Updated Country Profiles - The Baltic States - Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania

We have updated several additional Reaching the Nations country profiles on www.cumorah.com. These profiles include:

• Estonia
• Latvia
• Lithuania

Due to many high-quality surveys and local member reports, I believe these profiles number among some of the most accurate and comprehensive country profiles we have posted since updating the almanac. These profiles include a significant amount of information about member activity and convert retention rates in these nations, as well as trends in these metrics over the past 20 years. Furthermore, we have also obtained information about "natural growth" in the Church in these nations (i.e. children born into the Church). Interestingly, there has been a significant "baby boom" in the Church in Estonia and Latvia in the past couple years although there has been no such increase in births in the Church in Lithuania. The Church remains very small in all the Baltic States with 950-1,350 members in each of these nations. However, the Church has been successful in the establishment of a core of local leadership capable of leading congregations with minimal support from mission leadership. Although membership growth rates has substantially slowed in the past 15 years to essentially stagnant membership growth at present (mainly due to few convert baptisms and emigration), convert retention rates have markedly increased in these nations to good-to-excellent levels. Furthermore, much of the recent progress in improving convert retention rates has occurred despite the number of full-time missionaries assigned to the Baltic Mission at the lowest levels seen since the early 2000s.

On another note, we are in the process of updating and revamping cumorah.com. There have been issues with ads being placed on the site due to outdated coding on the site. These ads will be removed once the updates are completed. 

2008: A Year of Expansion for the Church

Over the past few weeks, I have found around a dozen blogs from missionaries and mission presidents from around the world. Places these missionaries are serving in range from the Ukraine to the Democratic Republic of Congo. They have provided valuable information concerning the growth and status of the Church throughout the world.

One overlying theme I have found in these blogs, especially within the last several months, is the expasion the Church into new cities, particularly in Eastern Europe. Africa has also seen this expansion of missionary work and congregations into areas where the Church was not organized. Below is a list of countries in Europe with the number of new cities opened within the past 14 months. Again, this is only the number of cities I have found; there could be more.

• Albania: 1
• Croatia: 1
• Estonia: 1
• Hungary: 4
• Latvia: 1
• Slovakia: 1
• Ukraine: 4
• Romania: 1

What makes this impressive is the lack of new cities which were opened for missionary work over the past decade. Most of these countries have only seen one or two new cities have congregations established in them during that time. For example, the only city opened in Estonia since the late 90s was Narva.

Below is a map of Albania and the Baltic Countries. These are a couple countries I do not have maps of posted yet and have seen missionary work expand into new cities recently. The green squares are branches and the red dots are large cities without known branches or missionaries.