The Slowing of Church Growth

Christian Anderson, who has an article in the upcoming Spring Issue, takes a hard look at membership numbers after they were released in April 2017 conference. Here’s a taste of his post “The Slowing of Church Growth.”
“Using the same methodology I used in (Dialogue Spr 2017; in press), making some reasonable assumptions about death rates and removals, the membership statistics suggest approximately 30,000 members were excommunicated or resigned in 2016, bringing the total for the last four years to just over 150,000. This value is based on several fudge-factors, and should only be taken as a rough order-or-magnitude guess. Randall Bowen at churchistrue.com used different fudge-factors (including assuming an increasing rate of removals of 110 year old lost members, and 9 year old children of record who had not been baptized) to arrive at an estimate of 20,000 defecting members in 2016 and about 95,000 over the last four years.”