have been 14 million people baptized Mormon, I wouldn't even be sure that is true. How can it be known, they cook their books!

Do ou know something you haven't shared about Mormon membership record keeping. They claim over 14 million members, how could 14 million people belong to a cult?

gentlestrength Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> What do I have to remember about Mormon church
> record keeping? Baptism equals membership?

Yes.

> The point of this thread is that there is no
> honest, standard accounting process that can get
> Mormons to 14 million.

It may not be honest, but you can get the count to 14 million if you include any that has been born Mormon or ever baptized Mormon.

> Do ou know something you haven't shared about
> Mormon membership record keeping.

Well I have seen individual ward membership lists and have seen 500 plus names when only 100 attend. Those other 400 are REAL people but most of them are simply inactive or people who were baptized but no longer believe in it.

> ...how could 14 million people
> belong to a cult?

Easily. Most of us used to belong to a cult. And when you got a 60,000 full times sales force spread around the world, you're gonna get people that are willing to get dunked. Doesn't mean they are truly converted though.

If you add up the official numbers that mormonism presents over the years you'll see that it's obviously made-up numbers. Implied death tolls do not wildly swing from negative numbers to over 120.000. We do not accept the implication that 8600 members somehow resurrected in 1999 or a lost tribe of Israel were secretely found at the time. In fact the expected number of deaths alone should be consistently above 100k every year in the last decade. This is without taking into account resignations that may ebb and flow a bit more dramatically than deaths but definitaly not as much as implied in the official statistics.

No doubt the church has pretty good statistics about it's membership hidden somewhere, but it's certainly nowhere near the bullshit you find in their official publications.

I don't think they made numbers up, but I think they changed how they counted those members (to make themselves look better).

RPackham is right -- members only remain on the rolls until 110 if they cannot be found otherwise.

There is an interesting wrinkly in the way membership records are tracked, however. SLC maintains a lost/unknown set of records, for individuals and families who are members but whose whereabouts are unknown.

Knowing the size of that record set would tell us two pieces of information -- how many people the church has lost track of, and thus how many are likely (given current demographics) to stay on the rolls until 110.

Without knowing how big that record set is, though, everything else is just guesswork.

In the late 1980s it was 1 million+. In the UK it was 100k that is half or more of the UK membership.

I assume those who resign are removed from local unit records and are transferred to a 'resigned' unit which will be one of the 2 largest units in the church (address unknown and resigned).

I cannot believe the 14 million + membership number is after deducting those who have resigned. IMO resigning does not reduce their claimed membership numbers.

Twenty years after I resigned, one of my children was able to get financial assistance from a bishop in Rose Park.

He said they were able to find him "as a child of record."

How is that possible if my name, and presumably my family, was removed?


Anagrammy

Chopping whatever number they state, in half, is the most generous estimate.

Shave off an additional 2 mill, and that will be much closer to the reality.

http://exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,803893,803922#msg-803922

Current Number of Mormons In The World: 14,441,346
(http://www.mormonnewsroom.org/facts-and-stats)

Current Estimate of the Earth's Population: 7,095,180,000
(http://www.census.gov/population/popclockworld.html)

But just how many Mormons are there? How many are active in the church? According to a 2008 study, 1.4% of the U.S. population self identifies as Mormon:
(http://commons.trincoll.edu/aris/files/2011/12/Mormons2008.pdf)

According to Wikipedia, approximately 2/3 of Mormons in the US are inactive (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Less-active_Mormon) so this would mean that only about a third are active in the church. Using the LDS fourteen million member figure this would mean that only about four and a half millions of Mormons are actually active members.

LDS inc doesn't like to not know where their volunteer employees are, and they take steps to insure that everyone from middle management down to front line managers are always looking for lost members. If someone just goes inactive that is not enough to get lost because of their aggressive tracking program. One must not only go inactive but they must also relocate with out informing their supervisors. They still try and locate the lost employee by calling all of their family, corporate will even send records back to a unit and have their records clerks ask around in the unit. It is all unnerving.

If LDS inc doesn't know where you are and no unit will accept the record they will put you in a lost file. That lost file is where the 110 age is from. They will not remove a volunteer from the system automatically at 110 unless they are in the lost file. A file that is associated with a unit can stay on till they are 200. Although that seems unlikely since managers are under tremendous pressure to keep tabs on people.

For those of you looking for proof of this please review LDS inc's policy on divulging corporate policies. Fortunately there have been enough whistle blowers to give us this small but accurate picture.

None of the members are 'alive'...

They are the walking zombies of the world...

Lights are on; nobody home...

The end result of extensive washing of the brain...

Mental image: cart and hand bell-

"Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead!"

Any number given by the Church would be untrue. The cojcolds never gives true information, and there is no way I would believe any numbers given by the scc.

If someone with an outside interest and not the church was able to come up with numbers I would believe it. But the church is unable to be truthful in anything, It is the history and the character the church has maintained. Knowing that, I could not in good faith believe any numbers it produced.

The tscc still can make exmos believe its lies. There would be nothing good in it for the tscc to post numbers of resignations, it might plant a seed. There would be nothing good in it to post true numbers to anyone. Just use cult mentality and change the subject and use smoke and mirrors to make people believe. the profit is just like the wiz of oz, smoke, mirrors, and lies and convince people (like lemmings) that the truth is spoken.

if you know the church is a sham and done your own research using the church documents and found out the real truth; why would you acknowledge anything the church publishes as truth. it is not capable of the truth.

Even the church statement on the video of the mass resignation shows that. change the subject. and yes, I like many other exmos will welcome all past cult members with open arms and support.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/30/2013 07:16PM by wondering.

So if Mormons think that cooked fraud numbers get them out of cult status it is I portent work to push back on these made up numbers.

GBH follow-up to his butchering of the 60 Minutes interview with Mike Wallace.



Mr. Wallace: “Why is it that Mormons apparently have so many children?”

Reply: “We don’t dictate family size. That is left to the father and the mother, the husband and wife. And we expect them to make of this the most serious business of their lives, the rearing of the family. …”

Next question: “There are those who say that Mormonism began as a cult. You don’t like to hear that.”

Response: “I don’t know what that means, really. But if it has negative connotations, I don’t accept it as applying to this Church. People may have applied it; they may have applied it in the early days. But look, here is this great Church now. There are only six churches in America with more members than this Church. We are the second church in membership in the state of California. We are reaching out across the world. We are in more than 150 nations. This is a great, strong, viable organization with a tremendous outreach. … You will find our people in business institutions, high in educational circles, in politics, in government, in whatever. We are [rather] ordinary people trying to do an extraordinary work.”

Source

http://www.lds.org/ensign/1996/11/this-thing-was-not-done-in-a-corner?lang=eng

Back into that box shaped like Utah you go. Second largest church in California, what an absolutely fraud



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 07/01/2013 11:56AM by gentlestrength.

How many of the three to five million really believe?

I'd love to know that number

I think 3 to 5 million participating members is a perfectly reasonable guess. However inaccurate it may be, it is a damn sight more accurate than LDS Inc's claimed 14+ million.

When I last did my calculations I came up with a figure of 4 million so I would happily support an estimate of 3-5 million to allow a margin of error.

One thing for sure, the church knows the actual figures. It is really good with numbers, will know baptisms, deaths, resignations, excommunications, address unknown file,ordinations, seminary graduates, and the actual activity rate.

The fact that it 'cherry picks' some numbers and does not release others is par for the course of a lying, manipulative cult. Why would it be truthful? It was founded on lies and perpetuates itself through lies.

Shame on you lying apostles.

Here is a follow-up from GBH to his parsed Larry King Libpve interview. On Church growth he follows up with this beauty.

I agree with those who believe the Church is very detail oriented on its' membership records. People who affirm a church growth and count are knowingly lying and defrauding for reasons that are apparent, but also theirs. A perfect life of deception and guile or a life of genuine authentic, albeit flawed living. I chose the latter, Latter-Day Saints choose the former.

Question 5: To what do you attribute the growth of the Church?

We are growing. We are growing in a wonderful way. Between natural growth and converts baptized, we are adding about 400,000 per year. On a base of 10 million, that is about 4 percent, which is exceptionally good for a church.

People are looking for a solid anchor in a world of shifting values. They want something they can hold to as the world about them increasingly appears to be in disarray.

They are welcomed as new converts and are made to feel at home. They feel the warmth of the fellowship of the Saints.

They are put to work. They are given responsibility. They are made to feel a part of the great onward movement of this, the work of God.

And, of course, we have missionaries to assist them in their search for truth.

They soon discover that much is expected of them as Latter-day Saints. They do not resent it. They measure up and they like it. They expect their religion to be demanding, to require reformation in their lives. They meet the requirements. They bear testimony of the great good that has come to them. They are enthusiastic and faithful.

Source

http://www.lds.org/ensign/1998/11/what-are-people-asking-about-us?lang=eng



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/01/2013 11:45AM by gentlestrength.

For most countries self claimed membership in census data is about a third of church official figures.

And a lot of inactive members with no other affiliation will still put down a church they got baptized in as their religion. Churches who actually report the numbers in the pews find that census data overestimates membership. So actual actives will be lower than census figures.

They keep inactive members on the roles until they are 110. Probably true rather they resigned or not. The one bright thing about the fools who stay in, is that they stop getting counted the second their heart stops beating.

We think. Local 'yes', corporate--how do we know it's a made up number. If they were forced to document all 14 million plus where do they get the extra 9 to 11 million? The resigned, excommunicated, missing, dead, and possibly made up. I never did, but I it possible Mormon missionaries make up convert baptisms? I certainly think it is possible, saw how it was possible.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/01/2013 01:26PM by gentlestrength.