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Church statistics. Looks like the church may be slowly dying

Posted: Mon Apr 02, 2018 6:36 pm
by okay75
Out of curiosity, I put all the church's statistical information from 1989 to the present in excel. Things aren't looking very good. Amount of people leaving the church (derived from total membership that year - total membership previous year + convert baptisms + eight-yr-old baptisms) has been going up slowly since '99. Convert baptisms have a slight down trend since '97, with a couple rebounds after missionary age change and advent of preach my gospel. To give perspective, the mean convert baptisms per year from 1989 to 1999 was 306,947 while the same from 2007 to 2017 was 269,307. Doing the same with net change in membership shows things are worse (because of members leaving the church presumably). From 1990 to 2000 the mean was 342,623 and from 2007 to 2017 it was 295,414. The last four years have been particularly bad. Net growth in membership went below 270,000 only once from 1990 to 2013 but three times from 2014 to 2017. The number of rebaptized - excommunicated/people leaving the church never went less than -100,000 any of the years I looked at except the last four. Even amount of eight-yr-olds decreased over the last four years.
Do you guys think that President Nelson's meager reforms can reverse this or will it take something more drastic?

Re: Church statistics. Looks like the church may be slowly dying

Posted: Mon Apr 02, 2018 6:55 pm
by slavereeno
The changes may slow the exodus down a little. Some of the fence sitters I know have been making "revelation" and "true profit" claims since yesterday.

Re: Church statistics. Looks like the church may be slowly dying

Posted: Tue Apr 03, 2018 8:19 am
by Just This Guy
Okay75, is it possible to post your excel sheet? I would be fin to take a look at the numbers.

The only thing I can see casing a major change in this trend would be for the church to come out with some major reforms. We are talking Martin Luther level things. There is simply too much out there about the church that they are fighting for people to stop leaving. And it seams like every few months there is another major embarrassment that hit the news media. As long as that continues, I think we will sell the same trend occuring.

It would take a major shake up in leadership and a major change in course. Even then, that probably would result additional losses until things settled down. Take a look at the CoC for what happened with they made the move away from the BOM and JSjr

Re: Church statistics. Looks like the church may be slowly dying

Posted: Tue Apr 03, 2018 8:38 am
by Thoughtful
I'm really interested to see March stats on QuitMormon.

Re: Church statistics. Looks like the church may be slowly dying

Posted: Tue Apr 03, 2018 3:18 pm
by okay75
So, I am not finding how to post the spread sheet. The best I could do is publish it to the web in google sheets. Just use this link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... Ki/pubhtml
And I made several graphs displaying the information better here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2P ... 2HNHp9/pub