I prefer using data to help understand history. Noticeable changes in relevant data indicate that something important happened here – and you should figure out what that was. I am looking at the recent history of Mormon missionary work, using the data for the number of members, missionaries, and convert baptisms published by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Some changes are easily visible, like shorting the length of a mission in the early 1980s and lengthening it again or the age change in 2012 are immediately obvious. Others, like Raising the Bar and Preach My Gospel, can be seen but are more subtle. I have no explanation for the biggest change: in the 1990s, the number of missionaries and number of baptisms decoupled. Missionaries continued to increase, but baptisms began to fall. We have never been able to get to this number of baptisms since. If we could figure out how to return to the pre-1990 relationship between missionaries and baptisms, we would have hundreds of thousands of additional converts every year.
Prerequisites: Knowing about the missionary program of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons).
Originally Written: Summer 2011, updated annually since.
Confidence Level: Don’t trust me. Look at the data yourself.
To me, it is madness to commit two years or eighteen months of your life to anything without looking at the best data available about it. This tendency seems uncommon among potential missionaries.
The church publishes only a little of the data it collects. We do have the church statistical report. It used to be part of the Saturday afternoon session of the April General Conference, but now is only available online.
Three of the numbers reported each year are relevant to missionary work: the total membership of the church, the number of full-time missionaries, and the number of convert baptisms. Below is my analysis of these data going back to 1977. Prior to 1977, the church used a different reporting system and I don’t want to try to determine the correspondence between the numbers.
A fourth number might also be relevant: the number of babies blessed. This number can be used as a tracer for the total active membership of the church. However, to determine the total membership, we have to make additional demographic assumptions about the church. This becomes even more difficult because the reporting system has changed more recently, so we can’t do as good of a historical comparison.
There are multiple ways of displaying the data. Some of them which I find interesting are in Figure 1. These plots display how some quantity or quantities change in time. I will leave the interpretation of these plots to the reader.
There is an even more interesting plot to look at: how the number of baptisms varies with the number of missionaries. The plot should be able to show the effects of changing the number of missionaries and the marginal benefit of one additional missionary. It is also interesting because it makes the data look like a spiral galaxy (Figure 2). A more detailed version of the plot, with the year of each data point labeled, is shown in Figure 3. I will use this plot to give a history of the recent missionary efforts of the church.
There are some significant caveats to using this data.
Our only data is the total number of missionaries and the total number of baptisms. We don’t have access to any more detailed data. There is undoubtedly huge variation both between missions and between missionaries. Some of the differences depend on the mission itself, but most depend on the society the missionaries are called to work in. None of these local variations can be seen in this data. Since 1977, the countries that missionaries have access to and the relative number of missionaries in these countries has changed dramatically. Which countries were accessible and allowed missionaries to enter could be one of the driving factors behind the changes in baptisms. For example, during the 1990’s, missionaries could enter Eastern Europe for the first time. Suppose that the number of missionaries to Latin America (a high baptizing region) decreased as more missionaries began to be called to Eastern Europe (a low baptizing region). A decline in number of baptisms could then be explained by a shift in geographic distribution of missionaries, not in any changes to the policies of missions or to society.
The biggest problem with these data is that they only look at the number of baptisms. Missionaries do much more than just baptize people. They also perform service, strengthen recent converts, support the ministering efforts of the ward leadership, prepare people to receive the gospel in the future, and many other things. Emphasizing solely on baptisms misses all of the other good that missionaries do. One clear example of this is convert retention. If missionaries start spending more time strengthening recent converts, these converts would (hopefully) be more likely to remain active members of the church. However, this takes time away from searching for new converts and might reduce the baptism rate. Focusing more on retention might lower the baptismal rate and still mean that more people were being truly converted to the gospel of Jesus Christ. I would love to have other data that showed a fuller picture of the good work done by missionaries. Unfortunately, the church does not publish data on retention or on the results of missionaries’ service efforts. I do my best to tell the story with the data I have, recognizing that this picture is incomplete unless more data becomes available from church headquarters.
There is a lot of interesting things to notice about this plot.
First, if we look from a bird’s eye view, we see that the number of baptisms was increasing until around 1990 and has been flat or decreasing since then.
We see can more trends if we look closer. Typically, I am loath to build trends from only a few data points. In this case, each data point is a global average and so should have less random variation.
The first trend to notice is in the data from 1977 to 1995. During these years, there is a clear correlation between the number of the missionaries and the number of baptisms. This is not surprising – hopefully, more missionaries result in more baptisms. We can be fairly certain that this correlation is meaningful. One possible alternative interpretation of the trend is simply that, since the church was growing during that time period, all of the numbers associated with the church were growing as well. If this were true, the correlation would be merely accidental. However, there is evidence that this interpretation is false. In the early 1980s, the length of a mission for elders was reduced from 24 months to 18 months. As a result of this policy change, there were fewer missionaries at any time. This dip in the number of missionaries can easily be seen in the first plot of Figure 1. This dip cannot be easily seen Figure 2. When the number of missionaries decreased, the number of baptisms decreased as well. The correlation between the number of missionaries and baptisms remained the same, regardless of whether the number of missionaries was increasing or decreasing. This policy change only lasted a few years before it was reversed. The number of missionaries and the number of baptisms quickly resumed their correlated climbs.
Sometime in the early 1990’s, this correlation broke down. From 1996-2002, there is a very different trend. The number of missionaries continued to increase, while the number of baptisms started to decrease. I don’t know why this change occurred. There is no obvious change in the policies or practices of missionaries that could explain the change. I guess that something changed in the world. Here are several plausible-sounding guesses. The early 1990’s marked the beginnings of the internet and its first widespread use. Broad access to the internet, and with it the bulk of human knowledge, could have adversely affected missionary work in several ways. It makes it easier for investigators to find anti-Mormon materials and might thereby discourage them from joining the church. Living in an information-saturated world could make people less receptive to purveyors of the Truth. Communism almost completely collapsed in the early 1990’s with the democratization of Eastern Europe, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and the continuing market reforms of mainland China. After the collapse of communism, the world ceased to be bipolar – there was much less of a clear distinction between good and evil in foreign policy. Good and evil became a less appropriate way of describing countries’ and individuals’ interactions in a more ambiguous, multipolar world. This shift could also probably be found in shifts in media and entertainment – there were fewer clear heroes and villains and more ethically nuanced characters. Religions promote clear notions of good and evil and could find it more difficult to grow when these notions are in decline in the rest of society. I am not particularly convinced of any of these guesses, but I hope to fuel your thoughts with them. Coping with and compensating for this societal shift is the biggest missionary-related challenge for the leadership of the church. If we could have continued the 1977-1995 trend, we would have hundreds of thousands more conversions every year.
As the number of missionaries rose and the number of baptisms fell, a belief spread among those who concerned themselves with the structure of missionary work: You could send half of the missionaries home and it wouldn’t have any influence on the number of baptisms. It is easy to see the justification for this claim when the correlation between missionaries and baptisms was negative. The church decided to try it. In 2002, a new policy change was announced: Raising the Bar. The moral requirements to go on a mission were dramatically increased and it became much easier to send missionaries home for violations of the mission handbook. The number of missionaries decreased as expected. The number of baptisms did too. 2003, 2004, and 2005 were the lowest baptizing years since 1987. After this three-year transition period, the number of baptisms recovered to their 2002 levels. This recovery might have been caused by the shift to Preach My Gospel, which was rolled out in 2004. 2006-2011 were remarkably stable years for the missions of the church. There were only minimal fluctuations in both the number of missionaries and the number of baptisms. Although the 1977-1995 trend was not reestablished, the decline in the number of baptisms was stemmed.
In October of 2012, another major policy change was announced. The minimum age for a Sister to enter the mission field was reduced from 21 to 19 and the minimum age for an Elder was reduced from 19 to 18. This had two major consequences. The age change resulted in an immediate surge in the number of missionaries as multiple age cohorts entered the mission field at the same time. This surge began in 2012, but its largest effects were in the next two years. 2013 and 2014 both saw over 80,000 missionaries. Before these years, the number of missionaries had barely crested 60,000. After the surge, the mission force settled down to a more sustainable number. This new mission force is larger, younger, and more female than the mission force before the surge. It also baptizes fewer people. The years 2013-2016 indicate that a new correlation has developed between the number of missionaries and the number of baptisms. This correlation is well to the right of the 1977-1995 correlation – more missionaries are required to baptize the same number of people. It has a less steep slope – the marginal benefit of one additional missionary is lower. This correlation allowed the surge to take the number of baptisms to the highest number seen in this millennium. It also means that the mission force after the surge baptizes fewer people than the mission force before the surge did. 2016-2019 had fewer baptisms than even the post-Raising-the-Bar nadir. Not since 1987, when there were half as many missionaries held to looser moral standards, have we had this few baptisms. 2020 was terrible by all accounts, but that shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone.
Figure 4 shows the trends and groups of data discussed in the text. The 1977-1995 correlation is shown in blue. Each additional missionary corresponded to about 6 additional baptisms every year. The 1996-2002 negative correlation is shown in red. Each additional missionary corresponded to about 5 fewer baptisms every year. The post-Raising-the-Bar nadir is shown in yellow. The years 2006-2011 are shown in green – they form a tight cluster because there was little variation in the numbers of baptisms or missionaries during those years. 2012 was a transition year. The 2013+ correlation is shown in purple. Every additional missionary corresponds to about 3 additional baptisms in a year. 2020 is shown in black. We will see how quickly we can return to normal by looking at the data for next year.