If the LDS Church were shrinking, would you know it? The question of whether the Church is growing or shrinking is a relevant issue for a variety of reasons. Just off the top of my head, I can think of: (1) The huge investment in member time and money in supporting roughly sixty thousand full-time LDS proselyting missionaries. That investment and sacrifice is a lot less appealing if the end result is fewer members, not more members. And: (2) the oft-repeated metaphor of the Church as the stone cut from the mountain, growing as it rolls down the hill until it fills the earth. If the stone shrinks as it rolls down the mountain, there might be nothing left when it reaches the bottom of the slope. That’s an entirely different metaphor for the future of the Church.
But the more specific question is: If the LDS Church were shrinking, would you know it? How would you know it? I can tell you one way you would *not* know it. No apostle is going to stand up in Conference and give a talk that starts like this: “Brothers and sisters, I have some sad news to report: The Church is shrinking.” Nope, not gonna happen. Even if there were reliable statistics to that effect (and the Church collects an awful lot of statistics) such a public statement would never be made. Even if said apostle was in possession of reliable statistics that showed the Church was shrinking, what would be said (if anything) would something like this: “Brothers and sisters, I have visited many states and many countries over the last twelve months on various Church assignments, and I am thrilled to report that the Church and its members are stronger than ever.”
A related methodological question is how to define a shrinking Church. What do we measure? What exactly is shrinking? Total formal membership? Total active membership? Total stakes and districts? Total wards and branches? Tithing contributions? I have not been an active follower or the various analyses of LDS statistical reports, but let’s look at just the most recent LDS statistical reports to get a sense of what is going on: What they are telling us and what they are not telling us. I’m looking at official LDS reporting as of December 31, 2021 and December 31, 2022.
Total Membership. Year-end 2021 was 16,805,400. Year-end 2022 was 17,002,461. That’s an increase of 197,061, or a little over 1%. But those numbers are not as meaningful as you might think. First, the reported total membership number includes lots of dead people. When an active member dies, that info gets reported up the chain, but when inactive members with no connection to a ward (but still on the rolls at the COB) dies, nothing gets reported up the chain. They stay on the rolls as “dead people counted as members of the Church” (a statistical category I just made up, because it is obviously a thing even if it is not acknowledged or reported by the Church). Only when these dead people still on the official roll reach the age of 120, I’m told, are they dropped from the rolls. Perhaps there is a special section in the spirit world for these undead spirits: “Sorry, you all can’t go mingle with the other spirits until the Church acknowledges that you are no longer living. It will only be a few decades.” There must be several hundred thousand of these undead souls who were, at some point in their lives, baptized as LDS.
Second, total membership is not broken out by country. The Church certainly has total membership statistics by country, but doesn’t release them publicly, at least to my knowledge. If total membership is growing in some areas but overall total membership is fairly flat, the reasonable inference is that total membership is shrinking in other places. Like maybe in the United States, where there seems to be a steady stream of bad PR stories that hit the news from month to month.
Third, what we really want to know is active membership. Even with the fairly lax standard that “active member” is someone who attends at least one meeting a month, we all know that “active membership” is maybe one-third of total membership. Just look at your ward list. But the Church does not report “active membership.” It’s possible that internally tracked “active membership” is dropping, even as publicly reported “total membership” is slightly growing. If active membership is your measure of whether the Church is growing or shrinking, it may in fact be the case that right now the Church is shrinking. They just won’t tell you (and won’t publish the statistics that would allow you to make that determination for yourself).
Measuring Active Membership. A better measure of active membership is total units, which is publicly reported. From year-end 2021 to year-end 2022, reported wards and branches went from 31,315 to 31,330. That is basically zero growth (okay, it’s .05%). This is another indication that the “active Church” is now shrinking. And that’s a worldwide measure. In Europe and the United States (and Canada, let’s not forget Canada) the “active Church” is almost certainly shrinking. If the number of wards and branches in the worldwide Church is flat and they are forming new wards and branches in Africa and a few other places, then wards and branches are being merged or dissolved in other places.
What does it mean to live in a shrinking Church? There’s a topic you won’t hear in General Conference or in Sacrament Meeting. But it is certainly the case that living in a shrinking Church brings a different mentality, a different attitude. Think of where you work. If the company is growing, there is a positive attitude. Budgets are going up. Raises are handed out. New leadership positions open up for your next promotion. The company is hiring new employees. But if the company is in a downturn with fewer sales and lower revenue, bad things happen. Budgets go down. People get terminated, even good employees, say when an entire department or division gets closed down. Everyone gets nervous, wondering if they or their department might be the next to go. An entirely different mindset settles over the entire company. Just as managers of a shrinking company loudly deny the company is shrinking (This is just a temporary downturn! Our turnaround plan is going to work!), LDS leaders will deny the Church is shrinking no matter how glaring the statistics or other evidence. The last thing LDS leaders want is for the rank and file to get depressed about the Church, stop attending meetings, and stop paying tithing.
So here are some questions to ponder given the almost certain fact that the “active Church” is now shrinking in many places, particularly in the US, Canada, and Europe.
- Has it ever occurred to you that the Church is now shrinking? Is this old news or a new revelation?
- Is it obvious to you that the Church in your country, state, stake, or ward is shrinking? What tells you your ward or stake is shrinking? Is there a dead canary in your local Church mine that tipped you off?
- Has your attitude changed as the Church globally or the Church in your particular community flipped from growth mode to retrenchment mode?
- I see very little change in LDS discourse, which creates another layer of dissonance. It’s one thing to live in a shrinking Church. It’s another thing to live in a shrinking Church where no one will acknowledge that it is shrinking.
- What’s the better option for leadership, claiming all is well in Zion when it is increasingly evident it is not? Or acknowledging that Good Ship Zion is slowly sinking and dealing with the fallout?
Wheat & Tares 
I believe that the Church is basically stagnating in the US and Canada (true shrinkage will not occur until the Baby Boomer generation starts aging out of active membership). There is growth in some places, such as Utah or Texas, but that is offset by shrinkage in other places such as California (for example my home ward in Northern California is less than half the size it was when I was a kid).
Even where I live in Utah County, my coworkers will notice that their neighborhoods are not as Mormon as they used to be, and they constantly complain about how their kids don’t go to Church anymore.
My favorite statistic that no one talks about is members per unit (literally just membership divided by # of branches) I’ve been tracking it since 2000. In 2000, there were 427.12 members per branch/ward. 2021 536.66 and 2022 542.69. Has your ward or branch added 109 active people since 2000? If not the church isn’t growing with regards to active members.
I live in one of the few areas of near the Wasatch Front that is not growing. My little town has stayed about 700 for the 40 years I’ve lived here. The ward is constantly churning with families moving in and out of town. The area is economically depressed but is gaining value since our taxes are going up and a few new houses are replacing old houses. The ward used to have about 125 active members out of 500 members. Now it’s maybe 90 out of 450 members in town. There are two other churches in town and they have similar activity rates with smaller membership. They used to meet in their buildings weekly, now it’s either bi-weekly, or even monthly. There are several active members from years ago that I know are no longer active because of various political stands, most notably LGBTQ issues like Prop 8 in CA. Granted it’s a small town but as I travel around Utah I notice a lot of churches being built in newer areas but chapels being closed in older areas of town. I also found it very interesting that when the church closes a building and sells it to a community or business one of the clauses in the sale is the demolition of the old building ASAP. I’m on the city council in my town and have heard this from other city council members throughout the state and have observed it in communities near me that have had buildings demolished. The only exceptions have been when a building is repurposed into a charter school like in Salt Lake City’s Marmalade District. My last observation is that numbers may have been low before COVID-19 in my town, but they are lower after Covid. There were a number who refused to wear masks or get vaccines. We even had four of those individuals die, which seems like a lot in a small community. Some members have chosen not to return since then.
So I have seen things declining where I live. Driving around Utah I see both decline and growth. I think the church’s emphasis on temples is masking the decline and is being used as a symbol of hope and renewal. With a huge emphasis on tithing, I see the church becoming much more exclusive in its membership and ignoring those on the fringes, who are leaving.
I think because membership is in the millions and reported much more globally than it is locally and because change happens slowly, most members do not see trends. They just readily accept the new ward/stake reorganization as a part of growth not shrinkage.
Eventually people will realize that the emperor has no clothes – they will have to address the shrinkage. The current administration’s methodology hasn’t been helpful.
You have “sad heaven” – guilt and manipulation on steroids. I realized with a never-mo husband and two of my three children out of the church, that heaven would indeed be an extension of my lonely church life and why would I want that? I know – my reaction was the opposite of the intent, but I also feel this emphasized point has been a problem for many.
We also have those pesky “lazy learners”. Oh the irony, so many of those who have left know considerably more than their active counterparts. For the most part, they are the opposite of lazy. As members interact and venture to bring souls back into the fold, they will discover those lazy people are anything but.
In my opinion, if the church wants to slow/reverse the shrinkage they need to start with honesty and accountability. I remember when the Internet first became available being told it was coming forth to allow the members to further their family history research. Well surprise! It’s shedding information on a much wider scale than family history. Church history is readily available, even on their own website. Between being told that a prophet will never be allowed to lead the members astray to being told we shouldn’t look to past leaders for anything they said, they need to realize they can’t have it both ways. Instead of casting shade on those who have left, act on the reasons they have left and make change. It would seem that the current admin is determined to dig their heels in and stay the course. If that is the choice, then nothing will change except the ultra secret statistics. I would love to see leadership model the behavior of repentance – acknowledge, apologize, and change their ways in areas in which they were wrong. (Financial, child-abuse, restoration of the priesthood, policy of exclusion, etc)
(1) See D&C 20:68 for what is probably supposed to happen, but doesn’t: after baptism but before confirmation, “a sufficient time” for the new member to be taught “all things concerning the church of Christ to their understanding.” And v. 69 for the new member to “manifest before the church … a godly walk and conversation…” before confirmation. Maybe we should count baptized members and confirmed members as two separate numbers, and those who are baptized but not confirmed should fall of all records after some period of time. That would make ward membership rolls more manageable, which might help reactivation efforts. The scriptural pattern would result in the number of confirmations being lower than the number of baptisms.
(2) See D&C 88:51-61 for a parable that might explain how the Lord deals with the Church leaders. The church was given to Joseph Smith, and his successors sit in Joseph’s seat, as it was said that the chief priests and Pharisees sat in Moses’ seat in Jesus’ day. I recognize my leaders as holding the keys that they hold. This parable says (to me) that the master of the field will not spend all of his time with one servant or in one part of the field, because he has other servants to visit and the field is large. I’ve never heard a church leader expound on what this parable means.
I’m OK with the Lord allowing His church to be administered by men, and I’m OK thinking that all men sometimes make mistakes. That’s kind of a pressure relief valve in my psyche–to mix metaphors, this mental position is a lubricant that reduces tension in the joints. When people aren’t allowed to have a pressure relief valve, or a little ecclesial WD-40, then boilers explode and machines jam. We teach the principle of infallibility (but deny the word), but I wonder if more people would remain active if we could acknowledge that sometimes leaders at all levels make errors. Elder Uchtdorf tried to teach this principle in October 2013 when he was in the First Presidency:
“To be perfectly frank, there have been times when members or leaders in the church have simply made mistakes. There may have been things said or done that were not in harmony with our values, principles or doctrine.” And “God is perfect and his doctrine is pure, but human beings — including church leaders — are not.”
How refreshing it was to hear that message ten years ago. I’d like to hear it renewed and repeated, but we’re stuck on infallibility, albeit by another name. I fear that one day the time might come when many will leave the Church because there will be no pressure relief valve or no oil in the joints. Flexibility doesn’t mean giving everyone everything they want. I think that Pope Francis is much more flexible than some of his predecessors in office, but he isn’t ready to ordain women priests, for example. Still, some Catholics appreciate that the current pope is willing to listen, and he listens with empathy, and that allows them to remain in the fold.
The RLDS church or Community Of Christ has about 15% of its members active. I know this anecdotally because in my Mission Center and nearby Mission Centers, we talk about it.
It doesn’t really bother me that the Church may be shrinking in the US and other parts of the world. My understanding is that most (all?) organized religion is currently in decline in the US and many other developed countries, so it is no surprise to me that the Church is following a similar trajectory. Indeed, my understanding is that Church may actually be slightly outperforming many other churches religions in terms of shrinkage/stagnation in these areas of the world.
That said, the current situation doesn’t really match what I was taught to expect growing up in the Church. I was taught that the world was going to become more and more evil to the point where our Church would essentially be the last church standing, and all the righteous would flee to the Church while the wicked would languish without any real religion. That was how the Church was going to grow in “the last days”. That certainly doesn’t seem to be happening right now in the US. While traveling abroad in 3rd world countries where the Church is growing, I have heard members talk about how the US has fallen so deep into wickedness that the growth talked about in my youth isn’t going to happen in the US. Instead, it’s going to happen in Latin America, Africa, etc. where there are still sufficient righteous people for this growth to occur. Maybe…but I’d put my money on less developed countries following the trends of more developed countries if and when they do become more developed.
The Church should publish the statistics. All of them. Members should be able to easily get accurate numbers on active membership broken down by geographical areas (cities, counties, etc.). The Church needs to increase transparency in many areas, but this one just seems like a no-brainer to me. I really doubt that learning how Church membership is declining or stagnating is going to kill the faith of most orthodox Mormons. It still makes sense to send missionaries out to find the “elect”, even if more members are leaving the Church than joining it. Being more transparent would also put a stop to all the speculation on just how bad the decline is or isn’t among other members, ex-members, outsiders, etc. Would this blog post have even happened if the Church was more transparent?
What changes have I noticed as the Church stagnates/shrinks in my area? I’ve noticed that local Church leadership seems to be much gentler than it used to be. You (privately) don’t agree with the Church’s LGBTQ stance? No problem–you can still have a temple recommend. Divorced? No problem–in fact, we want to call you to be the next bishop. Your kids are leaving the Church? Instead of lessons on how it’s the parents fault kids leave the Church, we’re now hearing lessons about how parents’ own “righteousness” can “save” their kids who have left the Church. YSAs are leaving in droves and not attending GA devotionals? Let’s sponsor a “OneRepublic” concert, so maybe they’ll actually attend our boring GA devotional afterwards. The growing Church of my youth dealt with members much more harshly and just expected them to always do what they were told. Now that membership is declining, retaining the members the Church still has has become a much higher priority, so I believe that local leadership is, in general, much, much more tolerant of the “sins” of the members they oversee.
I have a sincere question for the TBMs out there who read this: Why is the Church not thriving in this, the latter days? We have 60,000+ full-time missionaries. We have $150b+ in assets. We have a team who manages Church communications and the Church’s web site. We have dozens of GAs who manage the Church in the US and abroad. We seem to be very good at managing assets and people but not very good at attracting outsiders. Why is that? Is the world just plain evil? Why is the Gospel of Jesus Christ so uncompelling to virtually everyone (LDS membership constitutes 2/1000 of the world’s population and if you strip out the inactives it’s less than 1/1000….and if you strip out the “born into the Church” population I can only imagine the fraction).
Really, I’d like to know what the Lord has executed a plan for his people in which less than 1 out of 1000 actually live the “Covenant Path” It seems ridiculously inefficient…what am I missing?
josh h, I don’t have a definitive answer, but I know what thought works for me for now. God wants us as salt, the salt of the earth. A little salt can save an entire barrel of pork. No one wants a barrel full of salt, but a barrel of pork (the world) with a little salt (people of the covenant) seems to be God’s plan.
Georgis, D&C 20:68-69 seems to make sense, and I do not know why we don’t follow it. It seems that God intends for baptism and confirmation to be two separate events, but we treat them as two parts of one event. Maybe we should try it using God’s pattern.
There’s another trend that adds to the fake numbers: as kids grow into adulthood and leave the Church, they often remain on the parents’ membership record as if they are still in the household, but they are not. This prevents them from being harangued by a local ward when they have no interest in the Church. Often, parents allow them to remain there because they know how heavy-handed church members can be, and they don’t trust the Church to handle things right; they maybe don’t want their kids to outright resign, and so they leave them where they are. But obviously, this is inflating the stats, and I suspect it’s pretty widespread based on observation and on the discussions I’ve seen online. It pales in comparison to the 120 years old before the record is retired which is frankly pretty brash as far as tracking methods go. I know you have to draw the line somewhere, but gimme a break.
All Churches seem to be shrinking post-pandemic, and I suspect the US is going to see a huge shift (10-20%) away from religion and toward being the “nones” (agnostic or atheist, but not affiliated with any religion). Personally, conservative Christianity is a toxic non-starter at this point (Mormonism at least used to be distinguishable from Evangelicalism, but no more); I struggle to tell the difference between a Trump rally and the mainstream views in the Church at this point. But it’s no better in the Mainline Protestant denominations. Younger people have lost interest. They don’t see religion as a net positive in their life. It feels like it’s going the way of the Elks Club.
Another measure of the church’s size is the number of people who currently identify as members. This would not count people who no longer think of themselves as members but who remain on the church’s official rolls.
There is a large survey called the Cooperative Election Study (CES) that has been polling Americans every two years since 2006 in connection with elections. It’s a large data set. One of the questions on the survey is about self-reported religious affiliation.
The Washington Post ran an article last month that cited the CES. According to the article, “1.8 percent of American adults identified as Mormon in 2007. In 15 years, that total dropped to 1.2 percent. In raw terms, that’s a net loss of roughly 1 million adult members.” (my emphasis)
The Census Bureau estimates that there were 260,836,730 adult residents of the U.S. in July 2022. If 1.2 percent of those people identified as LDS, that means that approximately 3.13 million adults in the U.S. identified as LDS in 2022. The number of adults who are actively participating in the church would be lower than that, since some inactive people still identify as LDS.
As a rough comparison, the church reported total U.S. membership of 6.23 million at the end of 2021. This is not a direct comparison, since the church’s official figure includes all members, not just adult members.
Roughly, the number of U.S. adults who currently identify as LDS is approximately 3 million less than the number who are counted on the church’s rolls—about half as many as the church officially counts.
In another comment, I’ll give links to websites that are the sources for this information.
Washington Post article, “The GOP has a glaring Mormon problem”:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/07/03/republican-party-mormon-church-decline/
U.S. Census Bureau, Estimates of the Total Resident Population and Resident Population Age 18 Years and Older for the United States, States, District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico: July 1, 2022 (SCPRC-EST2022-18+POP):
https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/popest/tables/2020-2022/state/detail/SCPRC-EST2022-18+POP.xlsx
Church Newsroom article, “Church Membership Grows in 49 of 50 States,” June 7, 2022:
https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/church-membership-grows-in-49-of-50-states
Cooperative Election Study website:
https://cces.gov.harvard.edu/
I wonder when Pew Research will do its next self-reporting survey of the religious landscape. We’d get some clear idea about the US church at least.
I believe their first was 2007 and their last was in 2014.
Josh H,
Short and brutal answer: Church is boring and it brings little perceivable good into people’s lives. Now all you TBMs don’t get wound up and down vote me. I get much good from living my religion, but my religion has surprisingly little to do with the actual institutional church and church meetings. I felt better about being a member during the pandemic lock downs and realized the problem with the LDS church was the church. Living Mormonism is much better without all those darned Mormons around.
Religion is far greater than a series of truth claims one believes in. If we actually shopped religions, would the LDS Church win on the quality of its worship services? Would it win on services it provides its members? Does it provide adequate religious education? Does it reach out in Christian service to the extended world? Would it win on the social and community front? Do individuals feel like they have improved and grown due to the institutional church? Is our community supportive or are people pigeonholed and judged?
I am a TBM. But Zion is generations away.
@ji: “No one wants a barrel full of salt, but a barrel of pork (the world) with a little salt (people of the covenant) seems to be God’s plan.”
You can make analogies there and back again, but the totality of God’s children aren’t pork, and members of the LDS church aren’t salt. When talking in analogies, sure. When considering you are talking about all of God’s children, no. Try harder.
My experience with organizations that can’t/don’t/won’t fill in the gaps (be it a church, a private entity, a governmental agency, or a person), is that we all invent the numbers/narrative based on our perspective. In my experience, these inventions are normally very inaccurate. The Church would be better off to just disclose the information rather than leave us all making stuff up that is probably more salacious than the hard data. My two cents.
Chadwick, I saw wisdom in ji’s analogy. I don’t think that he was calling people a bad word by calling them pork. He wasn’t casting slurs and aspersions. Any analogy is imperfect, but think about this one. God’s plan is to save humanity. Maybe that means that only those in the Church will be saved, but that seems like God’s salvation will have little reach. What if our God is mighty to save? What if He has a plan that we cannot begin to comprehend? We understand the role of salt in preserving meat–in the past it was frequently done in barrels to provide meat to sailors on sailing ships. The salt wasn’t what really mattered in the long term, although it was necessary. It was the meat. And if we believe in a God who is powerful to save, and I do, then I cannot see the Church’s statistics as fulfilling that measure. But God sees farther than I can see. I like the analogy, because it recognizes that the salt, in and of itself, is useful and necessary, but there’s something much more important that the salt. Maybe the church is useful and necessary, but maybe the salvation of mankind is greater. I can see the God that I worship working to save a whole lot more than some miniscule and small fraction of the world’s population. I didn’t take offense at being called either pork or salt in ji’s analogy. But I did appreciate a view, a suggestion, that God may be greater than we are able to comprehend. Maybe God’s work is greater than the church. That might be a hard statement for some in the church to accept, but maybe it is still true.
Every US ward I’ve lived in (outside of Utah) has been reorganized to compensate for shrinking numbers. And this seems to be happening at a faster and faster clip. One of the meeting houses in our stake was recently sold to another faith. The average age of your typical ward member also seems to be going up and up and up, which does not bode well. Yes, this mirrors societal trends, but my perception is our problems are more acute.
@Georgis I appreciate your perspective and recognize it’s valid and helpful. Thank you for the pushback.
My perspective is that I tire of setting up systems with chosen people. Either we are all God’s children or we aren’t. To say that my neighbors need LDS church members to keep from spoiling just doesn’t work based on my experience with my very not LDS community. They are great on their own.
Old Man: your comment about the “Church is Boring” resonates with me. This past year, I’ve had several occasions to sincerely ask myself “Really, what has this Church EVER done for me; throughout my entire life?”. Candidly, this soul searching has returned one answer – time and time again – to me; aside from some small sense of community, this Church has NEVER done anything FOR ME. But, over the course of a lifetime, it has taken from me – again and again – my money, my time, my sense of well-being and many of my own (deeply personal) hopes and dreams. The Church is most definitely a TAKER.
Two things:
1) SLC could adopt the narrative that shrinking membership is a positive thing – or at least a sign of the times of sifting of the wheat from tares. It’s the last days after all and oat yourselves on the back for stick around.
2) Over time I think we’ll redefine what we consider success in the face of shrinking membership. Instead of # of baptisms overall it will become % of children born in the covenant who are baptized. Or the ratio of YM who become Elders. Or youth who marry in the temple. There will be statistics that mask shrinkage which will become more common.
Chadwick, I agree very much with your statement: “To say that my neighbors need LDS church members to keep from spoiling just doesn’t work based on my experience with my very not LDS community.” Heck, I want Church members to leave me alone, too! The way I see it, God will perform great acts beyond our ability to comprehend in spite of the members of the church because He is mighty to save, and His salvation will astound us all. I don’t want people to worry too much about my own spoilage. Part of loving my neighbor is respecting his agency. Jesus never pestered and repeatedly contacted anyone. Those who believed, believed, and those who heard but did not believe were not pressured. When some of those who believed ceased to believe, He allowed them to leave and did not send others after them.
grizzerbear55: I have also seen with dismay the financial impact to loved ones (not to mention myself at least theoretically, although I haven’t had the same type of crisis) who paid tithing under the guise of “insurance,” believing that one day when the chips are down, the church community would be there to help pull them through, only to see that like the Roach Motel, “Tithing checks in, but it doesn’t check out.” Instead of being supported through a financial or health crisis, people are treated as if they are the takers (despite what they’ve already given over a lifetime), been given strict limits on the help they can expect, been asked intrusive and demeaning questions, and felt humiliated and shamed for even asking.
I know that’s not always the case, but we ALL know how often that has happened to people. There’s a huge disconnect between the resources wards have available to them which also lean heavily on volunteer labor (usually from the Relief Society) and any meaningful access to the Church’s coffers. If only these individuals had stuck that 10% in a bank instead of handing it over to the Church (who then invested it for BIG returns), they would be covered. Now, they are not. It’s hard not to feel they were scammed, and now they can work until they die because they do not have the retirement funds they need.
I’m not sure how many people are connecting those dots, but it’s hard to unsee it.
Active temple recommends and birthrates are strong indicators to help gauge what’s really happening in the Church. The institution is so high-minded and arrogant, it doesn’t feel obligated to address its congregation of common members. In this, the Church is divided by two cultures: the culture of the institution and the culture of the congregation. The institution’s panopticon and membership surveillance approach is tyrannical and mocks the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Members are leaving the Church primarily because of the culture of the institution. Many members have faith in the restoration, but have lost trust in the institution. So at the heart of the tragic LDS exodus from the Church is the toxic culture manufactured and exported by the institution. The problem is that the institution is myopic—it can’t see from any other perspective.
How can the Church grow and move forward if the very institution responsible for growth and progress is unable to identify itself as the problem?
Unrighteous dominion pervades the LDS Establishment: the Gadiantons that profiteer from developing real estate near temple sites; the horrific paid clergy of the Church Educational System that whitewashes history, doctrine, and covenant; the Strengthening Church Membership Committee that pressures Stake Presidents to excommunicate common members, for speaking uncomfortable truths; the apologists that comfortably “lie for the Lord,” and so forth.
It seems to me that the LDS Establishment and the institution that runs the Church have colluded to rob the treasury of the congregation and reduce membership numbers in order to mitigate financial burden and operating costs of doing church stuff. The institution is infiltrated. Tares have been sowed throughout the middle management of the Church. Any sober farmer can look at the field and recognize that Zion is in bondage to the monied, wealthy class of the LDS Establishment. Right out of the Book of Mormon. The institution is the Harlot and the congregation is the Bride. Lord protect the congregation from the institution…
Chadwick, if you interpreted my analogy as suggesting the salt is important and the pork is unimportant, then you did not understand. You apparently weren’t the only one, as my comment has drawn several down-votes. I apologize for causing any confusion.
The pork is precious and is worth saving — that’s why a little salt is added. A barrel of pork (with no salt) rots and is no good to anyone. But sprinkling a little salt into the barrel of pork saves the whole barrel — that’s why salt is necessary; it saves the precious pork.
Jesus himself used the analogy of covenant people being the salt of the earth. For me, in my own way, this approach gives meaning to Jesus’s analogy. I have never heard anyone provide an explanation of that analogy that works for me, so I have my own. I suppose people in Jesus’s day down-voted him for saying covenant people are the salt of the earth — it seems to be the human condition.
@ji thank you for the response. I don’t want to take away from the OP on a side conversation so I’ll be brief and move on.
Perhaps I’m still misunderstanding but it seems you are saying that church members (salt) are currently saving those not of our faith tradition (the precious pork). I don’t believe that and honestly I cannot think of an example of that. While we have an obligation to help each other, I’m not my neighbor’s savoir, even if I wanted that role. For me personally, pretending that I had that role would probably cause more harm that good.
If then church is shrinking than everyone who hates or dislikes the church gets to enjoy that. Who wouldn’t enjoy watching an institution they dislike dwindle into utter irrelevance?
I grew up in SLC and now live in another area of the county – the stake where I grew up (Holladay/Cottonwood area) has merged a few wards whereas where I live now (somewhere near Kennecott) is on yearly lists of fastest growing areas in the US and there seems to be a shortage of church buildings.
Grizz,
Our religion is internalized. I no longer do things “for the church “. I love and serve people. I build the kingdom of God but take a long-term view. In those instances where I recognize the arm of the institutional church, I strive to be extra discerning about if I want to be involved. It helps keep me sane.
Oh, my. Bless your heart, Chadwick — it seems you’re having a bad day. Yes, you are still misunderstanding — I hope not purposefully.
Certainly I haven’t said that you are your neighbor’s savior, but you might be right that you would be unsuited for the role.
Still, as the old aphorism says, God works in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform. For me, the Savior’s teaching about the salt of the earth must have some meaning.
I do apologize for upsetting you by using pork in my analogy. I had no intention of upsetting anyone. I might have to use vegetables the next time I use the analogy, as salt can also be used to preserve vegetables such as corn, peas, and beans.
Josh h,
The Lord’s people have always been small in number. Indeed, the numbers in the church today might be the greatest the Kingdom has ever had on the earth.
For the USA, all you have to is look at the number of new buildings. No, not temples, but the LDS chapels. The church put a stop to building all new chapels (as I am aware) around 7-8 years ago. They will only build a new one in the USA for the brand new neighborhoods in high density Mormon Jello regions, with few exceptions. Otherwise, stakes are supposed to figure it out with their current buildings. No new Chapels. Do an internet search. 10 years ago, the church would frequently roll out news articles of new stake centers; I found 1. Now…..crickets.
Another fact is the data on Matt ‘s ldschurchgrowth.blogspot.com: 31 new stakes in 2023 and only 33 in all of 2022.
Of the 2023 stakes 13/31, and 13/33 for 2022, are in the USA. For 2023 and 2022, 4 each year are outside of the Mormon corridor. Upon further exam 2 of these are in North Carolina, where young grads are moving. 2 were in OK/AR another young grad relocate site. I would propose most of the members in NC/OK/AR are Jello belt transplants, not converts. So for the USA 2022-23, of 8 new stakes, only 4 could be some what claimed by “growth” Also 7 stakes were dissolved in UT and WA. WA/ CA/ England and other places are not having shrinkage, it is near collapse.
In my non-Western USA area, the local leaders 10 years ago, tried to trick SLC in getting a new chapel built. They sent people in 1 ward to the Stake center, which was about 10 miles away, one way from their home, even with people living on the same street as the chapel. Then the local area leadership sent 2 whole wards from another stake to the original ward where the first ward was removed, but they had to travel 20 miles, one way.( with a chapel within 2-4 miles of most homes.) The whole area is a jumble with few members are attending the building closest to their home, and even out of their own stake (the stake is around 1/3 of the county of a large metro area) ( This is not Utah where inconvenient is traveling 1/2 mile). SLC has not let them build a new chapel, and one is not needed. However the irrational stake leaders have not fixed the traveling, and members are traveling to chapels and unnecessarily “sacrificing” for no real reason.
Recently, I went to my son’s Utah county ward and was even shocked how few people were in the chapel. So I vote for the church is in shrinkage.
If you live in Saratoga Springs, Rexburg or St. George you may think there is growth but it may be a “Deseret mirage”
If the leaders of the church eventually admit to the members the church is shrinking, I imagine the conversation would go something like the Seinfeld “shrinkage” episode. Substitute the leaders in the place of George and Jerry and the members in the place of Elaine and women:
George Costanza: Do women know about shrinkage?
Elaine: What do you mean? Like laundry?
George Costanza: No.
Jerry: Like when a man goes swimming… afterwards…
Elaine: It shrinks?
Jerry: Like a frigthened turtle.
Elaine: Why does it shrink?
George Costanza: It just does.
My take: The members don’t really know about it or notice, and the leaders know it is happening, but are just as powerless to stop it as a man in cold water. It’s not yet that obvious to members, but it will be increasingly difficult for leaders or members to ignore as more “shrinkage” occurs. The leaders have already started to distance their words from the “Stone cut from a mountain and filling the earth”, or on membership numbers as church progress, in favor of focusing on the faith of members as church progress.
I may be off, but when I served as bishop, a person whose whereabouts were unknown stayed on the rolls until they were 110, not 120. Also, a person was considered active if they came to sacrament meeting once a quarter, not monthly.
A bunch of whiners on here. You’re all losers. A bunch of fair-weather members.
13 ¶ Your words have been astout against me, saith the Lord. Yet ye say, What have we spoken so much against thee?
14 Ye have said, It is avain to serve God: and what bprofit is it that we have kept his ordinance, and that we have walked mournfully before the Lord of hosts?
15 And now we call the aproud happy; yea, they that work bwickedness are set up; yea, they that tempt God are even delivered.
16 ¶ Then they that feared the Lord spake often one to another: and the Lord hearkened, and heard it, and a abook of bremembrance was written before him for them that feared the Lord, and that thought upon his name.
17 And they shall be amine, saith the Lord of hosts, in that day when I make up my bjewels; and I will cspare them, as a man spareth his own son that serveth him.
18 Then shall ye return, and adiscern between the righteous and the wicked, between him that serveth God and him that serveth him not.
“Precious Pork” would be a fantastic youth motto for 2024
A few changes made in recent years really point to active shrinking. The first was changing the length of services from 3 to a 2 hour block. With some of the auxiliaries meeting once every 2 weeks it means fewer people can handle more callings. The second is consolidating EQ and HP. Fewer leaders and instructors needed. The third is eliminating YM presidency and putting the Bishopric in charge. Once again it means fewer leaders are needed. I can’t imagine any of these changes being implemented for any other reason except to allow wards and branches to function with fewer people, especially men.
Is anyone bothering to deny that active membership is shrinking in the US? It’s clearly been doing so for a while, and the pandemic accelerated it significantly.
I’m curious when the shrinking started. My guess is that somewhere between 5-10 years ago active membership in the US began contracting and has done so every year since (with the possible exception of 2020-2021).
My observations go along with others — shrinkage is real on the U.S. Wherever growth is occuring, it is likely driven by transplants moving from somewhere else.
I recall my brother once asking, “What are we selling?” That is a fair question. To me, it seems that we need something beyond obey the prophet as a message. We used to sell wholesome families, and we used to sell the restoration. What are we selling now? Is it working for us?
And I wonder if local leaders and councils really focus on serving and strengthening members and fellowship, or instead simply focus on administering the program. I fear our cultural emphasis on obey the prophet has eroded some of the vitality and enthusiasm that I seem to remember from the past. As a message, obey the prophet doesn’t appear to work — it is reactive, not proactive.
I hope these discussions can be helpful.
1. We do know the “Growth Rate” has shrunk precipitously since the 90s, to a near crawl. The church doesn’t explicitly report this, but anyone with an 8th grade math education can calculate it.
2. Now, plot the growth rate of the church against the 1) the growth if temples (they love reporting this one), and the growth in church wealth (this one is harder calculate), but we know that in 1997 the church put $7B in reserve funds (tithing money) into an investment fun, and every year thereafter added about 20% of members tithing contributions into the fund. The result: about $150B in excess funds (this is outside real estate holdings, and the value of for-profit business the church owns).
3. Now, ask yourself, why is there an inverse relationship between the member growth rate and both the growth in temples and growth in wealth?
4. Now, take out of the graph the shrinking member growth rate line. You have two very sharp up-and-to-the-right lines which are very correlated.
5. There is your answer to #3: The church is building more temples, even as membership is likely shrinking, simply because they can now afford to do so. Also, I believe it’s a place to diversify their holdings portfolio (more real estate).
6. Now here’s the kicker. TBM, exmo, or questioning active member, all of you ask the following questions:
Where are the hospitals? The shelters? The schools?
Why are the occasional alms (donations) made so publicly with lots of “see we’re charitable” fanfare?
Why have programs that enrich the members’ experience been eliminated? Road shows, pageants, sports leagues, scouting, etc. Why are members asked to clean the churches?
7. Why is the church spending all of its money on temples, real estate, shopping malls, and hedge funds, and none of it on its members’ experience, or infrastructure to aid communities?
8. The answer to number 7, to me is obvious: the church is not a church, it’s an organization of wealth managers preying upon its most vulnerable, yet most indispensable asset: its members.
9. And the conclusion to number 8: this is why the church is in fact shrinking, because astute members are catching on to the greatest ongoing fraud and scam perpetuated in history (measured by wealth creation).
10. What will it look like 10 years from now? 20? 30? 50? Simple: fewer members, more wealth.
There is no question the active and total membership of Community of Christ has been shrinking for several decades. Some critics smugly attributed that to ordaining women (starting in the mid-1980s) or LGBTQ-friendliness, or any number of other liberal/progressive issues. All that played a part, of course, but the underlying reason is that in Western nations the people who care about and are compelled by religion are aging. That affects membership, baptismz, attendance, and contributions. It’s affecting just about every Christian denomination. At the same time the CofC in so-called developing nations continues to grow and thrive. That alone calls for us here in North America to ask why.
I am heartened by the current effort in the church to not only (as a prophetic people) to discern who should be our next prophet-president but to discern just what kind of church the Holy Spirit is urging us to become. My guess (and hope) is that incredible change and transformation lay ahead. There will be more difficult years ahead, but at least we’re recognizing the problems, challenges, and opportunities. That approach will be seen by some, perhaps, as Pollyanna-ish. Or maybe it’s actually prophetic.
Yes, the church leadership will never mention the shrinking nature of the church. Even if the church membership is “growing” we can clearly see that the growth rate is declining.
Here are some charts from publicly available data (which admittedly are a few years old already): https://wasmormon.org/lds-church-growth-declining/
You have all read Jacob chapter 5 a time or two. That long, repetitive allegory of a lord trying to get his olive trees to produce good fruit. He tries one thing after another: pruning, digging, nourishing, moving saplings to other ground, grafting branches from one tree to the roots of another. Most of it fails. Now and then something does work for a time, but when the planter returns later, he finds the sporadic successes do not last. He wants to chop down his worthless, labor-sucking orchard, pile it all up, and light it on fire, but he is persuaded to keep at this negative-product endevour. He finally manages to produce one good crop of olives, and he tells his workers to store the harvest, after which he will quit while he is as close to breaking even as he ever will be, and he will burn the orchard down.
“Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat:
Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.” — Matthew 7:13-14
I’ve been following the annual statistics for decades, and the direction has been losing about .1% a year in growth of Total Membership. Without a miracle, the Church will reach 0% year-over-year growth around 2030. So just when the Church is celebrating its bicentennial, we will enter a new phase of having fewer Total Membership each year.
Most members don’t keep track of the size of the church, so as long as the Total Membership is growing each year, all is well in Zion. But when the Total Membership starts decreasing each year, they can’t spin that. The Church can’t rely on huge families to grow the church, and baptisms are dropping.
As pointed out, how the Church relates to members is changing. They are clearly in defense. They are working to prevent members from leaving more than working to gain members. They have tried to plug the hole of youth leaving between high school and missions by lowering the age for missions. They are working hard to keep the youth with more programs and devotionals, getting them to the temple and married.
But I think there is a bit of a faith crisis because many grew up with the Church proudly stating we were the fastest growing church in the world during the 1980’s and that continued to be asserted. Some people still say it today even when it clearly isn’t true. The expectation was set that we will be the stone that rolls forth and continues to grow to fill the earth. So what if that isn’t happening?
None of this means the Church isn’t true. It’s just the last days. The Church may further shrink. It may drop from 17 million to 8 million. That is more a reflection of the righteousness of the people than the Church. I think we see this in the Bible and Book of Mormon. All we’re promised is that the Church won’t completely disappear before Christ comes again. We weren’t promised that the Church would be 1 billion members.
I wonder about growth stats outside the U.S. and Europe?
My observation in the UK is that we have largely lost the rising generation, mostly due to the churches narrative on polygamy, priesthood and it’s once vicious attack on our LGBTQ community, as well as it’s self identification as Trump republicans. Nice kids want to disidentify with that, and don’t want that for their kids. I brought my kids up to be nice kids, seems like my bad.
Well, the text of the post is interesting and thought provoking, but the photo does a HUGE disservice to the point I believe the author is trying to make in this post from Aug 2023. The photo is of an empty Mormon chapel, but it doesn’t take a whole lot of looking to surmise it is from 2020 when many congregations (of all religions) were not meeting in person due to COVID regulations, and those that were often had limits on the number of attendees allowed (mandated by law or by policy). Everyone is wearing a mask; every one is hyper-spread out ( including the leaders on the stand). Just like FAIR drives many people away from Mormonism due to their laughable apologetics, critics likewise lose credibility when their material is equally sus. Critical thinking is often absent in mormonism, but it is also often absent by the critics of mormonism.
The numbers the church reports are basically useless. It was apparent to me from an early age from looking at the ward directory that less than half of our ward was active. It’s reasonable to keep them on the rolls because people do sometimes come back, but in terms of the health of the church and its congregations, active attending members are the numbers that matter. The church surely tracks that information, but for some reason has never been interested in talking about it publicly.
As for whether the church is growing or not, it looks to me like it’s basically flat, that numeric growth is being offset by declining activity rates, but it’s hard to tell. There’s so much local variability, but the anecdotal evidence of a decline is starting to accumulate. Maybe this temple building spree is about reactivating people by putting a temple nearby. I’m not convinced it’s going to do much, but I could see it being a rationale for this.
The church where I live seems to be at least maintaining numbers with new move-ins. Maybe it’s growing, but if it is, it’s slowly.
On the question of what it’s like to be in a shrinking church, I would note that this is a challenge for nearly all Christian denominations in the US right now. There are likely to be problems with morale in congregations, but actually the LDS church’s geographic boundaries and willingness to consolidate to keep congregations at a particular size probably helps with that and makes it better off than some of the mainline Protestant congregations that are disappearing. In the future, active members will travel further to attend church in a congregation that’s increasingly older and has fewer kids in it. Kids growing up in the church can expect smaller youth groups with bigger age ranges grouped together.
I suspect peak active membership was around Y2K. As a boomer myself I may not live to see if I’m correct.
Thanks for the comments, everyone.
Zwingli: “Even where I live in Utah County, my coworkers will notice that their neighborhoods are not as Mormon as they used to be, and they constantly complain about how their kids don’t go to Church anymore.” Anecdotal support for the statistics.
Nathan: total membership per unit is a great statistic. I think growth of that number just means more inactives on the ward list. We might work backwards from this to compute the (unpublished) activity rate, which is obviously falling.
ERich, it’s harder than you think to find a good image to pair with a post. Sometimes it’s easy: if I do a post on Mt. Everest, there are a thousand photos to choose from. Shrinking church? Good luck.
To me this is an obvious disadvantage of the #1 qualification to lead the church is that you didn’t die. RMN is 98, he can afford to kick a LOT of cans down the road.
I think the “salt of the earth” question is absolutely relevant to this discussion because what is the point of a One True Church if an infinitesimally small number of God’s children ever come into contact with it, let alone join it? And if that church shrinks into deeper obscurity, the question hits harder.
The idea that church members “salt” the earth somehow—that we contribute to God’s plan even by being a tiny fraction of the people here—seems comforting at first but it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.
First of all, who was salting the earth in the 1700s if there was no One True Church on earth?
Second, as Chadwick pointed out: What exactly are we doing to salt the earth? What is the mechanism? What function does a One True Church serve in God’s plan if it comes into contact with so few people? Are we setting a good example by being basically invisible to most of the world? Are our humanitarian efforts making a dent in global poverty, hunger, or conflict? Does God give the rest of humanity a pass as long as there are some Mormons somewhere minding their own business? That’s weird.
You can hit the “God works in mysterious ways” buzzer all you want, but at some point you have to wonder that if God is so mysterious, why call a prophet at all? Why go to any of this trouble if there’s some mysterious back door plan? None of it makes sense.
A couple thoughts here:
1) IMO this has less to do with the specifics about mormonism than it does about macro-level religious trends happening right now. Religious activity worldwide is way down – especially countries like the US and Canada. In 2022 only 46% of people in the US reported that religion is “very important” to them – down from 61% in 2003. Similar trends are happening in many places worldwide.
2) The LDS church’s stats don’t really raise any red flags for being fake…it would be nice to see actual activity numbers, but since it’s a church like any other church the best proxy for active membership is probably the religious importance stats from above…So of the ~6.8M members in the US, the same 46% who find it “very important” are relatively likely to meet the minimum activity requirement of attending at least once a month. (Then there’s another 26% in the US who say religion is “fairly important” that we can presume are sometimes active)
3) This has happened before. Almost exactly 100 years ago in the mid 1920s there was another macro-level religious depression. If you look at LDS membership stats from that era, they ground to a near standstill then too.
4) The LDS Church does actually publish statistics by region and country right on their “Facts and Stats” page. (https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/facts-and-statistics). You can drill down into any continent/country/US State and see the breakdown of members and congregations…it doesn’t differentiate active vs non-active, but otherwise is quite granular.
A quick sanity check using US numbers to estimate activity. I think in the US the LDS Church still requires at least 300 members to form a ward – wards rarely exceed 500 members except in places like Utah county and high growth areas (where they’re splitting things all the time anyway).
So using the raw US membership of 6,804,028 divided across the 14,614 congregations, that’s an average of 465 members per ward…there’s just not that many people in most wards in Sacrament meeting.
But using the 46%, we get 3,129,852 presumably-active members, which then means there are an average of 214 active members per congregation. There will obviously be variability in the actual sizes (some tiny branches and some huge wards), but the number seems to be a reasonable (albeit very rough) estimate of the average congregation size on a given Sunday.
Pirate Priest: I don’t have an accurate source to cite on this, just (potentially faulty) memory, but pre-pandemic, our stake made an announcement that wards were being re-distributed / organized around a smaller principle of targeting 100-150 active members so that they would be more cohesive. I remember thinking at the time that it sounded like they were going for the Dunbar number. Having grown up in a close-knit branch, the idea made sense to me.
At the time I thought this was a sort of local pilot the Church was trying out in various places, although it also occurred to me that it was probably a way to address shrinkage without copping to it.
Just a little something from our local Moscow Idaho stake. This explains the recent sale of a local chapel to another church.
Clay Hansen Unsubscribe
8:55 AM (9 hours ago)
to me
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
Moscow Idaho Stake
TO: All Members of the Stake
FROM: Clay Hansen (stake clerk)
____________________________
For your information, the following changes to the Moscow wards were implemented yesterday:
The Paradise Ridge ward was discontinued
The Rolling Hills ward was split:
All who were members of the Paradise Ridge ward are now members of the Rolling Hills ward
Some who were members of the Rolling Hills ward are now members of the Palouse River ward
The Quail Run ward was not affected by these changes
So, there are now three wards in Moscow: Palouse River, Quail Run, Rolling Hills
Details were given to members of the affected wards in a special meeting yesterday afternoon and emailed to them during the meeting.
In the Denver area, I know of six ward buildings that have been sold or are up for sale, with NO replacements having been built.