Showing all posts in April 2022

In Statistics

New Children of Record and Church Activity

Author ZiffPosted on 8 Comments

In this post, I just want to make a small point about the Church’s report of new children of record in the annual statistical report. Here’s a graph showing annual end-of-year counts since 2010.

The count was flat for several years, but then started falling consistently from year to year starting in 2015. And then of course it fell off a cliff in 2020, going from 94,000 all the way to 65,000, a drop of over 30%. (For the rest of this post, I’m going to abbreviate thousands as “K,” so 94K is 94,000.)

It seems clear that the 2020 decline was caused by COVID. But there are (at least) two possible mechanisms that could be driving the effect of COVID on new children of record. One is that COVID affected birth rates. I had the idea in the back of my head that economic downturns are often associated with declining birth rates, and a quick Google turns up at least one paper that suggests that that’s true. However, given the nine month length of human gestation and the fact that COVID was officially declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020, it seems pretty unlikely that couples were changing their childbearing plans and having the effects show up before the end of the year.

The other possible mechanism by which COVID could affect children of record is through church activity. The children of record count is effectively a count of children born to or adopted by LDS families where at least one parent is active enough to get them recorded on Church records. With COVID pushing church meetings to be online, or suspended entirely, it’s not surprising that families were less diligent about recording their births and adoptions with their local units than they would have been in ordinary times. So I think the big drop from 2019 to 2020 makes sense.

What is striking, though, is that the 2020 to 2021 recovery is smaller than I would expect. New children of record rebounded from 65K to 89K, which seems like a healthy gain. But if my guess that people were just lax in recording new births and adoptions is right, there should have been a big backlog from 2020 that got recorded as people largely returned to attending church in person in 2021. Really, the 2021 count should have exceeded 2019 if this was the case.

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In Missionary Work, Statistics

Proselytizing vs. Service Missionary Counts in the Church Statistical Report

Author ZiffPosted on 15 Comments

It may not be read in general conference anymore, but needless to say, I was interested to take a look at the Church’s 2021 statistical report. One interesting thing I noticed has to do with the counts of proselytizing versus service missionaries. Here’s a graph showing the end-of-year counts of missionaries since 2010. You can see in the count of proselytizing missionaries the jump with the age change in 2012, the slow decline afterward, and then the dramatic drop with COVID and then some recovery. The count of service missionaries has had fewer dramatic movements, increasing through 2018, then declining for a couple of years, and then increasing sharply in 2021.

As I mentioned in my conference review post, several speakers reminded young men that they need to be serving missions, and that young women can go as well. For example, here’s President Nelson in the opening talk of the conference:

Today I reaffirm strongly that the Lord has asked every worthy, able young man to prepare for and serve a mission. For Latter-day Saint young men, missionary service is a priesthood responsibility. . . . For you young and able sisters, a mission is also a powerful, but optional, opportunity. . . . Your decision to serve a mission, whether a proselyting or a service mission, will bless you and many others. [italics in original]

As an aside, I find the patronizing tone directed toward young women grating, but I feel like at least it represents a step forward from President Hinckley’s 1997 talk where he pretty openly discouraged women from serving. Anecdotally, for some women I know who were missionaries at the time, the talk led many elders to sneer to them, “Why don’t you just go home?”

Looking back to the graph, President Nelson and the other GAs are clearly concerned with the upper line, the count of proselytizing missionaries. It fell from about 67,000 at the end of 2019 to about 52,000 at the end of 2020. Of course this can be attributed to the pandemic. But then through 2021, even as vaccines became more widely available, it rebounded only a little, to about 55,000. I suspect they’re concerned that all the disruption in missionary work because of COVID has made missionary service seem more optional.

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In General Conference

A Heretic Reviews General Conference, April 2022

Author ZiffPosted on 17 Comments

Best musical number: “Now Let Us Rejoice” Saturday afternoon. I really enjoyed this arrangement, and it gets bonus points for being so upbeat.
Worst musical number: “Our Prayer to Thee” Sunday afternoon. I’m not familiar with this hymn, but it just sounded way too soft and slow and what I think of as “Mormon reverent,” if that makes sense.
Fastest musical number: “In Hymns of Praise” Sunday afternoon. I didn’t actually check, but this seemed pretty fast to me.
Slowest musical number: “Oh, May My Soul Commune with Thee” Women’s session.
Best choir outfits: I appreciated that the women in the BYU-I choir on Saturday afternoon got to wear a very dark blue rather than a bright or pastel color that women are so often required to wear to show their adherence to divine gender roles.

Longest prayer: Vern P. Stanfill, Sunday afternoon benediction, 105 seconds. This is the second conference in a row where nobody got close to two minutes, which is kind of my rule of thumb for when a prayer starts to feel long.
Shortest prayer: Jan E. Newman, Saturday afternoon benediction, 62 seconds.

Things we don’t talk about:

  • Dale G. Renlund built his whole talk around a caution to women to not try to learn more about Heavenly Mother. Or pray to her. Or speculate about her. Or ask for revelation about her. He did stop short of telling them they shouldn’t mention her, but his message was still clear.
  • Gary E. Stevenson told a story of women in Poland who left strollers on a train platform for arriving Ukranian refugees who were fleeing the Russian invasion. He said “Poland,” but he couldn’t bring himself to say “Ukraine,” and certainly not “Russia.”
  • Russell M. Nelson did manage to say both “Ukraine” and “Russia,” but carefully avoided naming the Russian invasion for what it is, opting instead to vaguely refer to it as “the armed conflict in eastern Europe.”

Best title: Reyna I. Aburto, “We Are The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints”. A nice perspective, even if I think it misses the outsized control the GAs have.
Overwrought title: Patrick Kearon, “He Is Risen with Healing in His Wings: We Can Be More Than Conquerors”. I love the talk, but the title is just a bit much.
Trying too hard title: Becky Craven, “Do What Mattereth Most”.
Phoning-it-in title: Dallin H. Oaks, “Introductory Message”.

Talk that should have just been a Church Newsroom post: Dallin H. Oaks opened the Women’s session by explaining that the Saturday night session will be held going forward, but for different purposes at different times. I guess after the canceling and un-canceling of the session last year, the GAs felt like they had to come clean about the Saturday Night Session Selector (in principle, even if not in detail).

Best visual aid: Jeffrey R. Holland showed a note from a young girl who complained that conference is boring, and asked why we do it. It’s only too bad he didn’t actually discuss her question!

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In Fun, General Conference

Conference to retain some COVID-era adaptations

Author ZiffPosted on 6 Comments

This weekend, the Church will hold its first general conference to welcome a large live audience since before the COVID pandemic began. Even with the return of an audience, though, Church spokesman Heber Gordon Alonzo Pratt explains that several adaptations made during the previous four conferences will be retained going forward.

First, during the sustaining votes, which are held each conference to allow members to express their support for the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve and all other general-level governing bodies of the Church (as presently constituted), audience members will no longer be asked to raise their hands in support. Rather, as during the pandemic, all audience members, whether viewing online or in person, and

Photo by Ismael Paramo on Unsplash

in real time or later using recordings, will be presumed to have expressed support unless they explicitly express otherwise by contacting their stake president and surrendering their temple recommend (if applicable). Making this change permanent has a number of benefits, Pratt explained. First, it does not privilege the voices of in-person attendees over those of members who are far from Salt Lake. Second, it eases the minds of General Authorities who may become unsettled by the possibility of a dissenting vote occurring right before their very eyes. Third, it relieves attendees, who do not know ahead of time which session the sustainings will occur in, of the burden of having to raise their hands upwards of five times. “Essentially, we’re streamlining the sustaining process by making it opt out rather than opt in,” Pratt summarized.

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