Beantown
Well-Known Member
Rumor is Adrian Peterson has 7 kids!
LDS church membership statistics
- Thread starter colton
- Start date
Rumor is Adrian Peterson has 7 kids!
Beantown
Well-Known Member
I think large families are great for people that can support them but the LDS church need to separate themselves from people's bedrooms. The fact that poor LDS families pop out 10 kids because they assume that's what God wants is just wrong.
I completely agree. Have as many kids as you want as long as you can provide for them.
D
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This singular contribution is enough to absolve Turkey of any wrongdoing for centuries to come.
LogGrad98
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This singular contribution is enough to absolve Turkey of any wrongdoing for centuries to come.
May be the single greatest food item ever invented by man.
I don't know why you invite church leaders into your bedroom, but that has never been the case for me. I have never been encouraged or dissuaded from having as many or few children as my wife and I want and can handle.
Your example of "poor" LDS families having large families is pretty lame.
It's no more your business to tell a couple they have too many kids as it would be for a LDS church leader to tell a couple to have more kids, which I doubt actually happens. I personally feel a couple should only have as many children as they can handle financially, mentally, physically, and in any other way. That call though is up to them.
While you may have your opinion about what is right, you are telling people what to do just as much as the imaginary church leader in your example.
Geez beantown, stay out of people's bedrooms.
No they are not literally invited but you already knew that Spazz. However you cannot deny that the Church is very heavily family oriented. It is one of its main tangents. That leads to a atmosphere or almost pressure if you will, to have large families.
Archie Moses
Well-Known Member
Pressured to have large families? Lol
Family is an important topic in the LDS church... not large families. If there is pressure to have a large family even if beyond what you can handle is self inflicted or misunderstood.
Have as big or small of a family as you want/need but that is between you and the Lord.
Also try to understand every situation is different and you don't know the whole story.
Sometimes there are couples that can handle a large family where things change due to job loss, injury, sickness, death, blablabla... things change.
Sometimes there are couples that can handle 3 children that things happen and they can't handle those 3 any more.
Life happens man.
Try not to judge when the whole story is not known.
In fact, I suggest you make up some story to explain it in a way that is satisfactory to you.
While most likely not true, it will help you not judge or react negatively to that person, family, situation, etc.
For instance, I imagine that Trout was hit on the head by a brick and after that he wanted to get into politics.
(Not really just saying that to you Stoked, just everyone in general)
I think I'd like to see the numbers related to members/ward and members/stake. I understand that you're making an inductive reasoning argument related to how many positions have to be filled but I think that's still an assumption I'm having problems getting on board with. I also understand that if we were to discover that the average number of members/ward and members/stake had increased during this time that would also explain the discrepancy in growth rates. However, based upon some anecdotal information I have about membership statistics in other countries (some wards in Asia have only 10-12 members) I suspect the opposite is true.
On another matter: isn't the other interesting question "What happened in 1999?"
I think that assumes that they changed their counting methodology in 1999. However the Church actually used to report it's death rate between 1974-1983, and so we know that the death rate counts have been absurdly low (probably from counting people as if they were still alive until they were 105-110) for decades prior to 1999.
https://www.mormoninformation.com/stats.htm
On that same page if you look at the first chart you'll notice that 1999 something bizarre happens: the church's net increase in members exceeded it's gross increase, meaning that it actually had a negative member loss number. Despite the fact that this is logically impossible, this indicates that something weird happened in the accounting in 1999. I'm curious if colton or others (well, some others) have any theories.
just imagine where we would be without one of their greatest gifts - ZERO!
We'd still be tallying things up in Roman Numerals if we didn't have that nifty little placeholder to help us out.
(sorry for the aside, I'll try to say something more on topic next...)
you're equating the religion with the politics in the regions where it is practiced
just because some followers of a religion twist its doctrine to try to make it suit their purposes is not an inherent quality of the religion
and just a question here about the point of this thread and the numbers - - what is the point?
Because it seems to me it's a bit of a pissing contest over the number of adherents that are considered LDS. Is there a contest for world domination or something? I'm just not understanding why these numbers are such an issue.
ok, a quick read of some of the more recent posts in the other thread (and we need two threads about this because...) is that some sort of a prophesy has been made about the growth of the LDS church and if the church leadership can't show numbers to back up this prophecy it might lead some believers to question the prophecy, and perhaps question the value of their membership in the church? Or something like that...
at least that's my simplistic interpretation of the other thread
and why are there two threads again?
at least that's my simplistic interpretation of the other thread
and why are there two threads again?
Two threads furthers the LDS goal of world domination. Our threads are growing at an exponential rate. I could create a new thread to discuss the number of LDS threads if you'd like.
I recall an LDS prophet telling members to not put off having a family before you were financially fit to do so. The advice was to have children right away, and let the Lord worry about taking care of them while you go to school, etc.
I do not recall exactly who it was nor do I care to get into an argument on it, but there you have it if you want to investigate further.
I'd probably put it between the doner kebab and pizza, with pizza winning by a nose.
Actually, up until the mid 1970s or so, LDS leaders counseled members to not to use birth control, kind of like Catholics still are. Probably that's not widely known amongst people who weren't around then (I discovered it by reading a bunch of old Ensigns on my mission.) Then the church wisely changed its teaching to be what it is now--that the decision to have kids is a personal one to be made by husband and wife, and that if they want to use birth control then that's up to them.
Those numbers are on the web page I created, linked to in the first post of the thread.
Side note: a ward would never have 10-12 members. It would be a branch.
I know, it's bizarre. I can't think of anything special that happened in 1999.
No, I haven't been able to think of anything either. I agree that maybe the explanation is a change in the accounting that wasn't publicized, and hasn't been made know since. But I can't think of what it might be. Maybe we should blame it all on Y2K. ;-)
I don't know how likely this explanation is, but the website you linked to contains this info: "An official in the Church Office Building reports that for approximately the last 30 years "children of record" have been included in the membership total, not children who are baptized at age 8. In other words, children blessed in Sacrament Meeting and children age 7 or less of converts are immediately included in the aggregate membership total." I'm wondering if "approximately the last 30 years" might have been incorrect, and that maybe THIS was the change that happened around 1999. But I haven't thought about it enough to decide if that would really explain the effects.
Let's see, brainstorming a bit more... was 1999 around the time when the "raising the bar" thing for missionary service was announced? Maybe there was a dip in missionary numbers as a result of that, which created the dip in number of converts and hence church growth. (quick search) No, it looks like that was 2002. Close, but no cigar.
For me it's much more of just curiosity than a pissing contest.
The other thread was meant to discuss conference talks. The membership number stuff was pretty far off topic from that, so I started this thread. Then this thread got taken over by people discussing Islam. A bit odd, but maybe it was good that I started this thread because it would have been even odder had the Islamic discussion occurred in the LDS general conference thread.
