SoyLeche
meh...
A while back I got to wondering about the 16 Million or so number that keeps getting quoted as the worldwide membership of the church. I understand where it comes from, but it seems a bit misleading.
On my mission it was, quite frankly, fairly easy to baptize people. Getting them to stick around for the long term was the hard part. I spent plenty of time in different areas going through the ward list and trying to find inactive members - in some areas upwards of 90% of the list.
So, what would the actual, active membership number be?
I think a better metric (and the best one to measure the growth of the church by) is the number of stakes. There has to be some minimum threshold of active membership for a stake to be organized. So, I did a quick back of the envelope calculation.
In my experience, each ward tends to have between 200-300 active members (in the places I've lived in the US. Much smaller in a lot of international places, but let's get an upper limit by using the higher numbers).
Stakes tend to have 8-10 wards in them, so that puts a stake's active membership at 1600-3000 members. Call it 2000 for a good average.
At the end of 2018 there were 3,383 stakes. So, that makes somewhere on the order of 6.7 million. I recognize that there are many people that live outside of where stakes are organized, but I'd have a hard time putting the active membership of the church at over 8 million, so about half of the stated number. That's actually higher than I expected.
I found this analysis that puts it at around 30%. They probably had better methodology than my quick calculation. It's a bit dated though - 2014.
What are the takeaways from this? I'm not sure. It's just something interesting I thought I'd share.
On my mission it was, quite frankly, fairly easy to baptize people. Getting them to stick around for the long term was the hard part. I spent plenty of time in different areas going through the ward list and trying to find inactive members - in some areas upwards of 90% of the list.
So, what would the actual, active membership number be?
I think a better metric (and the best one to measure the growth of the church by) is the number of stakes. There has to be some minimum threshold of active membership for a stake to be organized. So, I did a quick back of the envelope calculation.
In my experience, each ward tends to have between 200-300 active members (in the places I've lived in the US. Much smaller in a lot of international places, but let's get an upper limit by using the higher numbers).
Stakes tend to have 8-10 wards in them, so that puts a stake's active membership at 1600-3000 members. Call it 2000 for a good average.
At the end of 2018 there were 3,383 stakes. So, that makes somewhere on the order of 6.7 million. I recognize that there are many people that live outside of where stakes are organized, but I'd have a hard time putting the active membership of the church at over 8 million, so about half of the stated number. That's actually higher than I expected.
I found this analysis that puts it at around 30%. They probably had better methodology than my quick calculation. It's a bit dated though - 2014.
What are the takeaways from this? I'm not sure. It's just something interesting I thought I'd share.