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My celestial sex partner and I had an interesting discussion the other night after I read an article about how the world’s population will be nearing 7 BILLION in 2011, and is projected to reach 9 BILLION by 2042. Neither of us are great at math and were couldn’t get the calculator to work with those numbers, but we were wondering if there is approx 13 MILLION active LDS by the time the earth’s population reaches 7 BILLION, what percentage of the earth’s inhabitants will be Mormon? Anyone out there able to figure that out? We decided on 13 million LDS as that’s the current number given and we know not all of those are active members.
These numbers gave rise to a few questions we debated:
1- At the rate LDS missionary work is going and the population is growing, approximately how long will it take to reach all of the earth’s inhabitants with the church’s message?
2- If God wants us all to accept Mormonism as the earth’s true faith, then why are so few of the earth inhabitants members?
3- If God is as powerful as they say, then why is it taking so long for his message to get out to people? Why not use a more efficient means than missionaries?
4- We often hear from the pulpit that not all members will make it to the celestial kingdom, so with membership being so small when compared to the earth’s population, why are so few going to make it back to God’s presence if he loves us?
Do you have any of the answers, if so, please share!
Like a waterfall in slow motion, Part One
2 years ago
5 comments:
Here are my thoughts-
A- God reaches out to people and prepares them in numerous ways outside of the missionaries. I truly believe that some people are prepared through the religions of the world even if those religions do not have the fullness of the gospel. Many religions have important parts of the gospel and do important work in preparing people. I believe the vast majority of religions bring people closer to Heavenly Father and help prepare them for more light and knowledge. (This excludes some of the satanic religions for reasons I would hope to be obvious.)
B- Everyone will have the opportunity to hear the gospel, some in this life some in the next.
C- Not hearing the gospel or not being a member of the church does not automatically exclude you from the the celestial kingdom. Having certain key ordinances done is an important part of reaching the celestial kingdom and luckily for us there is a way to have that done e for people who never had the opportunity. Or at least they will be given the chance to accept those ordinances when they are done.
Your calculation works out to be 13,000,000/7,000,000,000 = 0.19% of the worlds population as LDS. If you take into account a few other statistics like that the majority of the worlds population is Christian (~2.1 Billion or ~30%), the worlds fastest growing religions are non christian, ie; Islam, and that the major non christian religions are not too far behind in the overall percentage race. If things continue at the current rate, non christian religions will overtake and eventually the vast majority of the world won't even know who the "mormons" are.
I have also recently wondered why a more effective means was not chosen to spread the true word of god? Why pick a boy in the relatively scarcely populated continent of North America? It would have been much more effective to pick someone in a more strategic location like India or China. Though I guess if this had been done, then the faith would have had much more competition with religions that had been in place for hundreds if not thousands of years and would most likely have been stamped out before getting off the ground.
Sorry for the rant, just some thoughts.
I think your question about the efficiency of sending teenage missionaries to spread the word of god is a good one. With the world becoming so global and changing so drasically why hasn't the missionary efforts chaged all that much in 100 years?
I don't know the official church stance on this one but, I think it's less about spreading the gospel and more about strengthing the boys sent out.... JMO!
Nice post. So here's something more to think about: The retention rate for new convert baptisms is right at 30% in a given year. So let's do a quick excercise. If the mishies baptize 300,000 converts in a year, by the end of that year only 90,000 will remain as "active" mormons. This leaves 210,000 who either do not consider themselves to be mormon anymore, or stop practicing for some reason. These we can call "former mormons". So, the missionary effort actually creates more former mormons than it does mormons on a yearly basis. That is effeiciency for you.
I just looked up the statistics on the latest Pew survey on religious affiliation. 1.8% of all surveyed said their childhood religion was Mormon, while 1.7% said they were currently Mormon. So, uh, do the numbers.
http://religions.pewforum.org/pdf/report-religious-landscape-study-full.pdf
It's on page 24.
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