[teppe]

It’s kind of Ironic isn’t it ...

Your rejoicing about a LDS members in Utah who attend non-LDS church service (I’ve attended probably 50 in my lifetime)

....while every day another 5,000 to 10,0000 join the LDS church worldwide.

Its as Joseph Smith Prophesied, “....the work of the Lord Jesus Christ has begun and no unhallowed hand will stop it”

PS .... When Jesus prayed to God his Father .... he wasn’t talking to himself, he meant it!

[svcw]

5,000 a day = 1,8250,000 per year = delusional thinking

[svcw]

LDS Church Growth, Member Activity, and Convert Retention: Review and Analysis
Overall Growth Trends

Having defined basic terms and having identified core considerations in the analysis of church growth data, I will now critically review pertinent data relevant to LDS growth, convert retention, and member activity from a variety of sources.
Although I will make every effort to be objective in the analysis of data, space and time do not allow an exhaustive discussion of each study.
An entire article of this length could be written on each of the national censuses and major sociologic studies without fully exhausting their nuances.
I have focused on pointing out key considerations which are essential to accurate interpretation of the data.
The close convergence of findings from diverse sources corroborates the validity of the range of results and serves to negate claims that minor study nuances not considered here would significantly alter the overall conclusions.

Overall Growth Trends

The rapid growth of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has been a frequent and recurring theme in the secular media.
The claim that the Church of Jesus Christ is the “world’s fastest growing church” has been repeated in the Los Angeles Times,[1] the Salt Lake Tribune,[2] The Guardian,[3] and other media outlets,[4] while sources claiming that the LDS Church is the “fastest growing in the United States” are too numerous to chronicle.
Sociologist Rodney Stark’s 1984 projection has been widely cited: “A 50 percent per decade growth rate, which is actually lower than the rate each decade since World War II, will result in over 265 million members of the Church by 2080”[5]. In Mormons in America, Claudia and Richard Bushman claimed, “Mormonism, one of the world’s fastest-growing Christian religions, doubles its membership every 15 years”[6].

Latter-day Saint media have also lauded rapid church growth. The LDS Church News has described international LDS growth with a litany of superlatives, including “astronomic,” “dynamic,” “miraculous,” and “spectacular.” The claim that the LDS Church is the “fastest growing church in the United States” has been repeated in the Ensign and LDS Church News.

Yet annual LDS growth rates have progressively declined from over 5 percent in the late 1980s to less than 3 percent from 2000 to 2005.[7] During this same period, other international missionary-oriented faiths have reported accelerating growth, including the Seventh-Day Adventists, Southern Baptists, Assemblies of God, and Evangelical (5.6 percent annual growth)[8] and Pentecostal churches (7.3 percent annual growth). Since 1990, LDS missionaries have been challenged to double the number of baptisms, but instead the number of baptisms per missionary has halved. The average LDS missionary in 1989 brought 8 people into the church, while the mean number of annual baptisms per missionary averaged between 6.0 and 6.5 between 1985 and 1999. From 2000 to 2004, the average missionary experienced 4.5 convert baptisms. When one accounts for actual activity and retention rates, approximately 1.2 of the 4.5 converts baptized annually by the typical missionary will remain active. The sharp decline in LDS growth rates occurred even at times with record numbers of missionaries serving. This declining growth comes in spite of the LDS Church entering fifty-nine new nations for proselyting between 1990 and 2000.

For 2004, 241,239 LDS convert baptisms were reported, the lowest number of converts since 1987. The number of convert baptisms increased to 272,845 in 2006, but both missionary productivity and the total number of baptisms remained well below the levels of the early 1990s. Even more concerning is that only a fraction of baptized members remain active. Sociologist Armand Mauss stated that “75 percent of foreign [LDS] converts are not attending church within a year of conversion. In the United States, 50 percent of the converts fail to attend after a year”.[9] As 80 percent of LDS convert baptisms occur outside of the United States, this means that only 30% of LDS converts worldwide become active or participating members of the Church. Natural LDS growth has also fallen as the LDS birth rate has progressively declined. LDS church membership has continued to increase, but the rate of growth has slowed considerably.

[JSDude1]

So uh if God isn’t a liar (and we know that He isn’t), and the Bible claims that Jesus is God; then what more needed to be accomplished after the Cross.

Don’t you remember Jesus when He died prayed to The Father “It is finished”?

To put it another way..let’s go to Ephesians 2:8-9. “For by Grace you have been saved through faith, and this NOT of yoursleves it is a GIFT of God”!

So salvation is by Grace right? (I am just asking your opinion).

[greyfoxx39]

....while every day another 5,000 to 10,0000 join the LDS church worldwide.

Let's see an actual source for that comment...oh wait...there isn't one.

Membership statics for mormonism

Major Religious Groups

#	Faith	Congregations	Active Members	Adherents	Percent	Annual Growth
1	Protestant	0	0	168000000	56.00%	0.91%
2	Catholic	0	0	84000000	28.00%	0.91%
3	Jewish	0	0	6000000	2.00%	0.91%
4	other	0	0	12000000	4.00%	0.91%
5	none	0	0	30000000	10.00%	0.91%
6	Jehovah's Witnesses	11426	988469	2153268	0.72%	0.91%
7	Seventh-day Adventists	4422	861954	1723908	0.57%	3.00%
8	Latter-day Saints	12753	2276268	5690672	1.897%	1.69%

Country religious adherents data courtesy of the World Factbook.LDS membership and unit data are derived from the LDS Church Almanac. Seventh-day Adventist statistics are from the Adventist yearbook statistical reports. Jehovah's Witness data are from the Jehovah's Witness yearly statistical report. Other data are from a variety of sources available upon request.

Extrinsic Religious Challenges and Opportunities: National and Cultural

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in United States

Official LDS Statistics LDS Members: 5690672 Missions: 106 Temples: 62 Stakes: 1390 Districts: 13 Wards: 10778 Branches: 1975 Total Congregations: 12753

Derived LDS Statistics Approx. Active Members: 2276268 Percentage of Members Attending Church Weekly: 40% Average members per congregation: 446 Average active members per congregation: 178 LDS, as percent of population: 1.8968% Active LDS, as percent of population: 0.7587% LDS, as percentage of churchgoers: 1.724% National population per LDS congregation: 23523

Annual LDS Membership Growth

#	Year	Members	Annual Growth Rate	Wards	Branches	Units	Unit Growth Rate	Proportionality Ratio
1	1976	2336715	0%	0	0	0	0%	0
2	1978	2486261	3.1%	0	0	0	0%	0
3	1980	2693765	4.01%	0	0	0	0%	0
4	1982	2882145	3.38%	0	0	0	0%	0
5	1984	3049965	2.83%	0	0	0	0%	0
6	1986	3863598	11.77%	0	0	0	0%	0
7	1988	4100000	2.97%	0	1226	1226	0%	0
8	1990	4175000	0.91%	7456	1286	8742	75.4%	82.857
9	1992	4336000	1.89%	8056	1405	9461	3.94%	2.084
10	1994	4520000	2.08%	8433	1580	10013	2.83%	1.36
11	1996	4712000	2.08%	8719	1698	10417	1.97%	0.947
12	1998	4923000	2.19%	9189	1622	10811	1.85%	0.844
13	2000	5113409	1.9%	9627	1688	11315	2.27%	1.194
14	2002	5310598	1.89%	9999	1732	11731	1.8%	0.952
15	2004	5503192	1.78%	10357	1755	12112	1.59%	0.893
16	2006	5690672	1.67%	10778	1975	12753	2.57%	1.538

LDS membership and unit data 1976-2000 from Mark Davies' WW-LDS.

Proportionality Ratio is the ratio of the increase in units to the increase in membership. A ratio of 1 means that membership and church units are growing at the same rate.

National Population and LDS Growth Rates

Current LDS Membership Growth Rate: 1.67%

Current LDS Unit Growth Rate: 2.57%

Annual Population Growth Rate: 0.91%

Relative LDS Population Growth Rate (LDS membership growth rate minus population growth rate): 0.75%

Intrinsic Challenges and Opportunities of the Church of Jesus Christ

Convert Retention and Member Activity

While LDS activity rates in the United States are among the highest of any country in the world, less than half of members on the rolls are active. The Encyclopedia of Mormonism reports: 'Canada, the South Pacific, and the United States average between 40 percent and 50 percent [attendance at sacrament meeting].' (Source: Encyclopedia of Mormonism, edited by Daniel H. Ludlow, 1992, 4:1527.)

Marginal retention of new converts, and especially potential priesthood holders, remains a serious challenge:

'For the U.S. as a whole, only 59% of baptized males ever receive the Melchizedek Priesthood. In the South Pacific, the figure drops to 35%; in Great Britain, 29%. In Mexico (with almost 850,000 members) the figure is 19%; and in Japan, only 17% of the male members ever make it past the Aaronic Priesthood.' (source: Lowell C. Bennion and Lawrence Young, Dialogue, Spring 1996, p.19.)

[Elsie]

(I’ve attended probably 50 in my lifetime)

And you are STILL a MORMON?

I guess that thing about eyes to see and ears to hear is RIGHT!

[Cronos]

About the LDS, one thing that puzzles me is the contrary-to history statement that there were Semitic peoples here in America around the time of Christ and that modern day native americans have Semitic blood

This is archaeologically, historically, genetically and linguistically false, utterly false

It may have worked for a con-man in the 1800s before the development of DNA testing, but with the discovery of DNA sequencing, this foundation of the LDS is shown to be utterly false

Oh, and another thing is J Smith's insistence that the "Book of Abraham" was actually of Abraham with Smith's made-up "Reformed Egyptian" -- when the book has been shown to be an excerpt of the ancient Egyptian book of the dead dedicated to Anubis and the "Reformed Egyptian" is false