Growth of the Church
Homogeneity of Mormons

For the church to sustain exponential growth, the ability of the church to recruit and procreate new members must remain constant on a per-member basis. If the church gets more efficient over time at recruiting it will grow faster than exponential, and if it gets less efficient over time it will grow slower than exponential.

New members of the church can be broken down into 3 types. First are converts who join based upon the member-missionary efforts of a friend or relative. Second are people who join based upon the efforts of the full-time missionaries and the associated marketing support of the church. Third are children who are born into the church. We will examine the church's ability to produce each of these 3 types of new members at exponential rates.

 

Converts from Member Referrals

Stark convincingly argues that religions grow through networks of friends and relatives in an application of the control theory of deviant behavior. "In effect, conversion is not about seeking or embracing an ideology; it is about bringing one's religious behavior into alignment with that of one's friends and family members."1 That being the case, a convert outside of the geographical Mormon strongholds will have more opportunities to convert others because she will have more non-Mormons in her network. But by the same token, she will also have more pressure to abandon her new faith and remain in the behavioral patterns of her established network.

The question then is, in aggregate are new members homogenous with established members in regards of their propensity to convert their friends and relatives? To answer that, let's first look at the activity patterns of converts versus people born into the church. Sociologist Armand Mauss said that 75% of converts outside of the U.S. go inactive within a year of joining the church. That number is 50% for U.S. converts.2 If somebody goes inactive within a year of joining, the chances of them ever returning to activity are probably quite low.

But what about the activity patterns of people born into the church? A BYU study said that of people born in the church, only 34% go inactive and stay inactive.3 This study and the Mauss study aren't exactly comparable, but they do give an indication that converts and lifetime members are not homogenous in their propensity to be active in the church.

But does the fact that somebody is less active in the church imply that she is also a less-effective member missionary? Some would argue that active members have little need or time for non-member social contacts, and are thus less effective member-missionaries than the inactives.

I would argue that inactives are less-effective member missionaries. Consider the following anecdote from my mission. A totally inactive family referred us to a non-member family to teach. They were golden and kept all of their commitments. They believed everything we said, enjoyed reading the scriptures, were excited to get baptized, and went to church with us once. They did not like church and refused to make the commitment to attend regularly. But they still wanted to get baptized. They simply wanted to be totally inactive believers like the friends that referred them.

In situations like this the people may or may not end up getting baptized. But according to Stark's model, the investigator is in the process of adapting the behavior patterns of the people who referred them. While it is true that inactive people have more non-members in their networks to potentially convert, it is also true that, according to the model, any conversions from those referrals will follow the example of the person referring them and go inactive.

If new members are more likely to go inactive than established members and thus be ineffective at bringing in more active recruits, then they are not homogenous with the church as a whole.

 

Converts from the Efforts Full-time Missionaries

In order for the number of annual conversions due to the efforts of the full-time missionaries to grow exponentially, two things must happen. First, the percentage of members who are serving full-time missions must remain constant so that the number of missionaries will grow exponentially as the church grows exponentially. Second, the productivity of the missionaries must remain constant.

Chart 1 shows that the first condition is metthe number of missionaries has in fact stayed around .55% of total church membership.

However, Chart 2 shows that the converts-per-missionary has been decreasing steadily since 1989as time goes forward missionaries appear to be getting less and less effective. It's difficult to say how many conversions are due to the efforts of the missionaries and how many are due to the efforts of members. I wish I could do a regression of converts on both missionaries and total church membership, but because the number of missionaries and the size of the church are so tightly correlated I would face an insurmountable multicollinearity problem. For the purposes of this section I am going to assume that the decrease in converts-per-missionary is due in part to the efforts of missionaries and not just to the efforts of member-missionaries.

It's hard to imagine a more homogenous group of people than the Mormon missionaries. They all dress alike, are approximately the same age, follow the same rule book, and use the same strategies and tactics to gain converts. However, this component of the exponential growth of the church is concerned with their homogeneity in their propensity to gain converts, not their appearance and standards.

Approaching this as an Economist would, the Church tries to distribute missionaries around the world in a way that meets 2 conflicting objectivesto maximize the number of baptisms constrained by a desire to give a minimum level of coverage to all geographic areas where the church has a presence. Once that balance is reached, the Economist would predict that the marginal effectiveness of additional missionaries would be lower than the average effectiveness of those already in the field. This is because the new missionary will be assigned to the marginal areasthe areas of the world that the church didn't believe were worth the cost of a missionaryuntil that marginal missionary arrived. If one subscribes to this theory, that in itself would be enough to stunt exponential growth (unless the dynamics were such that a growing church could keep a growing number of missionaries productive).

Chart 3 shows the number of converts the church has baptized each year. The yellow line is the number of baptisms needed to sustain exponential growth at a rate of 50% and the blue line is the actual number of converts. Before 1990 it appears that the number of converts were following the exponential growth pattern, perhaps with a cyclical component. But in 1990 the number of converts hit a ceiling of 331,000 that has not since exceeded.

This shows that the theory of the marginal effectiveness of missionaries is not enough to explain the level of baptisms because the marginal effectiveness of additional missionaries would have to be zero to explain this.

One part of the problem is that there are two distinct classes of missionaries. The first class is the young men and women who rigorously follow the rules with the objective of gaining convert baptisms. The second class is retired couples who work fewer hours and usually have a primary objective other than gaining convert baptisms. There has been a big push for the last several years for retired couples to go on missions, and no doubt some of the increase in number of missionaries is due to more couples.

But that still doesn't explain why the number of baptisms hasn't gone up, at least a little. Consider the following anecdote.

From December of 89 to March of 90 I served as a missionary in the town of Guernica in the providence of Buenos Aires, Argentina. At the time Guernica had about a dozen active members and met in a branch located in the near-by town of Alejandro Korn. There was only one set of missionaries in Guernica, and they were effectively baptizing people.

Three years later in March of 1993 I returned and married a girl from that town. By that time Guernica had about 50 active members with its own chapel. In 1994 a second set of missionaries was added. From 1994 until now, the efforts of 2 sets of missionaries in that town have resulted in no appreciable gain in the number of active members--for every person those missionaries baptized, somebody went inactive.

In at least some areas of the world, the church is beyond the stage of exponential growth and is approaching its carrying capacity.  If there are many areas like Guernica--areas that used to produce many baptisms but have since been "fished out", that would explain the the decrease in converts per missionary.

Why the first condition is met merits further consideration. In the previous section I suggested that the new converts to the church are less dedicated than the established membership. If that is true and the church is getting more and more bloated with undedicated new members, why is it successful at maintaining .55% (.0055) of the total church population as full time missionaries? To the extent that converts come from the efforts of missionaries and not members, maintaining this ratio is all the church needs to do to satisfy the internal requirements of exponential growth.

My experience has led me to believe that the missionaries baptize a disproportionate number of teenagers. This shouldn't be surprisingteenagers are more likely to be open to new philosophies and are in the process of expanding their social networks. Furthermore, they are more likely to look up to the missionaries as spiritual mentors. That would explain why the church has been able to keep sending out more and more missionaries--because the missionary program baptizes a higher percentage of potential missionaries than the percentage of potential missionaries the church has as a whole.

The other factor worth considering is whether or not more established Mormons are going on missions. The church has put a lot of pressure on older couples to go on missions, as well as relentless pressure for all young men to serve. Some of the growth in the missionary force is due to more elder couples going, and some of it is also probably due to a higher percentage of established members going. The successful economy of the 90's possibly allowed some to go that wouldn't have in less prosperous times.

The church has two big issues with conversions from the efforts of missionaries. The first is finding people to teach. The second is establishing relationships between the members of the church and the investigators. It is extraordinarily common for investigators to develop bonds with a particular missionary and begin the conversion process of bringing their religious behavior into alignment with his. But as soon as that missionary gets transferred the investigator looses interest in the church, whether it be before or after his or her baptism. So even if the church continues to get more missionaries, it has got to do a better job of absorbing investigators into the social network.

 

Children Born into the Church

We know that there are many people who join the church, discontinue participating in it, and yet remain on the rolls. The strength of the church isn't the number of people whose names are on the rolls, but rather the number of people who subscribe to its teachings and are dedicated to it. Unfortunately the church does not make public many of the statistics (such as number of temple recommend holders) that could help us gauge the dedication level of its membership.

One statistic available to gauge the strength of the church is the "Increase in Children of Record" statistic. If someone is at least marginally dedicated to the church, when their children are a month or two old they will take the child to church for a blessing and the child's name will be recorded by the church (The child won't be counted as a member until they join the church by being baptized when they are older). If someone's name is on the rolls of the church but they don't participate, they most likely won't take their children to get blessed and recorded by the church.

Chart 4 shows the number of children the church has blessed in each of the last several years The blue line is the number of children actually blessed, and the pink line is the number it needed to bless in order to sustain 50% per decade growth rates. Interestingly, the church exceeded that exponential growth rate until 1983, at which time the number of children blessed started to go down.

This is a surprising observation. Since 1983 the total membership of the church has gone up by 100%, so for exponential growth we'd expect the number of children being blessed each year to go up by 100%. But rather than going up by 100% it has gone down by 34%.

Certainly lower across-the-board birth rates are a part of this phenomenon. In addition about 75% of the new members since 1983 are converts, and we wouldn't expect converts to have as many children as the traditional Mormon families, as large families is more of a cultural convention than a doctrinal one. Also it is possible the demographics of the new membership have something to do with it. But this could also indicate that the percentage of Mormons that take their religion seriously enough to have their children blessed is going down. Be the reason for the declining birthrate what it may, birthing is not carrying its weight in growing the church exponentially.

 

1.  Stark, Rodney. The Rise of Christianity. Pages 16-17. (back)

2.  Las Vegas Sun, May 4, 2001.  (back)

3.  The study also said 44% go inactive for a period of a year or more but eventually return to activity, and 22% remain active their entire lives. http://fhss.byu.edu/adm/hickman_lecture.htm  (back)

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