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133: LDS Growth Not Exponential as Predicted. Why?

Latter Day Struggles

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The Rise and Fall of the LDS Church

Dr. Stewart is doing a literature review on publications that have either predicted church growth or gone back and analyzed why some of those predictions didn't pan out. He often quotes another researcher by the name of Rodney Stark, who had a report in 1984. We're also going to reference work by another companionship named Binyan and Young, who predicted in 1996 that the total Church membership would be between 36 and 121 million by 2020. In 2020, we had 16.7 million members, which was less than half of the low ball projection of 36 million. And in 2023, this year, we just barely hit 17 million. So, the Church's growth has accelerated quite a bit.

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