The Church Could Officially Start Shrinking In 2022.

[_SteelHead]

Compare church growth rates to birthrates in Utah.

[_Res Ipsa]

I think the current trends in official LDS membership could be partly explained by the 110 year policy for inactive members. Reported growth rates were overstated because the Church deferred removal of people from the olds who clearly no longer considered themselves LDS. Like deferred maintenance on your house, at some point you have to catch up. For the church, the impact really hits as the percentage of actual new members each year drops. The decline in growth rates may be overstated, as the Church removes more and more 110ers that haven’t been active for decades. I’m guessing that big surge in Latin American baptisms decades ago is just starting to hit.

Which leads me to ask: is it possible that these businessmen recognized at some point that they were carrying increasing huge numbers of inactive on the books and started amortizing them over time? Didn’t a couple GAs go down to South America at some time and close some stakes? Did they remove members at the same time?

[_Lemmie]

I was looking at some articles related to growth as discussed here, and stumbled across this response. I apologize for being off-topic, but I just wanted to share the deep wisdom occasionally to be found in comments, like the rare blooming of certain desert succulents. In fact, I might have to revive my long-dormant but well-established LDS womanly sewing skills and crewel-embroider this on a throw pillow or maybe decoupage it onto a piece of wood:

dubliner
March 3, 2019 at 3:31 am

You clearly don't speak Mormon, which is one of the most passive aggressive dialects of American English. If they say you are underestimating, then yes they are calling you pig-ignorant. But bless your heart!

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginal ... ptote.html

[_lostindc]

It takes roughly a couple hours of web searches to sink the Mormon church. The Church is absolutely on it's way out.

[_Physics Guy]

In my experience, those options are usually exercised as a matter of course. There will almost always be a full-court press for the children of inactives or the psychologically vulnerable. I would be surprised if a bishop or missionary had the option of adding an 'easy' member to the list and passed it up even if their numbers already looked fantastic. But maybe they'll look harder when their number is 0. There is probably some effect here, I just think it would be dwarfed by the effects of the big decisions the leadership makes on who counts as a member, but maybe I'm wrong. It's hard to know when we are dealing with an organization that is trying their best not to be transparent.

I would defer on this to anyone with experience, since I'm just speculating, but for what it's worth that also sounds reasonable to me.

Central fudging was my own orginal guess just because it seemed simple, but I backed off on it because somebody pointed out that the year-by-year numbers bounce around a fair bit. Maintaining a steady average trend for thirty years by deliberate fudging at a high level, while allowing a lot of individual years to look kind of bad in comparison with the previous year, just didn't really make sense to me after I thought about it. It wouldn't have looked consistently good in the short term, and it doesn't look good in the long term, either, because looking good long-term would need better than linear growth.

So I was more persuaded by Gadianton's theory of lower-level fudging, which would tend to keep to a steady trend on average but which would still vary a fair bit year-to-year because different places will still always have good and bad years.

But there might be a way for high-level fudging to have the same kind of steady-trend-plus-noise effect, by making changes every few years in how the numbers were officially computed. The high fudger would have to have the opportunity to keep revising and re-revising the calculations at least several times over the course of thirty years; just one or two re-jiggerings wouldn't have kept the trend straight for so long. But if there were chances to re-tweak the rules every few years, then it might work like this.

The numbers fall from one year to the next; the High Fudger says, "Uh oh," but lets the figures stand because they can't go changing the rules every year. The next year is a good year; the numbers tick up a bit. Again the numbers can stand. But then the next year shows a big drop, and this just will not do. The High Fudger changes the rules for computing the numbers and, Boom, the next year's reported figure ticks up nicely in consequence. The following year again falls, but thanks to the re-jiggered rules it still shows a bit more Mormons added than were added five years before.

Now repeat that pattern for a total of thirty years. Perhaps it would indeed tend to show thirty years of reported figures bouncing up and down around a steady average, even though if the same computing method had been used throughout the steady trend would have clearly been down.

[_Lemmie]

I’ll have to see if I can find the reference, but, re: this idea of trend I seem to recall reading that the LDS reporting of numbers is done in some reports as monthly reporting of a quarterly average, or monthly posting of a 12 month running total, instead of just straight numbers. Any type of reporting like that makes fudging easier to do.

Also, wasn’t the change in 1989 or 87 when births of children of record started being counted as membership? Technically, I think if they are not baptized by 10 the membership is supposed to come off the records, but since no information is released, who knows if that happens. Maybe if their family becomes inactive, they can technically be considered “inactive” not unbaptized, and their record stays in until they are 110.

I also wouldn’t put it past a fudger to add baptisms to the membership total while “forgetting” that that child of record was already counted as a member. Maybe a duplicate record gets created, by virtue of a tiny typo, and with no incentive to remove duplicates it just stays. Creating duplicates anytime there is confusion could be a way to be righteously thorough, but really just subconsciously fudging to please the higher ups.

[_fetchface]

I’ll have to see if I can find the reference, but, re: this idea of trend I seem to recall reading that the LDS reporting of numbers is done in some reports as monthly reporting of a quarterly average, or monthly posting of a 12 month running total, instead of just straight numbers. Any type of reporting like that makes fudging easier to do.

I was never a clerk, so I'm no expert on this, but the quarterly reporting or monthly, etc. is different from reporting membership. Membership is simply the total of the number of records in the unit. SLC already knows this number at any given instant and it doesn't require reporting. In fact, you could say that SLC tells the unit how many members are in it, not the other way around.

The only way to inflate the number of members in a unit (at the local level) is to create more records. That happens when a child is born to members or someone is baptized and the clerk creates a new record.

[_I have a question]

I’ll have to see if I can find the reference, but, re: this idea of trend I seem to recall reading that the LDS reporting of numbers is done in some reports as monthly reporting of a quarterly average, or monthly posting of a 12 month running total, instead of just straight numbers. Any type of reporting like that makes fudging easier to do.

I was never a clerk, so I'm no expert on this, but the quarterly reporting or monthly, etc. is different from reporting membership. Membership is simply the total of the number of records in the unit. Salt Lake City already knows this number at any given instant and it doesn't require reporting. In fact, you could say that Salt Lake City tells the unit how many members are in it, not the other way around.

The only way to inflate the number of members in a unit (at the local level) is to create more records. That happens when a child is born to members or someone is baptized and the clerk creates a new record.

The control comes at the other end, when deciding to remove from the records inactive members who may have died. I believe the Church has made the decision to remove all members who reach 110 years old, who they haven’t been notified previously had died. Changing that to 109, or 111 would have the effect of moderating the total.

[_Lemmie]

... Membership is simply the total of the number of records in the unit. SLC already knows this number at any given instant and it doesn't require reporting. In fact, you could say that SLC tells the unit how many members are in it, not the other way around....

Not to be indelicate about it, but since there is no transparency, what SLC knows and what they tell us are not necessarily the same thing.

The only way to inflate the number of members in a unit (at the local level) is to create more records. That happens when a child is born to members or someone is baptized and the clerk creates a new record.

Agreed. And once records are created, deleting them seems virtually impossible. Looking at the LDS tech forums, there are many questions and complaints about being unable to delete temporary records or duplicate records, confusion over “nonmember” “linked” records that seem to be counted as membership records, etc.

Also, a minor issue, but related to PG’s point about revising and re-revising categories and definitions, I read today that while children of record memberships are supposed to be removed if the child is not baptized, there are exceptions that result in that membership technically being counted, apparently, like a full member.

[_fetchface]

Not to be indelicate about it, but since there is no transparency, what SLC knows and what they tell us are not necessarily the same thing.

I agree completely. I formally resigned but it would not surprise me one bit to find out that SLC still counts me in the total that they give for membership.