Year-End 2020 Membership and Congregation Data by Country Remains Unavailable

The Church has yet to update its Facts and Statistics page on its Newsroom website - the only location where the Church publishes year-end membership and congregation data by country and province/state (for the United States and Canada). This marks the longest the Church has ever taken to update this page after the annual General Conference (the last time it took this long to update the page was in 2013 when it was not updated until April 22nd). Typically, these data are available within 1-2 weeks after the annual General Conference. I have contacted the Newsroom staff about the issue, and the statistics have yet to be updated with year-end 2020 figures. The Church continues to not report membership and congregational data for more than a dozen non-sensitive countries -- most of which have had a recent official Church establishment (e.g., Gabon, Guinea, Mali, Senegal) or a de-sensitization of its previous status during the past few years (e.g., Belarus, Cuba, Egypt, Kosovo, Lebanon, Morocco, North Macedonia, Vietnam). Other countries have had a long-term, nonsensitive presence and remain missing from the statistics pages on the Newsroom site (e.g., Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands, Bonaire, Jordan, Oman, Qatar, constituent countries in the United Kingdom).

Statistical Pages Updated on Official Church Newsroom Website

The Church recently updated its country and world region statistical pages on its official Newsroom site. For the first time, the Church has published online its year-end 2017 figures for several metrics, including:

• Membership
• Congregations (with breakdown of wards/branches)
• Stakes
• Districts
• Missions
• Family History Centers
• Temples

With this information made easily accessible to the public, the Church now publishes nearly all of the data that was previously included in the defunct Deseret Church News Almanac series that ran from 1974 to 2013. Additionally, the Church has published graphs that display membership and congregational growth by world region to provide greater context to growth trends. For example, congregational decline in Europe and South America are clearly evident in these graphs, as well as steady growth in congregational growth in Africa and North America.

Although this is a major improvement in making accurate information more accessible to researchers and the public, there remains much to be done in regards to greater access to official Church data to assist the study of Church growth. For example, the Church does not publish its membership, congregational, stake, district, mission, and temple data by country for prior years (although this information is available for all countries at www.cumorah.com). Also, there remain many countries/territories without official church statistics reported even though there is not a sensitive Church presence, such as Vietnam, Gabon, Bermuda, Macedonia, Senegal, and Guinea.

See below for my recommendations in regards to additional metrics that appear appropriate to release to the public. None of these metrics appear sensitive and can provide a more accurate measure of the Church's size in terms of active membership and growth trends. The Church has previously published some of the following information, whereas some of these metrics have never been published by the Church.

• Consistent updates (e.g. daily or weekly) regarding the creation of new congregations or discontinuation of congregations
• Consistent, accurate updates regarding the creation and discontinuation of stakes and districts
• The annual number of convert baptisms by country and mission
• The annual number of missionaries serving by country
• Average sacrament meeting attendance by country
• Seminary and institute enrollment by country