A Look at Church Statistics for the year ending December 31, 2022
On Saturday afternoon of the April General Conference the church releases "on-line" the annual statistics for the prior year. What follows is a discussion of those results. A year ago the church announced membership by continent and country. I could not find a update to those numbers this year. One thing is certain, North and South America have more than 80% of total church membership based on data from 2021.
The year 2022 saw strong improvement in church membership metrics as the world came out of the SARS-COV-2 pandemic. Church membership topped 17 million for the first time. It would be nice if the church reported the number of "Children of Record Baptized", rather than number of "Children of Record born,"as we could infer some other important statistics from that.
As convert baptims accelerated from recent years, the total topped seventeen million for the first time
As convert baptims accelerated from recent years, the total topped seventeen million for the first time
The number of missions worldwide has been in the 400-421 range since the required expanions which were required when the missionary age was lowered to 18 for young men and 19 for young wormen.
The rebound from 2020 when many missionaries were recalled due to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is simkply stunning.
The number of baptisms per missionary almost returned to 2019 levels, which was the highest level since 2013.
The rebound in baptisms tracks well with the rebound in the number of full time missionaries serving
The number of Church Serivce Missionaries dropped by almost seven thousand. I don't have an explaination for this decline.
Clearly people did not want to have children in 2020, but things returned to a more normla level in 2021 and 2022. It's just a fluke that the 2022 and 2023 number are almost identical.
The number of temples dedicated in 2022 was 5. This number must increase going forward. There are about 320 temples in operation or announnced. There are 175 temples dedicated as of the end of 2022. That leaves about 145 temples that have been announced, site disclosed, ground broken, in construction or complete but not yet dedicated.
