Saturday, April 6, 2013
Full-time Missionary Force Continues to Swell
This morning, President Monson announced that there were 65,634 full-time missionaries serving as of April 4th. Currently there are 20,000 missionaries who have received their mission calls and an additional 6,000 individuals who are in the interview process. For more information about the influence of reducing the mission age on future church growth trends in the LDS Church, please refer to my case study on cumorah.com that can be found here.
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So if we assume that the average wait time for a mission call is about 4 months, we could guess that before the announcement, there would be about 9,000 people with calls in hand at any moment. So this is a doubling of that, which makes sense since we have 2 years of elders and 3 years of sisters currently going out. The exact same thing happened in 1960-61 when the elders age was dropped from 20 to 19. Then, the initial surge was compounded by the arrival of the baby boomers, and the post-surge numbers never went down more than a few hundred. The stats looked like this:
1958: 5,485 total (2% increase); 2,778 called
1959: 5,500 total (0.3% increase); 2,847 called
1960: 7,683 total (40% increase); 4,706 called
1961: 10,383 total (35% increase); 5,793 called
1962: 11,818 total (14% increase); 5,630 called
1963: 11,653 total (1% decrease); 5,781 called
1964: 11,371 total (2% decrease); 5,886 called
It will be very interesting to see what it settles down to next year when the surge passes.
In an article about the calling of training siters I got the impression that the percentage of sisters among missionaries serving is now more than double what it was before the policy changes.
I suspect the long term effects will be more missionaries serving. I hope it will be lots more, but am confident it will be permanently more.
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