After the Church’s new policy regarding same-sex couples and their children, there seemed to be a buzz about mass resignations from the LDS faith.
News outlets nationwide showed large public meetings of people seemingly fleeing in droves—but the actual stats of the Church over the last year tell a very different story than the pictures and the news. It’s not a surprise that the media “distort the real picture” and misrepresent the Church’s change in membership over the past year, reports the LDS Church and the Salt Lake Tribune.
Special thanks to LDS Living Mormon Report for helping us find and report on this as well.
Here’s some of what they had to say:
The LDS Church acknowledges “periodic increases or decreases in [membership resignation] requests,” explains spokesman Eric Hawkins, but “the number of people asking to have their names removed from the records of the church has been less than one-tenth of 1 percent (less than 1 in 1,000) for more than 20 consecutive years, including in 2015 and the first eight months of 2016.”
That means of the 15,634,199 members reported by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in April, fewer than 15,634 have or will resign this year.
That figure pales in comparison to, say, the 257,402 converts who joined the church in 2015.
Hawkins says other “important statistics” demonstrate the continuing “activity [rate] of individual adult members, such as endowed members with a current temple recommend and full tithe payers.”
Read the full report at Salt Lake Tribune.
