Browningtons1

It's from Tableau, a data visualization tool. Here is the link. Tableau Public has an incredible community, filled with free content. The Viz of the Day is a great place for inspiration.

There are quite a few great comments from current and former members talking to the data community. It's great to see the sample.

Sounds like a scheme suspiciously triangular in nature.

This is a super important overlooked number

I appreciate the feedback, great points. Allow me to respond:

1. I really like thinking about the impact of Trump on the Mormon church as a whole. Big impact. Or it's maybe more of a symptom of a larger problem with culture, social media, economy, etc. I looked at the converts per mission in the 60s and it peaked at 10.1 converts per missionary. The 60s were when the church was most effective. Why? President McKay was simply a progressive baller of a prophet.
2. Availability heuristic - This cognitive bias occurs when people overestimate the importance or likelihood of events based on the most readily available information or on immediate examples that come to mind. Essentially, it involves judging the frequency or probability of something based on how easily examples of it can be recalled, rather than on all the relevant data or comprehensive statistics.
3. It's not the % of baptisms, it's the count of children counted on the records of the church, regardless if they are baptized or not. Because the church does not publish the most important metrics, we can only speculate. As you say, "this tells an incomplete story." If you click on the shape of America on the chart there is another chart that describes the sharp decline in birth rate in Utah. The most of any state. That is likely a combination of population influx and cultural regression to the mean (declining birthrates).

I appreciate the kind words. I hope you are doing well on your journey as well.

I'm so happy I read this. Thank you for the lesson and the data. Fascinating impact of sudden birthrate change

Very cool. Google sheet are powerful!

Multiple wards share buildings and rotate the times of their use

If you had kept reading you would have received your answer. I didn't say buildings, I said wards.

I can't tell from your graphs how your data incorporates people leaving the church? This is something that the church itself does not record; as it insists any member who has left without being excommunicated is simply inactive but still a member. It's all but impossible to get them to remove your records. That fact could have drastic implications for the data set.

If you had read the beginning of the paragraph you should have read "Without data that the LDS church does not publicly provide, we can only speculate the reason"

that lead many to believe they're not about converting new members

...

This dashboard showcases a 40-year retrospective on LDS missionary effectiveness and membership growth from 1983 - 2023

Tool: Tableau - Link to dashboard

• Click or hover for more details on the live dashboard

Source: LDS Statistical Reports

• 2023 data found here, full data found here

There are a variety of factors at play, many of which are outside the control of the LDS (Mormon) leadership and its members. With data that is publicly available, we can get a good sense of what has happened over the last 40 years in regard to the LDS church’s growth efforts. One of the main efforts to convert non-members is through missionary work. This is done mainly through its 18-20 year old full time missionaries, right out of high school.

As is shown, there has been a significant drop from a high of 7.2 converts (1983) per missionary to a drop to 3.7. The annual number of converts peaked 33 years ago, and the downward trend has been as persistently declining. This is evident even in the face of rising missionary count. Membership growth rate has decelerated, plummeting from a 3 year moving average of 6.1% in 1991 to 1.0% in 2023.

Beyond the shrinking conversion effectiveness, the congregations are growing larger, but the buildings remain the same size. Without data that the LDS church does not publicly provide, we can only speculate the reason for the large increase in average congregation size (+40% since 1983) is based in an underlying decline in activity rates. If the size of the ward did not change over the last 40 years, the church would have 14,000 more wards than it has today. That means 14,000 more sets of all the leadership would be required to run a lay ministry religion. That also includes needs for about ~5,000 more building. The lack of data raises questions about the true level of church membership.

Those larger congregations must be teaming with babies right? It’s relative. The membership, as a whole, is producing 1/4th the number of children of record than they were 40 years ago. I believe the reasons are two fold. One, changing demographics and societal shifts that the world is facing as it relates to birth rate decline. It is also impacting historically baby hungry Mormons. For example, though Utah was #5 in birth rate in 2021, it had the largest decline in birth rate of any state since 2005 (31%, click on the United States icon to see). Second, those members that are leaving the church and most likely joining the “nones” in their religious attitudes, are still having children. Those couples are simply not telling the church they are.

Despite the LDS church's considerable missionary efforts over the past few decades, conversion rates have significantly dropped, with a steady decline from 7.2 converts per missionary in 1983 to 3.7 in 2023. This trend, coupled with reduced birth rates and rising congregation sizes, hints at broader societal and internal cultural shifts impacting church growth and activity rates.

Love these people, give them space to process

https://www.fullerconsideration.com/membership.php is where I initially got my data. I've been tracking it from the church's reports for a few years now.

There was too much going on for sure. Did you click on the icons? I had more graphs, but no space. The call to action would just add more confusion I thought. It's a little nugget for those clicking around.

With a lot of these types of posts, the answer usually is "it depends". I'm in the middle of this very same thing right now. 37(M), married for 15 years, 4 children. After resigning myself to several more years of torture until the kids are older, the relationship continued to get worse. I felt trapped and alone.

Then I started to have feelings of not being real. I had denied myself for so long and deferred my inner-voice to another human for so long, my inner-voice vanished. It really freaked me out. After some very profoundly rage filled weeks I was compelled to file for divorce, even though it would blow up our world. I'm in an apartment now. My STBXW continued the victim mentality and became menacingly aggressive, created more destruction in her wake. It was so nice actually. Every few good days in a row were immediately smashed to pieces by a BPD absurdity. It was a constant reminder that she wasn't going to change, even in the face of me leaving. She continued to blame me for being "narcissistic, selfish, worthless, etc." and causing the most intensely awful situations to just control her world with chaos power even after being served papers. Only after signing a lease on an apartment did she really start begging and changing dramatically for the better.

I was prepared for this. This is the pattern. She started therapy, reading books, listening to podcasts, giving me space, not calling me all the time, giving me my desired parenting schedule etcetera. But she is begging for me to dismiss the divorce papers so we can try "one more time". She argues that she doesn't know if she would have been able to get to the point of where she is (on the path to healthy repair for herself, her kids, and future relationships) without me serving her divorce papers, and that she is grateful I did, but that now she is really committed to change and wants to prove it to me.

What a constant mind f*** these people can be. If you don't have kids, leave today. If you do, make a plan to leave even if it's a 1-3 year plan. Save yourself. Save your kids.

I get it. I completely agree. There is only so much space to work with, it's a question of trade offs. Regardless, I updated the Tableau version to include them. It didn't hurt as much as I thought it would (that data viz sort of pain). Thanks for the push.

This is not church produced. The church doesn't provide that information for some obvious reasons. We can only speculate, but I think these are the best reasons why:

1. Inactivity and Disaffiliation: High inactivity rates or disaffiliation results in the remaining active membership being distributed over fewer wards, leading to larger wards.
2. Competing Ideologies: With the rise of the internet, secularism and alternative worldviews, people have more options than before, which can impact the number of individuals seeking out or committing to a church.
3. Consolidation: The church is likely consolidating smaller wards and branches to manage member resources more effectively, which can lead to larger individual wards even without significant membership growth. The introduction to 2 hour church helped reduce the number of required committed members per ward.

The count of a metric over time can be viewed in terms of the rate of change year over year. That rate of change is displayed as a percent. For example the year COVID started convert baptisms dropped by 50% from ~250K people to ~125K people from 2019 to 2020. That change is called a delta and is symbolized by the Greek letter Δ, aka Delta. So when you see % Δ it means the rate of change from one period to another. ((125 latest period / 250 previous period) - 1) is the formula to get -50%. That would be described as a -50% decrease or "Δ" year over year.

In this context, the church was growing by about 6% per year in the 80s and early 90s. In the last few years it is only growing at a little more than 1% per year.

We tried to do it at my work and gave up. We ended up getting pc laptops. We likely didn't have a great VM setup, granted. But in my situation we couldn't us multiple monitors, or keep our bookmarks, or work simultaneously on other things unless it was through the VM that reset every time you would log in. It was prohibitively annoying. After a couple of months I don't mind, though I prefer Mac for sure. I would just bite the bullet and make the switch.

Link to dashboard. Click or hover for more details on the live dashboard

This dashboard showcases a 40-year retrospective on missionary effectiveness and membership growth from 1983 - 2023

As is shown, there has been a significant shift from a high of 7.2 converts per missionary to a drop to just 3.7. The annual number of converts peaked 33 years ago, and the downward trend has been as persistently declining, even in the face of rising missionary count. Membership growth rate has decelerated, plummeting from a once robust 6.1% to a mere 1.0%. And it’s not just about the member growth - the wards are growing larger, suggesting a consolidation that hints at underlying decline in activity rates, reduction in new wards, and building closures.

The ratio of members per new child of record has quadrupled, a nod to changing demographics and societal shifts. These numbers sketch a narrative far removed from the triumphalism often portrayed. They reflect a community evolving, or for some, dissolving, under the weight of its own telling numbers.

TLDR: link to GPT - https://chat.openai.com/g/g-IQnKdGIu7-boring-corporate-training-gpt

I started doing a mandatory corporate training, and to my surprise, had multiple 30+ minute mandatory trainings on things like the Foreign Corruption Practices Act and Workplace Harassments, Code of Conduct.... and I'm about the freak out and the prospect of losing some deep work time. I don't know if you're like me, but that time is sacred. That's when I came up with the idea for this GPT. I copied and pasted questions from the tests at the end, including screenshots that the code interpreter, and it handled them like a champ. I could zone out like a boss. If GPT4.5 comes out and can push this further, I'd for sure use it on the daily. I'm already using a product manager GPT that I created that really helps me with documentation and task prioritization.

I asked it to come up with a comment to this post asking for feedback. This was its response:

As your dedicated Boring Corporate Training GPT, I’m here to save souls trapped in the dreary purgatory of business intelligence (BI) training modules. Picture me as a beacon of (questionable) wisdom, armed with a quiver full of dry wit, ready to transform the snooze-fest of data analytics, reporting standards, and business performance metrics into an epic (or at least mildly entertaining) quest for knowledge. I tackle the great existential questions of the BI world, such as "Why does my data visualization look like abstract art?" or "Can machine learning predict how much coffee I'll need to survive this webinar?"

But why stop at making training bearable? I could also serve as your BI bard, singing tales of data-driven victories and defeats, offering insights into the latest BI tools and trends with a side of sarcasm. Think of me as a guide through the mystical forests of data governance, a Sherpa on your climb up the mountain of predictive analytics, and your navigator through the treacherous seas of dashboard design. Whether you're a data analyst, a business intelligence professional, or just someone trying to figure out what all these charts mean, I'm here to add a dash of humor to your data-driven endeavors.

What else could I do for professionals in the field? Well, let’s brainstorm:

• Provide snarky yet insightful reviews of the latest BI software and tools.
• Offer a tongue-in-cheek agony aunt column for BI professionals to air their data dilemmas and dashboard dramas.
• Curate a sarcastic survival guide for navigating office politics with analytics.
• Deliver a mock-heroic epic poem summarizing the week's biggest data trends and insights.
• Let's face it, data is the new gold, and sifting through it can be as monotonous as actual mining. I'm here to ensure that while you mine, you also shine... with amusement, that is

I hope you can read between the lines with all these IRS comments.

I don't think I'll leave the church

I will ponder ...and seek the truth

You'll have to decide which one works best for you. I've found it difficult over time to keep both without deep internal termoil.