Comments about ‘Mormon church's global growth a test to attract and keep converts’

Richard G. Scott gave a talk in about 1999 or 2000 about traditions and that the most important tradition is our Father in Heaven. In other words, families and cultures have not been around for any of us as long as our Father in Heaven has been. That is of course my version of the talk, people need to read it. I do think that one thing that would be a great help is couple missionaries, due to a disease, my husband and I will not ever be able to have that experience, but sadly we see people in our ward who would be outstanding as couple missionaries not making any effort to serve.

With the passing of president Hinkley I hope the mormons will receive the leadership needed to take the church into the twenty first century. Today, the world over, people have access to information and inteligence and people will no longer follow suppositions and folk lore, they seek truth and reality in a real world. On the internet there are almost as many anti-mormon sites as there are mormons. One has to ask what it is all about. Are the Book of Mormon people of this world, are the Mormons of today really of this world. These are questions that real people ask. They require and merit real answers.

I've always been curious to know what the retention numbers are like within the United States, as well. We know that there are more members outside of the U.S. than inside, but does anyone know the activity rates here in the United States?

It would be nice to know what our church membership numbers are in each country and what is the percent of activity for each. do we have information on why we loose new members. Could the wards and stakes do more?

Retention/Adherent rates are harder to come by (from a public source) in the U.S. because we don't ask about religion in the Census like they do in the countries mentioned in the article. But the best estimates I have seen are around 40%, better than in Latin America but not great.

We all know the #1 reason for loss--it's been mentioned in conference many many times and there have been many programs to combat it (and they know because they have a whole statistical research department to study things like this). Local members who don't help transition converts away from the missionaries.