There’s something comfortable and fun about the kind armchair predictions about the future that are either too vague to be falsifiable or too far in the future for anybody to hold you to account. It’s a little nervy to make a concrete, falsifiable prediction in the near future, so I do some with some trepidation, but here it goes.
The record-breaking number of missionaries we are currently enjoying is going to peak in the next year or two (or maybe already has), and then start a precipitous decline. You can mark my prediction here.
The reason is not because of a crisis in confidence in the leadership, smartphones, your cousin reading the CES letter, some policy failure of the seminaries and institutes department, or, somehow, Donald Trump (since he always manages to make an appearance in every discussion about everything), although I’m sure there will be plenty of shooting-from-the-hip speculations along those lines if the crash comes. Rather, it’s from something much more banal: demographics.
The engine of the Church’s proselytizing is in the 18-20 year old demographic in US, and the Latter-day Saint corridor in particular. In the next couple of years the cohort of 18-20 year olds is going to significantly shrink as a result of the steep drop in childbearing that happened in 2008 in wake of the Great Recession and has persisted since then (I always thought the Great Recession got too much credit for the decline when it was probably going to happen at some point anyway). This is going to be armageddon for smaller, unendowed universities (and maybe not so small ones, the university I occasionally adjunct at just merged the sociology department with economics and education), but in a sense, as goes higher education in the US, so goes the Latter-day Saint missionary force.
In Utah we were hovering at 2.6-2.7, but after the 2008 decline we are now at slightly below replacement 2.1.
If I had to make a less confident, but more numerically precise estimate, one projection has Utah’s college population declining by 6% from 2023-2041, so I’d put my pin there If I had to make a precise prediction. Of course other parameters might change. For example, our retention rate has declined quite a bit between the 2014 and 2025 Pew Religious Landscape Survey. If that trends continue it may be higher than 6% decline. However, I suspect our retention rate has plateaud so I’m staying with a 6% decline, but time will tell.
I might be wrong about our missionary force declining, but it’s hard to fight against demographic waves, so I don’t think I will be.
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