A history of Christian growth

We Latter-day Saints often look at our own history as unique. Yes, there are echoes of past history — our westward migration to Salt Lake City is redolent of the migration of the Israelites, Jaredites, and family of Lehi into their lands of promise.

But these ancient events are known to us only through scripture. The world is free to doubt that those old stories mean anything at all.

(Though scholars who dismiss ancient records as fiction have been embarrassed time and again as we find that ancient tales that purport to be history usually have a foundation in real events.)

One story that parallels ours, however, has its feet firmly planted in history.

First, let's review one aspect of our past: When The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was organized in 1830, there were a few dozen members. Now, nearly 180 years later, we're at 13 million. (The famous \"six\" met a legal requirement; the Smith family alone provided more members than that).

Most of that growth has taken place in my lifetime. When I was born, President David O. McKay had been church president for less than five months. Church membership was at about 1.2 million members.It would be wrong to exclude them. We all know stories of people who have not come to church for years and then are touched by the Spirit — or befriended by a good neighbor — and come into full activity. There are those who dispute the exact numbers, though they are honestly arrived at. Any tally of the total number of membership records is going to include quite a few people who haven't been to church in years, including some who don't even remember having been baptized.

A better measure of church growth is the number of Mormon stakes. You can't form a stake until you pass a certain threshold of active members so that there'll be enough people to fill all the essential teaching, leadership, and clerical callings. And let's remember that church growth also comes through converting our children. It's our responsibility to have all the children we can decently raise and do our best to make the gospel an irreplaceable part of their lives.As the church leadership long ago realized, \"baseball baptisms\" never lead to creation of a stake. Conversions must be real and the new members must be committed.

To see a wonderful representation of the creation of stakes throughout our history, take a look at a short video at snipurl.com/stakegrowth.

Has such a thing happened before?

Yes. Almost exactly the same thing happened — between A.D. 34 and 320, as the Christian church grew.