In the thread "mormon stumpers", John Manning wrote:
> "...about the same number of people said they had joined the LDS Church
> as said they had left it."
>
> CUNY Survey
>
> When the Graduate Center of the City University of New York conducted an
> American Religious Identification Survey in 2001, it discovered that
> about the same number of people said they had joined the LDS Church as
> said they had left it.
>
> The CUNY survey re****ted the church's net growth was zero percent.
Not true. At the website you linked,
> http://www.gc.cuny.edu/faculty/research_briefs/aris/key_findings.htm
on Exhibit 1, they show
Mormon/Latter-Day Saints:
1990 - 2,487,000
2001 - 2,787,000
My calculator says this is a 12 percent increase.
Each General Conference in April, there is a Statistical
Re****t published by the LDS, compiled as of Dec. 31. It
includes a total church worldwide member****p figure.
This number is calculated by counting the names on the
member****p rolls, which can only get there by people
being baptized when old enough to make a conscious
decision. It takes into account, I believe, people who
are removed from the rolls, whether by excommunication
or death.
As of Dec. 31 The Member****p was
1990 7,760,000
1991 8,120,000
1992 8,406,895
1993 8,696,224
1994 9,024,569
1995 9,340,898
1996 9,694,549
1997 10,070,524
1998 10,354,241
1999 10,752,986
2000 11,068,861
2001 11,394,522
2002 11,721,548
2003 11,985,254
2004 12,275,822
2005 12,560,869
2006 12,868,606
2007 13,193,999
This equates to annual growth of 2.3 to 4.6 percent.
Over the years, most of the member****p has been in the
U.S. but recently we passed "parity", where there are now
more LDS outside the U.S. than inside, and growth outside
is greater. If you figure that in 2001, about half the LDS
were in the U.S, this data would give a number of 5,697,000
as opposed to the CUNY study's 2,787,000.
The LDS data here doesn't reflect active v. inactive
member****p. Presumably some inactive LDS will not tell
a poll they are LDS, but I don't think that would be
most of them. Perhaps, if we assume that a *majority*
of inactive LDS would not tell a stranger they were LDS,
then these numbers are perhaps within the accuracy of
the poll.
I believe your claim of zero growth is based on Exhibit
7, which shows numbers for "switched in" and "switched
out", which don't tally with Exhibit 1. Nor do they
seem reasonable. We've been baptizing 300,000 people
a year for the last several decades, but the poll
indicates that only 441,000 in the U.S. have "switched
in" to become LDS. And Exhibit 7 covers a period of
many years, maybe 75 - the verbiage associated with it
says, "...there is no indication in the current data
whether the "religious switching" actually occurred in
the 1990s or earlier. Surely, for our older respondents
the switching very likely had occurred earlier."
There can be little question, however, that the LDS
growth is real. Everywhere, there is much evidence
of it. We used to have 10 or 20 thousand missionaries,
we now have 50 or 60 thousand. You see them everywhere.
You see new chapels everywhere. The members of the
Church are attending new chapels, closer to where they
live. There are more stakes. The ratio of LDS to non-
LDS in the United States and the world used to be
around 1 to 1000, now it's more like 1 to 50, as you
can probably verify just among the people of your own
aquaintance. And the numbers presented above, from
both CUNY polls and LDS records, demonstrate a
consistent and steady growth, and they tally with our
other figures we post, such as convert baptisms, number
of stakes, number of church units, etc. New wards and
stakes don't get made, and new Temples don't get built,
if the active member****p isn't real.
But, if you want to content yourself that all this is
not happening, because one of the numbers in an obscure
study says zero percent, you can do that.
Wood
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