133: LDS Growth Not Exponential as Predicted. Why?

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Series Title: End of LDS Growth Analysis [Part I of VI]

Val and Nathan are so excited to jump into a VERY FASCINATING six-part podcast mini-series analyzing a recently published journal article titled, “The End of Growth? Fading Prospects for Latter-day Saint Expansion”.

In the mid 80’s a team of social scientists predicted that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was on track to become “The next Islam”, projecting that if the LDS church stayed on track with its current growth, it would achieve a membership between 36.4-121 million members by the year 2020.

At year end 2019 the LDS church reached a mere 16.5 million members, less than half of the number projected by these social scientists.

What Happened?

This is the topic of the next several episodes of the Latter Day Struggles Podcast.

In this specific episode, Nathan and Val offer an overview of six “misses” that the research team did not account for and then they break down each general area: including (but not limited to) serious issues of member retention, a significant drop in child-of-record baptisms, the shrinking size of the church’s missionary force, unexpected shrinking LDS fertility rates, and skewed membership record keeping practices.

IN FRIDAY’S EPISODE Nathan and Val tackle the topic of church growth specifically in Africa (the LDS church’s current missionary growth emphasis) and put the LDS church’s relative success in this geographic area in context by looking at the astronomical growth in Africa of two “cousin” church traditions—the Seventh Day Adventist’s and the Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Nathan and Val then discuss some valid reasons why these other faith traditions might be enjoying exponentially more growth in Africa and how the LDS church might benefit from learning from their religious counterparts, who seemed to have cracked some codes in multicultural membership growth and retention.

Link to the article analyzed in this series