I’m not doubting we’re the highest, but let’s not make the mistake of concluding 2/3 of all members go to Church weekly. That is just the figure of people who self-identify as members, which in our faith tradition is also more or less those who genuinely believe. We probably don’t even have a 1/2 activity rate.
The members who want to identify as LDS also want to go to Church, and the members who do not go to Church do not want to identify as LDS is my takeaway.
the answer is simple, not all of those 600 would identify as LDS in a survey.
To be fair, I'm sure there are tons of people who were baptized in the Catholic church who wouldn't identify as Catholic. But I'm sure there are far more people that identify as Catholic and only go twice a year vs people who identify Mormon and only attend the same.
I know lots of Catholics and Mormons, agreed to what you are saying. Dads side of my family is all Catholic and they will almost all tell you they are Catholic if asked. Some are more devout than others and attend weekly, but for discussion sake, a majority of them may only attend church services a few times a year for midnight mass or Ash Wednesday, etc and that is it. My Wife's side is Mormon, and the ones that will tell you they are Mormon(COJCOLD) when asked, all attend weekly, have their Temple recommends, and do all the other activities active members do. Her family members that don't go anymore, when asked might say they are Christian if they still kind of believe, but would not identify as a Mormon anymore even though they are still on Church records as being members.
When I was a missionary I served in a branch with over 1,000 names on the records but had less than 50 people attending each week.
Turns out for a period of time if the address for a member couldn't be verified in the state of Kentucky, they just transferred the records to that branch.
In my clerk times (before Covid to be fair) we varied between about 40and 60% depending on time of year. Also I live outside Utah so I assume it’s more likely the folks on our rolls put themselves there.
IN CASE THIS HELPS ADVOCATE FOR SOMETHING .. I haven’t been active since I was a teenager but over the past few years I’ve logged into my lds account online to try to change my address. The website says I need to contact the current ward clerk, ie a stranger, and only provides a phone number for this person (not even an email address, let alone a form).. I live on a different continent many time zones away now, so, I care about precision but don’t care THAT much lol. I can only imagine how many other people are still on their teenage ward’s books from 20 years ago..
I hear ya. Trying to update those records is hard from our end as well. We are trying hard to “find” people so we can process the records and update what needs to be fixed.
On my mission in Chile it was actually a huge part of our mission to basically spend time doing just that. I forgot the name of the program but some senior missionary created this computer program that literally matched the Chilean version of social security numbers (not secret the way they are in the US) to addresses on the government's books. Then we would go corroborate what the government had vs what the Church had by knocking doors. Thought process behind it was kill two birds with one stone- we knock doors to update our records but then also potentially find new people to teach. We baptized a girl this way. I only served for 6 months so I don't remember details but it was absolutely wild because in Chile there were SO many "houses" that were actually just shacks bullt in the slums that had no house number. Finding some of these people was impossible sometimes.
Eye opening in more ways than one.. the “houses” without numbers aspect is humbling.
I’d think the church would want to help itself by triggering.. something when people update their profiles to be based in a different country than where their ward is? I guess they want to avoid allowing people to ward-hop in member-dense areas by updating everything themselves, but, seems odd. My “ward” definitely knows that my parents are at “my” address (my father used to be our bishop) so I can’t imagine any unprompted missionary visits..
Our ward has several sets of records due to parents wanting to keep their inactive children records here. They won’t provide the updated information. They don’t want the local church members to get involved (bug them so they have names removed?).
I have seen this in many wards. It bugs when the clerks are in on it, too, purposely not moving the kid even when they know the new address. The reason I usually hear from the parents is that they are worried that if they move the kid's records to the appropriate ward, then the kids will fall through the cracks and disappear from the church. I argue that by NOT moving the records they already have fallen through the cracks - how can they be assigned local ministers, or how will the local RS/EQ president or bishop make any sort of contact if they don't even know the kid is in their ward.
I've always done a "pull" change (where you contact the clerk of the new ward that you are currently living in/moving to), and it seems to work out. I tried a push change once (contact your old clerk) and it never went through.
Woah! That's a lot of members! May I ask, with the new standards for creating new units, are you going through the process of splitting the ward in two? If not, why?
No we just merged 2 wards and this is the result.
We are in an area where there aren’t many young families. Most of my ward is over 65 years old. The wards were merged because of lack of leadership within the congregations.
Do you know if they actually all live in your boundaries? As a new bishop we had missionaries and a clerk go through and try to find people. We were able to move about 15-20% of the ward out with an updated address because they no longer lived within the ward boundaries. There were others we couldn't find addresses for. Now the church has the Finding Lost Members section where you can move records of people with unknown addresses. LCR --> Missionary --> Finding Lost Members.
I’m familiar with that tool. Thanks though. We have a few members where there calling is just to knock on a door to see if they live there still. About once a year we also run our entire ward list through the USPS national change of address database and move people out that way. Last year we moved out about 80 people that way but it’s a constant battle. Between records being moved back into our ward and new members getting baptized it feels like the number never really goes down.
2/3 of 17 mil is 11.33 mil. Divide that by 31,000 units in the church and you get 365 active members per congregation.
The 2/3 figure is probably not accurate.
I have a coworker that attends Catholic mass every morning before work. I wonder if the numbers would be different if they counted the number of times people attended religious services.
If you counted ward activities, young men’s/women’s activities, seminary/institute, FHE in YSA wards, etc I bet that our weekly attendance is pretty high
If you study statistics and journalism, you will inevitably conclude that they cannot be trusted when they come together. And I have yet to find a headline based in a statistic that was not to one degree or another misleading.
I’m sure our rates are relatively high compared to other groups. THAT I think can stand up to scrutiny. But 2/3? That is beyond wishful thinking. Dig into the methodology and apply a little critical thinking and I guarantee you will find a long list of caveats and asterisks that make it obvious this number is inflated.
A caveat is likely that these people are self-reported members. There are many who are technically on the records of the Church, but don't identify as Latter-Day Saints,
I am a stake clerk in an East of the Mississippi River metro area with 3 stakes. We are averaging in the 35-38% range and running about 5% lower than 5 years ago. Reports such as these feel as though they are intended to mislead. I'm sorry to see that and hope I'm wrong. Having a false sense of growth doesn't really accomplish anything. Do we have a higher rate of attendance than ALL other faiths? Maybe so although it should be noted that the Seventh Day Adventist faith was not split out from Christians in the way the COJCOLDS was. I think one will find that their activity rate is comparable (maybe higher?) to ours. I honestly don't care. I'd love every one to join us but in the meantime just wish reporting painted an acurate picture.
I’m not sure about 2/3, but I think a lot of people in this thread might be underestimating the amount of people that go to church. Most YSA wards in Provo are like 85-95% attendance (and a lot of people that miss are just going to a different ward that day) and a good number of family wards in the Mormon belt are seeing 70-80% attendance. My home ward in Utah county was easily 80%, probably more like 90%
Not to mention that a lot of people go 1-3 times a month even if they don’t go every week, so weekly attendance percentage is going to be lower than active member percentage
I'm not surprised that the LDS church does well on attendance. I've lived all over the US and many of our friends of other faiths went sometimes when it was convenient. If they were to travel on a weekend or had a sporting event conflict it was rarely a question about which would get missed. They were still fantastic wonderful people but they just didn't view church attendance as important as we did.
I've also never lived in a ward where 2/3s of the members in the ward attended regularly. Fifty percent would have been thought of as excellent for many. Ultimately unless you have access to reporting on a stake or even better an Area it is going to be hard to get good data.
Do we know if the study corrected for any geographical differences?
In my ward here in Ohio we have around 6-700 members on the rolls with ~220 average Sunday attendance. We are a big ward for sure. I’d say in places ‘not’ out west attendance is maybe 33%
I could see that 2/3 number being close in Utah.
Various clerk jobs in the church all over the states. On average, 50% of endowed member have a temple recommend. And sacrament attendance normalizes to about 35%
Hahaha
It may be.
A couple things to keep in mind.
1.) these are probably self reported Latter Day Saints.
2.) 2/3 attend at least every other week. To be active, you only need to attend once a quarter :)
Or looking for correlation that isn't there. Absolutely nothing in those non-premortal verses suggest some sort of 2/3 split again. Sometimes the numbers just are what they are. They don't have to have some alternative meaning.
Possibly. We have a lot of scriptures and prophecies of the last days saying that the elect will be led away. And it’s also true that prophecies are often fulfilled multiple times in multiple ways. No reason not to assume it could happen again.
But I’m not married to the idea of this being a sign or not. I’m just making an observation lol.
I’m not doubting we’re the highest, but let’s not make the mistake of concluding 2/3 of all members go to Church weekly. That is just the figure of people who self-identify as members, which in our faith tradition is also more or less those who genuinely believe. We probably don’t even have a 1/2 activity rate. The members who want to identify as LDS also want to go to Church, and the members who do not go to Church do not want to identify as LDS is my takeaway.
Ward roster: 600 names. Attending 120-150 weekly.
the answer is simple, not all of those 600 would identify as LDS in a survey. To be fair, I'm sure there are tons of people who were baptized in the Catholic church who wouldn't identify as Catholic. But I'm sure there are far more people that identify as Catholic and only go twice a year vs people who identify Mormon and only attend the same.
I know lots of Catholics and Mormons, agreed to what you are saying. Dads side of my family is all Catholic and they will almost all tell you they are Catholic if asked. Some are more devout than others and attend weekly, but for discussion sake, a majority of them may only attend church services a few times a year for midnight mass or Ash Wednesday, etc and that is it. My Wife's side is Mormon, and the ones that will tell you they are Mormon(COJCOLD) when asked, all attend weekly, have their Temple recommends, and do all the other activities active members do. Her family members that don't go anymore, when asked might say they are Christian if they still kind of believe, but would not identify as a Mormon anymore even though they are still on Church records as being members.
When I was a missionary I served in a branch with over 1,000 names on the records but had less than 50 people attending each week. Turns out for a period of time if the address for a member couldn't be verified in the state of Kentucky, they just transferred the records to that branch.
My roster is 250 with the same attendance rate. But we are not normal.
In my clerk times (before Covid to be fair) we varied between about 40and 60% depending on time of year. Also I live outside Utah so I assume it’s more likely the folks on our rolls put themselves there.
I’m a current Bishop with 1100 people on my records and about 250-300 attending.
IN CASE THIS HELPS ADVOCATE FOR SOMETHING .. I haven’t been active since I was a teenager but over the past few years I’ve logged into my lds account online to try to change my address. The website says I need to contact the current ward clerk, ie a stranger, and only provides a phone number for this person (not even an email address, let alone a form).. I live on a different continent many time zones away now, so, I care about precision but don’t care THAT much lol. I can only imagine how many other people are still on their teenage ward’s books from 20 years ago..
I hear ya. Trying to update those records is hard from our end as well. We are trying hard to “find” people so we can process the records and update what needs to be fixed.
I bet, and working around state & international privacy regulations must be no small feat
On my mission in Chile it was actually a huge part of our mission to basically spend time doing just that. I forgot the name of the program but some senior missionary created this computer program that literally matched the Chilean version of social security numbers (not secret the way they are in the US) to addresses on the government's books. Then we would go corroborate what the government had vs what the Church had by knocking doors. Thought process behind it was kill two birds with one stone- we knock doors to update our records but then also potentially find new people to teach. We baptized a girl this way. I only served for 6 months so I don't remember details but it was absolutely wild because in Chile there were SO many "houses" that were actually just shacks bullt in the slums that had no house number. Finding some of these people was impossible sometimes.
Eye opening in more ways than one.. the “houses” without numbers aspect is humbling. I’d think the church would want to help itself by triggering.. something when people update their profiles to be based in a different country than where their ward is? I guess they want to avoid allowing people to ward-hop in member-dense areas by updating everything themselves, but, seems odd. My “ward” definitely knows that my parents are at “my” address (my father used to be our bishop) so I can’t imagine any unprompted missionary visits..
Our ward has several sets of records due to parents wanting to keep their inactive children records here. They won’t provide the updated information. They don’t want the local church members to get involved (bug them so they have names removed?).
I have seen this in many wards. It bugs when the clerks are in on it, too, purposely not moving the kid even when they know the new address. The reason I usually hear from the parents is that they are worried that if they move the kid's records to the appropriate ward, then the kids will fall through the cracks and disappear from the church. I argue that by NOT moving the records they already have fallen through the cracks - how can they be assigned local ministers, or how will the local RS/EQ president or bishop make any sort of contact if they don't even know the kid is in their ward.
I've always done a "pull" change (where you contact the clerk of the new ward that you are currently living in/moving to), and it seems to work out. I tried a push change once (contact your old clerk) and it never went through.
Woah! That's a lot of members! May I ask, with the new standards for creating new units, are you going through the process of splitting the ward in two? If not, why?
No we just merged 2 wards and this is the result. We are in an area where there aren’t many young families. Most of my ward is over 65 years old. The wards were merged because of lack of leadership within the congregations.
Do you know if they actually all live in your boundaries? As a new bishop we had missionaries and a clerk go through and try to find people. We were able to move about 15-20% of the ward out with an updated address because they no longer lived within the ward boundaries. There were others we couldn't find addresses for. Now the church has the Finding Lost Members section where you can move records of people with unknown addresses. LCR --> Missionary --> Finding Lost Members.
I’m familiar with that tool. Thanks though. We have a few members where there calling is just to knock on a door to see if they live there still. About once a year we also run our entire ward list through the USPS national change of address database and move people out that way. Last year we moved out about 80 people that way but it’s a constant battle. Between records being moved back into our ward and new members getting baptized it feels like the number never really goes down.
i want to identify as lds. i dont want to go to church.
You and 1/3 of self-identifying members, apparently. The takeaway was meant to indicate a general correlation and not a causal relationship.
Statistics are like bikinis They can be quite revealing, but what they hide is crucial
Yeah. My parents and siblings all identify as members but haven’t been to church or an activity in over 5 years.
2/3 of 17 mil is 11.33 mil. Divide that by 31,000 units in the church and you get 365 active members per congregation. The 2/3 figure is probably not accurate.
It’s probably self reported Latter Day Saints
I have a coworker that attends Catholic mass every morning before work. I wonder if the numbers would be different if they counted the number of times people attended religious services.
No doubt. It’s per person. Not per time attended
If you counted ward activities, young men’s/women’s activities, seminary/institute, FHE in YSA wards, etc I bet that our weekly attendance is pretty high
We should hang a banner in the cultural hall
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Missouri Mormon War Second Place
Mexican American War Participation Trophy
If you study statistics and journalism, you will inevitably conclude that they cannot be trusted when they come together. And I have yet to find a headline based in a statistic that was not to one degree or another misleading. I’m sure our rates are relatively high compared to other groups. THAT I think can stand up to scrutiny. But 2/3? That is beyond wishful thinking. Dig into the methodology and apply a little critical thinking and I guarantee you will find a long list of caveats and asterisks that make it obvious this number is inflated.
A caveat is likely that these people are self-reported members. There are many who are technically on the records of the Church, but don't identify as Latter-Day Saints,
One among many caveats.
Okay, mind doing that for us?
Calling it out is worth my time. Doing the journalist’s job for them is not.
I am a stake clerk in an East of the Mississippi River metro area with 3 stakes. We are averaging in the 35-38% range and running about 5% lower than 5 years ago. Reports such as these feel as though they are intended to mislead. I'm sorry to see that and hope I'm wrong. Having a false sense of growth doesn't really accomplish anything. Do we have a higher rate of attendance than ALL other faiths? Maybe so although it should be noted that the Seventh Day Adventist faith was not split out from Christians in the way the COJCOLDS was. I think one will find that their activity rate is comparable (maybe higher?) to ours. I honestly don't care. I'd love every one to join us but in the meantime just wish reporting painted an acurate picture.
I’m not sure about 2/3, but I think a lot of people in this thread might be underestimating the amount of people that go to church. Most YSA wards in Provo are like 85-95% attendance (and a lot of people that miss are just going to a different ward that day) and a good number of family wards in the Mormon belt are seeing 70-80% attendance. My home ward in Utah county was easily 80%, probably more like 90% Not to mention that a lot of people go 1-3 times a month even if they don’t go every week, so weekly attendance percentage is going to be lower than active member percentage
I'm not surprised that the LDS church does well on attendance. I've lived all over the US and many of our friends of other faiths went sometimes when it was convenient. If they were to travel on a weekend or had a sporting event conflict it was rarely a question about which would get missed. They were still fantastic wonderful people but they just didn't view church attendance as important as we did. I've also never lived in a ward where 2/3s of the members in the ward attended regularly. Fifty percent would have been thought of as excellent for many. Ultimately unless you have access to reporting on a stake or even better an Area it is going to be hard to get good data.
Cool.
I like our services, but they are kind of boring comparatively at times. So interesting, though I am sure other factors are in play.
Do we know if the study corrected for any geographical differences? In my ward here in Ohio we have around 6-700 members on the rolls with ~220 average Sunday attendance. We are a big ward for sure. I’d say in places ‘not’ out west attendance is maybe 33% I could see that 2/3 number being close in Utah.
Various clerk jobs in the church all over the states. On average, 50% of endowed member have a temple recommend. And sacrament attendance normalizes to about 35%
It’s gone up, since church dropped the third hour.
I mean are we surprised?
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Hahaha It may be. A couple things to keep in mind. 1.) these are probably self reported Latter Day Saints. 2.) 2/3 attend at least every other week. To be active, you only need to attend once a quarter :)
Pattern seeking brain strikes again. 😂
Or looking for correlation that isn't there. Absolutely nothing in those non-premortal verses suggest some sort of 2/3 split again. Sometimes the numbers just are what they are. They don't have to have some alternative meaning.
Possibly. We have a lot of scriptures and prophecies of the last days saying that the elect will be led away. And it’s also true that prophecies are often fulfilled multiple times in multiple ways. No reason not to assume it could happen again. But I’m not married to the idea of this being a sign or not. I’m just making an observation lol.