It’ll be very interesting to see ten years from now what social effects that has. I’d imagine right off that it helps with marriages. Marriage is, I think improved by dealing with sometimes hard to live with companions full time. At least I learned a lot of both patience but also understanding of social dynamics I didn’t have.

The other effect will be more women delaying marriage though which of course is already going on but will be accelerated. I’m not convinced that’s necessarily a bad thing. It was good for me. I can’t imagine getting married in my early 20’s. For me personally it’d have been a mistake even though I know many were more than ready to handle it. One of those things that I wasn’t happy about at the time but that in hindsight I see as a huge blessing. Yet there’s clearly also the issue of people getting set in their ways and thereby perhaps making marriage harder when they reach their late 20’s.

Anyways, I think this indicates there are more big social changes ahead.

Sorry, didn’t spend the time to clean up the graph in Excel so 0s make it look a tad ugly. Red is actual and blue is projected by the model. But it does indicate we’re actually doing better than predicted due to increased numbers of sister missionaries.

Clark, I think it’s pretty easy to see the correlation between the two charts. The increase in births from 2001-2003 correspond to the increase in missionaries from 2020-2023, and the increase in births from 2007-2008 correspond to the increase in missionaries from 2026-2028. The bump in 2013 and 2014 is simply due to overlapped age groups serving simultaneously due to the age drop. Overall, the missionary numbers are smoother than the birth numbers because of the different ages for men and women serving, as well as the fact that not everyone serves as soon as they are eligible. So, often the missionaries serving in a given year come from a larger span of birth years, causing a sort of a running average between years.

I hesitated to provide the whole spreadsheet, because I just threw it together, and that was several years ago. But I just updated it, and I fixed an error I just found (so the chart is now just slightly different). So, here’s the link (but it’s still quite a mess to weed through, since I wasn’t worried about its presentation quality at the time).

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1y_MdJautkkxjnMyCzVmNMWDA-BifmkbmJBcH37oavmc/edit?usp=sharing

Thanks so much for your detail. I took time to go back to several of the statistical reports on lds.org just now and have discovered that in reality, the term “increase in children of record” was first used for the end of 1982 statistics in the April 1983 general conference by Michael F. Watson. Prior to that conference, we literally were provided the number of “children blessed.”

Bottom line, the term “increase” had slipped past me this whole time until your comments and I appreciated getting back on track. The mystery continues for me in the sense that Church statistics still indicate annual converts then why not annual 8-year old baptisms? It seems a bit odd to not provide both to give us a better picture of overall growth.

Just a thought.

To make things easier for readers here are the two graphs. (Click on the graphs for bigger versions)

Estimated LDS Births

Estimated Missionaries

It’s just not at all clear how to get from graph 1 to graph 2 given there’s no bump in the data from 1980-1999 yet there’s a huge bump in the number of missionaries. I assume he’s adding in the age change but I’d love to see the raw data.

The first statistic gives us a rough idea of how many people were born in the church 8 years previously, whereas the second statistic gives us a rough idea of how many people were born in the church in the current year.

So, for example, the 1996 report of “8 year old baptisms” would help us estimate how many births occurred in the church in 1988. So, using the reports up until 1996, we can estimate birth numbers up until 1988. However, the 1997 reported the “increase of children of record,” which is a fairly good representation of the number of births in the church during the year 1997. So, using reports from 1997 onward, we can estimate births from 1997 onward.

That leaves a gap from 1989 though 1996 (inclusive) in which we don’t have accurate statistics on the births that occurred in the church for those years. However, we do have the seminary enrollment stats for those same individuals, and we can use the data to back fill the missing birth information for that 8 year gap.

In order to backfill, I convert the seminary data from school years to calendar years, and I use the info from the age groups for which we have both birth and seminary enrollment info, in order to correlate seminary enrollment of a given year with the birth numbers for the years 14-18 years previous. That helped me estimate the births for the years 1989 through 1996.

The comment . . . “to backfill for the 8 year gap in data from when the church switched from “8 year-olds baptized” to “increase in children of record.”

I have a kept a spreadsheet on all the key statistics to come over the General Conference pulpit since 1971 and I can find no logical explanation for the disappearance of 8-year old baptism statistics (since 1997 data). You are implying that they were absorbed into the Children of Record stats, but when you place the two categories side-by-side over the decades, that just isn’t feasible. If it were the case, the number of Children of Record would have skyrocketed as a result. The trend lines don’t seem to accommodate your theory. What adds more to the puzzle though is that from 1988 to 1996 the Children of Record stat was not given over the pulpit, but then reappears from 1997 on.

Just curious if you know something I don’t know regarding the two different sets of statistics or any rationale behind the changes?