Evaluating Membership Growth: 2003-2013

 

Earlier this week, the Newsroom of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints released membership numbers by country.  LDS Church Growth offered analysis of the growth of membership in percentage terms and numerical increase.  There were few surprises.  Countries in Africa dominated the list of the top twenty countries with the highest annual growth rate.  The countries with the most members, the United States, Brazil and Mexico, dominated the list of countries with the largest numerical increase accounting for 49.3 percent of increase in membership.  In this post, I calculate the average annual geometric growth rate of the Church over two time periods, three years and ten years and use them to calculate the percentage increase in growth using the ten year growth rate as the base.  Whereas the geometric growth rate is the speed of growth, the percentage change in growth acts as a measure of acceleration. 

The ten countries that experienced the most rapid growth over the past decade are listed in the table 1.  To qualify for the list, a country must have more than 1,000 members in 2013.  Eight of these countries are in Africa. 

Table 1.  The Ten Countries with the Fastest Growing Membership over the Past Decade

Country	Growth Rate	2013 Membership
Cameroon	20.65	1,359
Togo	18.66	2,307
Malaysia	15.26	9,259
Guyana	15.11	5,474
Malawi	14.99	1,653
Mozambique	13.32	6,900
Uganda	13.21	12,380
Ethiopia	12.35	1,807
Botswana	10.53	3,021
Cote d’Ivoire	10.32	22,576

The ten countries that experienced the most rapid growth over the last three years are listed in table 2.  As before, a country must have more than 1,000 members by 2013 to qualify.  All ten countries on the list are in Africa.  Growth in Africa has been so rapid that it should pass both Europe and Oceania in total membership before the end of the decade!

Table 2.  The Ten Countries with the Fastest Growing Membership over the Past Three Years

Country	Growth Rate	2013 Membership
Botswana	31.42	3,021
Togo	22.79	2,307
Malawi	21.35	1,653
Ethiopia	17.11	1,807
Angola	15.50	1,436
Liberia	14.05	8,081
Sierra Leone	13.66	13,078
Madagascar	13.41	9,826
Cape Verde	13.13	10,796
Cote d’Ivoire	10.32	22,576

I used the three and ten year growth rates to calculate the percentage change in growth between the three year (G3) and ten year (G10) rates as using the following formula, ((G3-G10)/G10)*100.  The results for the world are presented in the color map at the top of the post.  Countries to the right of the 0 on the legend experienced accelerating growth, and on the left, decelerating growth.  While most countries experienced accelerating growth, the three countries with the largest membership bases, the United States, Brazil and Mexico, all experienced decelerating growth.  As listed in table three, African countries occupied five of the top ten positions, Europe occupied four and Oceania the remaining position. 

Armand L. Mauss asked in an article published in the International Journal of Mormon Studies, can there be a second harvest in Europe , (“Can There Be A “Second Harvest”? : Controlling the Costs of Latter-day Saint Membership in Europe,” June 7, 2013).  He even suggested an explanation for the growth.

Among the most recent and effective method for involving members in the missionary program is one that was “pilot-tested” in 2003, with the encouragement of two apostles, and finally implemented during the next two years in all of the stakes of the Europe Central Area, and perhaps in other areas as well. This method uses the CES classes with their Young Single Adults as “Institute Outreach Centers.” Under the ultimate direction of the local stake and mission presidents, these YSAs join with full-time missionaries to invite and bring young people of the same general age range (18 – 30) to local LDS Church buildings for Family Home Evenings, Institute classes, cultural and intellectual events, socials, and sports activities. Through these events, missionaries get many opportunities to teach young investigators in the chapels with YSA members present. So far the results of this program have been promising, not only in conversions but in retentions, for 80% of those converted through the Institute Outreach Centers are still active a year after baptism. Social scientists have long known that people in this transitional age range comprise the “demographic” most likely to be open to new ideas and experiences, including religious ones, so this approach appears to be a very effective “marketing strategy” for reaching the most likely “customers.”

While the growth rates in the European countries are still relatively small, they illustrate that the church can have success in secular, high income countries with low birth rates.  These programs may be successful for a second reason.  Not only do they attract and retain converts, they provide a grounds for youth to meet and marry LDS youth.  The Church seems to be stressing the formation of Young Single Adult wards and branches in the United States.  Perhaps the European success offers an explanation.  I would love to see the same strategy applied in Argentina, where I served a mission.  My limited experience suggested that youth who were lost could not find an LDS spouse. 

Table 3.  The Ten Countries with the Greatest Acceleration in Membership Growth over the Past Three Years

Country	Acceleration Rate	2013 Membership
Belgium	245.77	6,145
Botswana	198.36	3,021
French Polynesia	183.09	23,594
Cape Verde	115.48	10,796
Finland	111.38	4,866
Portugal	99.01	41,917
Liberia	94.02	8,081
Switzerland	72.91	8,741
Angola	68.62	1,436
Kenya	57.58	57,748

Growth is certainly easier to achieve in countries with high birth rates.  My next effort at examining growth will adjust the growth and acceleration rates for the total fertility rate by country.  Knowing how to grow in low birth rate countries is important because the birth rate continues to fall around the world.

The Impact of Government Corruption on Church Growth

Hylton, Rodionova and Deng published an enlightening paper entitled “Church and State: An Economic Analysis” (American Law and Economics Review, V13, N2, 2011) that examines consequences of regulation, taxation and subsidization of religion on a country’s level of corruption, economic growth and income inequality.  In part, their abstract reads

The results suggest that laws and practices burdening religion enhance corruption. Laws burdening religion reduce economic growth and are positively associated with inequality.

I will describe their paper in more detail in a future post but now I would like to focus on a similar question.  What is the impact of corruption on the growth of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints?  Growth is measured by the increase in the number of members between 20012 and 2011.  The data on corruption was provided by Transparency International and their 2012 index is reproduced in the world map, “Corruption Index by Country.”  The higher the index, the lower the level of corruption.  Graphically, the darker the blue, the less corrupt the government.  The colors move from blue to green, then yellow, brown and red.  Red also represents missing data.  The corruption index did not include Greenland, South Sudan, Western Sahara, and French Guiana. 

Dallin Oaks on Social Trends

Total Fertility Rate

At General Conference in October 2013 Dallin Oaks gave what many regard as a controversial talk due to his restatement of the position of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on gay marriage.  The Church views homosexual sex as sin like any other sexual act outside the bonds of marriage.  This position closes the door to “God approved” sexual fulfillment of same sex attraction and defines much of the conflict between the traditional Christian and secularist view on sexuality.  Traditional Christians believe that joy is the result of individuals subordinating personal desires to God by obeying His commandments whereas secularists believe that joy is the product of self-expression.  Conflicting visions strain friendly discussion.¹ 

Does an Age Explain Membership Growth in the U.S.

Median Age by State: 2012

The United States like much of the  world is experiencing declining birth rates and its inevitable consequence, an aging population.  In “Does an Aging World Explain Lower Convert Baptisms?,” I find a statistically significant relationship between the median age in seventy five countries and the growth in net membership of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  Older countries grow more slowly than younger countries.  I find that the same relationship exists in the United States; membership grows more slowly in old states than young states. 

Median age and the birth rate of a state measure age.  Data came from the U.S. Census population estimates for 2012. I consider two models, one using the median age and the other replacing median age with the birth rate.  The variable, the number of missions in a state, adjusts for the size of Church and the intensity of missionary effort.  All variables in both models are statistically significant and the birth rate acts as a nearly identical substitute variable for median age.  The higher the median age, the lower the increase in net membership and the higher the birth rate, the lower the increase in net membership.   

The model specification is weak in two ways.  First, growth is tied to the existing population but my simple model specification does not capture this aspect of population growth.  Second, the data should be expanded to include more than one time period.  My results have limitations but they are suggestive that the growth of the Church is slowed by an aging population.  I offer two possible explanations.  People are more likely to change beliefs when pushed by events such as the formation of a family, the birth of children and financial stress.  These events are more likely to occur early in life rather than late.  Finally, falling fertility is driving the increase in median age.  A generation or two ago, the growth of the Church was greater because LDS families were bigger.  The conversion of a young family was likely to add three or four children to the Church rather than today’s 2.1. 

Does an Aging World Explain Lower Convert Baptisms?

The number of converts to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints per missionary has been trending downward since 1983 as seen in the graph, “Convert Baptisms per Missionary Set Apart.”  Missionaries set apart is an imperfect representation of missionaries serving at any given period of time or the number of missionaries who served during a year.  Young men serve for two years; young women for eighteen months, and senior missionary couple for six, twelve, eighteen or twenty-three months.  If the number of senior missionaries has been rising over time relative to the number of young men and women, then the downward trend is overstated. The graph may overstate a trend of growing difficulty in finding converts, but I believe that it is a trend and I offer a possible explanation for the difficulty, an aging world population.

Traditionally, converts to the Church have been young.  The Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life report, “Mormons in America Certain in Their Beliefs, Uncertain of Their Place in Society,” reports that

Roughly half of converts to Mormonism (51%) say they joined the church before turning 24, including 26% who converted before reaching the age of 18. One-third (34%) say they converted between the ages of 24 and 35, 9% became Mormon between the ages of 36 and 50, and 6% joined the church when they were over the age of 50.

The Consequences of China’s One-child Policy?

Yesterday, the Chinese government announced the first major change to its one-child policy in thirty years; the government will now allow parents to have a second child if one or both is a single child (“China easing one-child policy amid elderly boom,” and “China to ease one-child policy, abolish labor camps, report says”).  The government implemented the program fearing Malthus’s four horsemen of natural population control: famine, misery, plague and war.  In “What to Expect when No One’s Expecting: America’s Coming Demographic Disaster,” Jonathan Last outlines some of the social problems the one-child policy has birthed: too few workers, i.e. taxpayers, to fund the retirement of the elderly, a labor shortage, and a dangerous sex imbalance of 1.23 boys for every girl. On the sex imbalance, Last writes

The inevitable result of this is a large cohort of men who—as a matter of mathematics—cannot marry.  The world has seen sex imbalances before.  From ancient Athens to Bleeding Kansas to China’s Taiping Rebellion, a skewed sex ratio has often preceded intense violence and instability.  So in addition to everything else, the Chinese will have a large cohort of military aged, unmarried men—tens of millions of them—floating around at precisely the moment when the country is facing the burden of its uncared-for elderly…

All of which suggests that what America needs to prepare for in the coming decades is not a shooting war with an expansionist China, but a declining superpower with a rapidly contracting economic base and an unstable political structure…

By midcentury, China will be losing 20 million people every five years and engineering a soft landing at an “ideal” birth rate will be difficult.  He suggest that supporting religion as a solution noting that “People who regularly attend church have more children than those who do not.”  I know of one religion that would be happy to supply missionaries to preach the gospel. 

Convert and Member of Record Baptisms, and Deaths

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints reports convert baptism for the world (April Conference Statistical Reports), but does not break down the numbers by smaller geographic units like countries, states, missions or stakes.  The researcher in me recoils at this lack of data but the member in me rejoices at the frugality in the expenditure of tithes.  Building on prior work, I use demographic data by country to break down the increase in membership by country into convert baptisms, member of record baptisms and deaths. 
The Church also reports membership by country on an annual basis at the Church Newsroom.  I used that data to calculate the change in membership from 2011 to 2013.  This is the second piece of the puzzle.  The change in membership is equal to child of record baptisms plus convert baptisms less deaths and excommunications.  I used demographic data from the CountryData function of Wolfram’s Mathematica program to estimate proxies for child or record baptisms and deaths.  Excommunications are reported to be a small percentage of the change in membership and, because I could not devise a proxy, I assumed them to be zero.  This will create a slight downward bias in my estimate of child or record births and convert baptisms.
I estimated child baptisms by multiplying the birth rate by the church membership for each country.  Not all children born into the Church will be baptized.  I multiplied the Seminary enrollment rates reported in “Seminary Activity Rates by Country,” to reduce the births to Church members to an estimate of the number of births that were baptized as members.  This number is likely to be a lower bound as death and inactivity grow as members age; initial estimates of child or record baptisms will be too low and convert baptisms, too high.  To summarize, child of record baptisms are estimated multiplying membership by both the birth rate and the Seminary enrollment rate.  Deaths were easier to estimate.  I multiplied church membership by the death rate. 
With the change in membership, child of record baptisms and deaths in hand, I estimated convert baptisms by country.  I then summed my estimate of convert baptisms and found that they exceeded actual convert baptisms.  I then multiplied convert baptisms for each country by a factor of .79114 to produce an estimate of convert baptisms by country that summed to the correct number.  This implies that the number of child of record baptisms or deaths by country was too low.  Using my estimates of convert baptisms, I made a second estimate of child of record baptism by country by multiplying the original estimate until the new estimate plus the estimate of convert baptisms less deaths summed to the correct worldwide total.  The estimates are presented in the table in the second portion of the post.   

Convert Baptisms and Missionaries

Having identified variables that influence the supply for missionaries, and estimated the enrollment rate for seminary, I am ready to move in a new direction, identifying variables that influence the demand for the gospel as measured by the number of convert baptisms.  The data used was provided by “Statistical Reports” given in each April General Conference.  The graph, “Missionaries Serving and Convert Baptisms: 1977-2012” displays the data.  There is a statistically significant relationship between the number of missionaries and the number of convert baptisms.  For those interested in the statistical details, I regressed the number of convert baptisms on the number of missionaries for the entire time period.  Both the intercept term and the slope are statistically significant (2.49162, 3.50198), and the slope has the correct sign; it is positive.  Convert baptisms increases as more missionaries preach the gospel. 

The graph, “Convert Baptisms to Missionaries: 1977-2012,” shows the ratio of convert baptisms divided by then number of missionaries. The ratio has declined over the time period for which I have data.  Baptisms are harder to come by but why? 

Enrollment Rates in Seminary by State

Seminary Enrollment Rate 2012            Seminary Enrollment Rate 2008

I originally wanted to use the Seminary enrollment rate as a proxy for activity in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; on a country by country basis, the seminary enrollment rate is close to activity rates estimated by other or reported by the Church.  For the United States, I believe they overestimate the actual enrollment rate.  To understand why, I must explain how I calculated the rates.
The seminary enrollment rate is equal to the number of students enrolled in Seminary divided by the seminary age youth in the Church.  I did not know the latter number, so I estimated it by calculating the ratio of seminary age youth in each state by the state’s population and multiplied this ratio by the membership in the state.  If the Church membership has the same age distribution as the state as a whole, my estimates will be unbiased.  Because the birthrate of Church members may be higher than the nation as a whole, the seminary enrollment rates may be biased upward. 

Institute Activity Rates by Country? Help!

As I present numbers that may give insights into the progress of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I hope my love for the Church, its members and those who guide it is apparent.  That love poses problems for my work as a researcher; it is a bias. The problem is not unique as all researchers confront bias.  It is how that bias is confronted that matters.  I believe that my bias propels care in measurement to accurately portray the Church as it is. I hope to inform and inspire.
The performance ratio I present here, the institute activity rate for a country, is based on a similar calculation as the seminary activity rate for a country that I presented in “Seminary Activity Rates by Country” and is presented below the body of the text.  The critical assumption in both ratios is that the percentage of a country’s population of an age demographic, 14 to 17 for seminary students and approximately 21 to 24 for institute students mirrors the percentage of the Church population in the same demographic.  The assumption may be accurate for seminary activity ratio but obviously fails in a wide range of countries for the seminary activity ratio.  It is the failure that suggests the most interesting question: why did it fail?

Seminary Activity Rates by Country

God really did create people equally.  There is no chosen people, at least in the sense that they are spiritually superior to others.  Differences in devotion are the product of political, economic and religious institutions of each country.  My purpose in estimating seminary activity rates by country is to enable a search for institutions that might impede Church growth and devise methods to overcome their influence so as to maximize the number of sons and daughters of God who win exaltation through the atonement of Christ Jesus.  Just as there is no superior people, the Lord does not play favorites for he “inviteth them all to come unto him and partake of his goodness; and he denieth none that come unto him, black and white, bond and free, male and female; and he remembereth the heathen; and the heathen; and all are alike unto God, both Jew and Gentile.”

Seminary Enrollment around the World

Seminary is an important institution of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that teaches high school age students basic principles of the gospel through scripture study.  In many parts of the world, where membership is sparse, seminary acts as a social gathering place where youth can associate with others who share their commitment to the gospel.  In “A Model of Variables Affecting Missionaries Set Apart,” I demonstrate that the number of seminary students is an important variable in predicting the number of missionaries set apart in a given year.  I believe that the relationship is causal, that seminary strengthens testimonies and friendships and nurtures a desire to serve the Lord.  I don’t believe that a demographic variable such as the number of eighteen year-old young men and women who are members of the church would have the same statistical correlation as the number of seminary students.  This post is my first attempt to understand seminary from a geographic perspective. 

A Model of Variables Affecting Missionaries Set Apart

 

Many years have passed since I have last attempted a serious piece of econometric analysis and my skills are rusty, but with some effort, probably not enough, I have developed a model that measures the degree of influence of several variables on the number of young men and women who are set apart as missionaries for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints annually.  The variables included war, recession, enrollment in seminary, and changes in missionary policy (see list below the post).  I used nothing more than simple ordinary least squares.  The model is not elegant, but it seemed to fit the data adequately.  For those interested, all the coefficients were significant at the 5% level or above and the adjusted R squared was .99.  I will use the model to attempt to answer two questions: what variables caused the reduction in missionaries set apart after the 2002 peak? and how many missionaries will be set apart as a result of lowering the age requirement for missionary service?

Demographics

Our children are our future and the number of children is dependent on the birthrate.  Is there an optimal population and have we exceeded it?  Two articles present very different views of the future of our country and the world based on birth rate.  They both address the Malthusian conclusion that mankind faces an economically bleak future because population growth will outpace economic development.  Hunger, disease and war are positive checks that limit population growth to the world’s resource base.  A slightly more modern version paints the world as a spaceship with limited resources.  The more people that inhabit the spaceship, the fewer resources per person.  The problem with the theory is that it is not supported by empirical facts.  The world has never been economically better off.  Scarcity has caused innovation and the world is richer than at any time in the past.  While there must be an optimal maximum population, we have not reached it.

The first, “Let’s Talk About Sex: Why More Babies Means More Economic Growth,” is by Jerry Bowyer who believes that many countries face economic and political decline because their birthrates are well below replacement levels.  Germany, France, Italy, Japan, the United States and China, just to name a few prominent countries all have birthrates below the replacement level.