Utah Pirate Radio

I hear so much about the LDS growth.  The LDS growth this, and growth that.

The problem is that the LDS church sends out about 52,000 missionaries per year (down about 8000 from just 10 years ago), and despite dozens of temple dedications, and an increased missionary effort, as well as adding 100’s of new meeting houses, the LDS are not gaining members.
What that means, is that they are losing as many members as they are gaining.
In Utah, they are just plain losing members.  If not for 3rd world countries, the LDS would be bleeding membership and losing members. 
However, even in those 3rd world countries that the LDS are gaining members, they are only seeing about a 5% retention rate..

About the LDS “gowth”. Here is more reliable information for you.

Check out these articles.
1. Avenues wards continue to lose members
http://www.sltrib.com/ci_2886597

2. Mormon portion of Utah population steadily shrinking
http://www.sltrib.com/ci_2886596

3. Keeping members a challenge for LDS church
http://www.sltrib.com/lds/ci_2890645

 ~ The Utah Pirate
From Mormon Curtain

If you think the SL Tribune articles on pathetic Mormon Church growth were good, then you should check out this church statistics page:

http://www.cumorah.com/harvest.html

Here are some interesting facts cited from the page:

Twice as many missionaries, half the converts

“The average missionary in 1989 brought 8 people into the church, while in 2000 the average missionary brought 4.6 people into the church. When one accounts for actual activity and retention rates, with the great majority of LDS convert growth occurring in Latin America and other areas with low retention, and only 20-25% of convert growth occurring in North America, one finds that of the 4.6 persons baptized by the average missionary each year, approximately 1.3 will remain active. This declining growth comes in spite of unprecedented increase in opportunity. From 1990 to 2000, the LDS Church opened an additional59 nations to proselyting.”

“241,239 LDS convert baptisms were reported for 2004, the lowest number of converts since 1987. Other recent years have also demonstrated decelerating church growth. Over the past decade, LDS missionaries have been challenged to double the number of baptisms, but instead the number of baptisms per missionary has halved.”

Church growth down to 3% per year

“The LDS Church is one of the few Christian groups with a large missionary program to experience declining growth rates in spite of widening opportunities. An analysis of annual LDS statistical reports published in the May Ensigns of each year demonstrates that LDS growth has declined progressively from over 5% annually in the late 1980s to less than 3% annually from 2000 to 2004.”

Pathetic Mormon presense in Europe

“There are over 570,000 active Seventh-day Adventists in Kenya alone, but less than 570,000 Latter-day Saints (of which less than 200,000 are active) in all of continental Europe, Asia, and Africa combined. After more than fifteen years of proselyting in Russia with the largest full-time missionary force of any denomination, LDS membership has risen to only 17,000, with a fraction of those members remaining active. The same period has seen the number of active Jehovah’s Witnesses in Russia rise to over 140,000, with some 300,000 individuals attending conferences. There are more active Jehovah’s Witnesses in the countries of Georgia or Armenia than active Latter-day Saints in all of Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Russia together. There are fewer than 100,000 active Latter-day Saints in all of Europe, including the United Kingdom.”

Based on growth, Jehovah’s Witnesses is more true church than Mormon Church

“Given that the Mormons are generally viewed as the world’s most successful new religion and had about an 80-year start on the Witnesses, this is an astonishing achievement.” It is even more astonishingwhen we consider that, since Jehovah’s Witness participation significantly surpasses raw membership alone while LDS participation is only a fraction of raw membership, the number of active and participating Jehovah’s Witnesses worldwide far surpasses the number of active and participating Latter-day Saints. In 1935, there were 56,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses worldwide and 746,384 Latter-day Saints. Since 1935, the number of active Jehovah’s Witnesses has multiplied their numbers by a factor of more than a hundredfold, while LDS membership has multiplied by a factor of twenty, with only a fraction of that number representing active members.”

Christian churches growing much faster than Mormon Church

“The Seventh-day Adventist Church was organized in 1849 and recently overtook the LDS Church with 13 million members. Seventh-day Adventists were adding an average of 3,176 new members each day in 2000,15 and have experienced increased growth since that time, adding between 900,000 and1.2 million members each year. In 2004, the LDS Church added an average of 661 converts and 270 children of record each day, from which only a minority go on to experience meaningful church activity. The Assemblies of God are growing at approximately 10% per year, or over three times the growth rate of the LDS Church, while the Seventh-day Adventists report growth two to three times LDS rates at 5.6-8% per year.”

Only Four Million Active Mormons Worldwide

“While the Church makes no claims about member activity rates and no official reports of LDS activity rates are published, the Encyclopedia of Mormonism notes: “Attendance at sacrament meeting varies substantially. Canada, the South Pacific, and the United States average between 40 percent and 50 percent. Europe and Africa average about 35 percent. Asia and Latin America have weekly attendance rates of about 25 percent.” While various idiosyncratic definitions of activity exist, the definition of members attending church weekly is the simplest and most meaningful. However, rates calculated by dividing church attendance by total membership may over-represent actual activity if nonmember visitors, small children, and other attendees are counted regardless of membership status. By multiplying the number of members in each area by the fractional activity and summating the data, one comes up with a worldwide LDS activity rate of approximately 35%, or approximately 4 million members. This is very similar to estimates published by the Associate Press in April 2003: ‘While the church doesn’t release statistics on church activity rates, some research suggests participation in the church is as low as 30 percent.’ For comparison, Adventist News Network reported in 2001 that worldwide Seventh-day Adventist member retention rates had fallen from 81% in previous years to a still very impressive 78% at present.”

Mormonism not sustaining growth from within

“Only about four million of the 11.3 millionLDS members worldwide are active, and therefore likely to raise their children in the Church. Fractional annual proportional increases in LDS children of record relative to growth rates of healthy populations around the world correlate closely with low activity rates, suggesting that a large majority of inactive members raise their children outside of the church. Second, birth rates have declined substantially among the lifetime North American LDS members that have traditionally constituted the core membership of the LDS faith. Active LDS in the US average about three children per family, which represents a large decline from twenty years ago. A fertility rate of 2.1 children per couple is required for population replacement. With only 22% of Latter-day Saints born to active families in the U.S. remaining active lifelong and another 44% returning to the Church after periods of inactivity, the natural growth of Latter-day Saints in the U.S. appears to be below the level required even to sustain a stable population.”

Lower levels of Temple Marriages

“The Encyclopedia of Mormonism notes: “The percentage of adults in a temple marriage varies from about 45 percent in Utah to less than 2 percent in Mexico and Central America… For all of South America, with 2.25 million members, less than 1.8% of the total adult membership has been married in the temple.” This is a significant finding, since approximately 35% of all LDS members live in Latin America. Sociologist Tim Heaton notes that “Mexico saints have fewer children than the national average.” Difficulty in generating new LDS families through temple marriages has been a chronic problem for the church, especially outside of North America, where many young people marry outside of the Church or remain unmarried.”

Decline in new church units not because of unit size changes

“In 2002, LDS unit growth fell further to 0.22%, less than one-seventh of the annual rate of world population growth. Those who insist that the low number of new LDS units being formed is a result of policy changes influencing unit size are uninformed: the average number of LDS members per unit has remained relatively stable, going from 439 per unit in 1973 to 431.7 in 1991 and 437 in 2001.”

Hinckley lied about the numbers

“In 1998, President Gordon B. Hinckley stated: “We are experiencing a combined growth of converts and natural increase of some 400,000 a year. Every single year that is the equivalent of 160 new stakes of 2,500 people each.” This statement has been widely quoted as evidence of the Church’s rapid growth. In fact, the Church has never yet experienced a net gain of 400,000 members in a single year, nor has there ever been a year in the history of the Church when 160 or more stakes were formed. The highest stake gains ever were of 142 in 1995 and 146 in 1996, which were up from annual gains of 32-78 over the preceding decade. Over the most recent five-year period forwhich data are available (1998-2003), the Church gained a total of 119 stakes, or an average of only 24 stakes per year. The low number of congregations and stakes being formed reflects fractional retention of converts.”

LDS Congregational Growth in Perspective

“In comparison to the 26,670 congregations serving the 12.256 million nominal LDS members, the Seventh-day Adventist Church had 12.894 million baptized adult members in 117,020 Sabbath Schools (congregations) meeting in 53,502 churches, while the Jehovah’s Witnesses with 6.5 million members list 96,894 congregations in their August 2004 membership annual report. This is not because LDS congregations are particularly large, but because the great majority of LDS members on the rolls are inactive. While on paper the LDS Church appears to be roughly the same size as the Seventh-day Adventist church in terms of members, and much larger than the Jehovah’s Witness organization, in reality, the latter two organizations are both far larger in terms of the total number of committed, active, and contributing members.”

Read more at the Mormon Curtain