Created in honor of General Conference weekend, April 2023, and in memory of my December 20, 2021 post “The Less Than Two Percenters: A Speculative Estimate of Mormon Missionary Conversion Rates,” which you can read write here.
If something hard happens to me and I somehow manage to get through it, does that experience make me stronger or better?
No.
I might become stronger or better before, during, or after the hard experience, but it is never the experience itself that makes me stronger or better, despite such prevalent sayings as “Adversity builds character,” and its many variants, or “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” (cue Kelly Clarkson, who I’ve heard many times, or Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols, which I’ve never read). Maybe these are just things people say to make themselves feel better about the suck parts of life. It has a sort of old-timey Protestant flavor to it I think – a feeling that everything has to have a purpose and ultimately be for your own good because it’s all part of the plan. So be sure to eat your vegetables and thank the Lord for your suffering. This is humanity’s way of putting some straight lines and right angles over the wiggly mess that is the reality of life, especially all the nasty bits that we don’t like.
If I get really sick and almost die but then I recover and later I feel stronger because of it, then it was not the sickness itself that made me stronger, The sickness made me weaker, which is why it almost killed me, and there is no good reason to be grateful for that, unless you believe that there is. Getting through a hellish health problem might show me what I’m capable of enduring, which might give me confidence, which could understandably make me feel stronger. But that would be a case of something being revealed to me about myself, and not of something hard helping me out.
When muscles are torn, they can build back stronger, and maybe that could be true of mental health as well – if an experience really breaks you up inside, maybe you rebuild better – but then again, maybe you don’t. It depends on who you are and what your circumstances are like at the time. Reinterpreting the hard stuff in a soft light can be a fun or comforting game to play, but that’s all it really is – a game. The totally sad stories about people who get knocked around by life until it knocks them right into their grave just don’t get mentioned as much, which is another part of the game – the game of counting hits not misses.
I started thinking about this whole concept more as my mind kept revisiting the question of whether or not the two year full-time mission I served for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which was an unusually challenging experience, was good for me. Even with all the problems I’ve discovered about The Church I still kept thinking “Well, my mission was good for me, so I can’t really argue with that, and it made made me a better, stronger person in a way I couldn’t have gotten anywhere else, so I guess no matter what The Church does, I’ll always have to be grateful to It for my mission experience. But something didn’t feel right about that for some reason.
Eventually I realized that my LDS mission did not make me a better person and I do not owe The Church a thing for it. The experience wasn’t inherently anything in particular on its own, other than what I believed it to be.
Do I regret serving a mission? Yes. Do I feel like I learned a lot and had some very valuable experiences on my mission? Yes. Did I enjoy my mission? Yes. Did I dislike my mission? Yes. If I could go back in time, knowing what I know now, would I choose to serve a mission again? No. Am I glad I went on a mission? Yes but it depends on when you ask me. Just like everything in life, it is what is is, depending on who’s looking, when, and where from.
The Church does not deserve my gratitude for my mission experience, I deserve theirs. I personally have done far more for The Church than The Church or any of its members or leaders have ever done for me personally.
The hard parts of life reveal who you are – like a sculptress revealing and refining more of her masterpiece with each strike of the hammer and chisel. But whether life turns you into a beautiful sculpture or hits you too hard and you crumble is not up to you. If it was, everyone would come out looking like Michelangelo’s David or Aphrodite of Knidos.
By the time you come out on the other end of a hard experience and are starting to interpret it in a positive way, you’ve already survived with what you already had going in. As Galen Strawson once said, “What you do follows from what you are.” If you survive the blows of life they can show you what you’re already made of, and while you may get better and you may get stronger, that is a testament to your own strength of character and not to adversity itself. There is no need to seek out adversity in the name of self-improvement – adversity will find you just fine, don’t worry. And there is no need to try and comfort yourself and others by putting a positive label onto every hard and hurtful thing that happens to you – unless of course you truly enjoy doing so, in which case be my guest and knock yourself out kid, you earned it I guess.
If God has access to all of our minds, and he wants everyone to receive the same message about him, why doesn’t he just deliver it to us directly? Wouldn’t that be more effective than relying on fallible human messengers to deliver it, especially when there always seem to be plenty of competing messengers around who are delivering contradictory messages about God which appear to be equally well meaning and sincere?
Why would it be so important to God that we get our information about Him and His will for us from someone other than Him, especially if you believe, as in Mormonism, that God will speak to us through the Holy Ghost to confirm the truth of all things? If God has the time and means to tell us if a message from Him through a messenger is true or not (as well as to monitor everything we think and do), why doesn’t He just give us the message from Him directly in the first place?
Imagine that God has an email address and that you regularly email Him and He emails back.
Then from time to time you get emails from various prophets, ministers, and missionaries with a message they claim is from God, for you and for the world. You email God to ask Him if any of the messages you’ve received from these various messengers are really true and from Him, and eventually you get an email back letting you know that yes, indeed, one of the messages is the truest and best and is the one you should listen to. So you do.
But at some point you realize that millions of other people have been emailing God for years asking the same question but getting a different answer in reply.
If your understanding was that it’s extremely important to God that all of his children receive the same message about him, at some point wouldn’t you wonder why He doesn’t just email His message to everyone directly, especially since He is already emailing with everyone directly about so many other things?
Does The Lord really want everyone to get the same message about Him, or does he want everyone to try and figure out which is the true message and who are the true messengers and then ask Him what he thinks so He can answer everyone differently ?
If you have to go to the original source of a message to find out if the message is originally from that source, why not simply get the message from the original source in the first place, especially if you are already connected to that source in such a way that it knows everything about you?
And if God is all-powerful, has one consistent message for the world, and already has full access to our minds, why would He need messengers at all?
(I posted the following to r/exmormon reddit on 12-28-21:)
Earlier this week our ward missionaries left me a voicemail saying they hoped we had a Merry Christmas and that they’d like to come by and introduce themselves and share a spiritual thought with us. I sent them a text in response saying we have COVID at our house right now but that I would send them an email in the next day or so to explain a little about our current situation in regards to the church.
In case any of you find this interesting or useful in some way, here is the text of the email I sent them today (with the subject line “My Mormon Story, Condensed”). Since religion is their full-time job I felt it would be okay to go into some detail, but for a different audience I would probably shorten this down to a few sentences or a paragraph:
Dear Elder_____ and Elder _____,
Greetings and Salutations,
Thanks again for your voicemail yesterday and for reaching out. Hopefully you got my text response last night. I do want to point out that on the voicemail you said you wanted to introduce yourselves, and I believe we already met when you stopped by our house awhile back – not sure if you forgot that you met us already or if it was just a figure of speech.
I’ve been debating about the best way to respond to you, and decided it felt best to write an email to give you some details about our history and current situation in regards to the church so you can have the information you need to decide if it’s worth continuing to reach out to us or not. I enjoy writing, and I especially enjoy writing about religion, science, and philosophy, but I will try to be relatively concise and not go on for twenty pages or anything like that, even though part of me wants to.
Where to begin?
I’ll start with a simple statement to explain why we haven’t been to church (Zoom or in-person) for over a year and half:
Our beliefs have changed, and we don’t feel like we can be ourselves at church anymore without making conservative, faithful members feel uncomfortable or offended, and without risking being demoted to second class citizens.
I think my wife _____ and my kids _____ and _____ would all agree with that statement, and now I’ll add some more details but will speak mostly just for myself, even though they may also agree with some or all of the rest of the things I write:
I’m a lifelong member of the church. Everyone on my dad’s side of the family is a member and we have pioneer roots back to John D. Lee. I graduated from early-morning seminary, served a Spanish speaking mission in Boston (1999-2000), got married and sealed to my high school sweetheart _____ in the temple in 2002, and have had a variety of callings and experiences serving in the church since then.
I’ve always been uncomfortable with some aspects of being a member of the church, even back to when I was a little kid, but I always assumed I should just go along with it all because it was obviously all just as factually true as parents, teachers, and leaders had taught. In 2014 there were a few things that happened in my life that caused me to question the church in a way that I never had before, including my experience watching the series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson. I learned some things about science that I’d never heard and/or never paid much attention to before, and I had the thought “I wonder how all this science stuff squares with the church’s doctrine?” I looked things up on the internet about the church that I’d never looked up before, and so, just before my 36th birthday, I slowly began to learn that the church’s doctrine, history, and culture is not what I thought and not what I was taught. I went down a rabbit-hole that turned into hundreds and maybe thousands of hours of research – books, articles, websites, podcasts, and videos exploring both faithful and critical perspectives on the church (much of it from the church’s own materials, including the scriptures), as well as a lot of world religion, science, and philosophy stuff and over time as I found ways to rationalize all of the problems and continue to be faithful only to eventually revert back to a more scientific approach, I came to some important conclusions, and I’ll share just a few of them:
Elders, there are hundreds of other things I would enjoy going into as well, but this is probably already too long for an unsolicited email, and so the question becomes, is it a good use of your time to visit with us and share spiritual thoughts? I would only enjoy it if I felt like I could express myself fully and freely (and politely of course), and it would most likely always turn into the kind of friendly but time-consuming debate that I don’t think the church wants its missionaries spending a lot of time on. Also, my wife and kids aren’t interested in having churchy missionary visits right now.
If you need someone to help you out of the church then I am your guy and we are your family. If you need someone to help you in temporal ways, we are nice people and would be glad to help. If you need someone to be a real friend on a human level, with no church strings attached, then we could probably help with that. But if your ultimate goal on your mission is to reactivate and baptize people through teaching and service, then you will be wasting your time with us. Maybe that will change someday, but at the moment, I doubt it. I would need some really good objective evidence that the church is true, and I’ve been looking for a long time and I’m still looking and I still haven’t found any, although there is a mountain of subjective evidence. By the way, back in 2013 I set a goal to read all of the general conference talks given in my lifetime and I am still working on it, and I hope that tells you something positive about who I am and where I am coming from with all of this. I am currently working on April 2013 conference and am excited to finish this monumental reading project. I’ve read well over 2,000 talks so far. I still love reading, writing, and thinking about the church.
I’m not going to be the guy who says don’t contact us, because it’s not in my nature, and I will always try to be nice when you or anyone does contact us, but in response to your message I felt you should know more about where we’re coming from to help you decide how best to spend your time.
Good luck with your missions, and I really do wish you the best!
Mormon Mouse
When I worked for large real estate firms in the apartment management business the commonly agreed upon standard was that one out of every three people inquiring about your apartments should end up renting an apartment if you are doing your job right. Although things didn’t always work out that well, over time working at multiple properties and for multiple companies I found this to be a fairly reasonable and achievable standard, or at least it was realistic enough to work towards. I think we called it our conversion rate.
Recently I realized that the average worldwide conversion rate for Mormon missionary work is extremely low by comparison – most likely less than two percent.
In other words, by my speculative estimation less than two out of every one hundred people who are invited in some way to learn more about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints actually end up joining the church. If the church’s message is as true and as powerful as it claims to be, and if the church has the most powerful beings in the universe, namely Heavenly Father, our Savior Jesus Christ, and The Holy Ghost as uniquely in its corner as it claims, then why in the world is it so hard to get people to join up? I think the leaders of the church would attribute the church’s low conversion rate to failures on the part of the members and the missionaries, attacks from Satan and his minions, and that the people of the world are not using their free agency to choose the right. If the leaders blame themselves in any way at all, most likely the members will never know, because, as Dallin H. Oaks famously said (quoting himself) in Helen Whitney’s 2007 documentary The Mormons, “It’s wrong to criticize leaders of the church, even if the criticism is true.”
Although the church is responsible for how it shares its message with the world, the low conversion rate of its missionary work is actually nobody’s fault. It is what it is. But if a surprisingly low number of people are truly interested in a particular message in any lasting and meaningful way, what does that say about the message itself? At some point, doesn’t the message itself have to bear some of the responsibility for its failure to inspire conversion in the lives of any significant percentage of those who hear it? And who is ultimately responsible for the message itself? If the church’s claims are all true, isn’t God himself ultimately responsible for the message itself?
Or what if there is nothing wrong with the message or the messengers and it’s all just as true as the church claims? Won’t the celestial kingdom be a relatively strange and lonely place if less than two percent of God’s children manage to qualify? This gets into all sorts of questions involving church doctrines (or lack thereof) around the different kingdoms of heaven and interaction and progression between them, baptisms for the dead, free agency, etc. – all subjects for another day.
What should the conversion rate be? I don’t know for sure, but I feel comfortable saying that if the message is as great as it’s supposed to be, then it should be higher. Ten percent? Higher? It seems like if everybody’s eternal life and salvation is at stake, and if the message is the most important message in the world and it truly comes from God himself, then it would sure be nice if he could bring home at least one in ten, but ideally even more than that.
Isn’t God. the Father directing the work of his one true church through his son Jesus Christ and The Holy Ghost? If so, why is he having so much trouble reaching his children through his Mormon missionaries? Missionaries who have special access to the omniscient creator of the universe should have some of the best conversion rates around – shouldn’t they?
Ideally, if God is perfect, maybe he should have a perfect record in the conversion department as well, that is, if one must be converted to his “one true church” in order to be “saved,” which in Mormonism is often confused or conflated with gaining “eternal life,” a.k.a. exaltation, the highest degree of the celestial kingdom.
Some might say that God is perfect but because he has gifted us with our free agency it’s our fault and not God’s if we choose to not be converted to his one true church. But why do we choose what we choose? We might think we know, and we might even be right, but do any of us have any idea why we choose to choose what we choose? At some point, the cause/effect structure of our chain of choices leads back into the unknown, into a realm that we can’t access or control but that an all-knowing, all-powerful God presumably can.
For the year 2019, the last full year unaffected by a worldwide pandemic, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints reported 67,021 full-time missionaries and 248,835 convert baptisms.
Full-time Mormon missionaries typically work in “companionships” of two and most often invite and teach the same people together, so I will estimate that there were approximately 33,511 full-time missionary companionships in 2019.
I believe it’s relatively safe to estimate that on average each missionary companionship invited at least one person per day to learn about the church, for a total of 12,231,515 invitations (33,511 companionships x 1 invitation per day x 365 days in the year). Any attempt to share the message of the church with someone counts as an invitation, with the idea being that each convert baptized had to start somewhere and so each one was prompted somehow, at some point, by a missionary or a member of the church.
Church membership for 2019 was reported as 16,565,036. If we estimate that approximately 1/3 of total membership was fully active and faithful (4,969,511) and that 1/3 of those members invited at least one person per year to learn about the church, we can add an additional 1,490,853 invitations, for a total of 13,722,186.
Of course we do not know for sure how many invitations were made in 2019. I am intentionally trying to underestimate (perhaps even vastly underestimate) the number of invitations in the church’s favor because I would prefer to question critically from a position that is puffed up in my opponent’s favor than my own.
We can now divide the total number of convert baptisms by the estimated number of invitations to get a rough estimate of the conversion rate:
248,835 / 13,722,186 = 0.01813377, or 1.8 percent.
Or, in other words, less than two percent of invitations to learn more about the church result in conversion and baptism.
Think about that.
Now, I realize I’m speculating. It’s a rough estimate. I’m guesstimating really. But I think it’s a fairly educated and reasonably polite guess because the invitations are most likely underestimated in the church’s favor and the rest of the numbers are the church’s own and are presumed to be accurate. And if the missionaries are not averaging at least one invitation per day per companionship and the church membership is not averaging at least 1 invitation per year for 1/9 of their membership, then why aren’t they? Again, surely I’ve underestimated the number of invitations and the actual number is greater – isn’t it? When I was a Spanish-speaking missionary in Boston in 1999-2000, each week we had to keep track of and report how many “Golden Questions” we asked people in order to try and stimulate a gospel discussion (and hopefully an appointment to teach again and eventually baptize). An example of a Golden Question might be if I walked up to someone on the street and asked them if they had ever heard of The Book of Mormon. The total number of Golden Questions asked by my companion and I was sometimes in the 200-300 range per week if I remember right.
Now that we’ve looked at some numbers for 2019 because it was the last full year unaffected by the pandemic, let’s see how those same numbers compare to other years in the period 2015-2020.
2020
Total membership: 16,663,663
Converts baptized during 2020: 125,930
Full-time missionaries: 51,819
Approximate number of missionary companionships: 25,910
25,910 companionships (making 1 invitation per day) x 365 days per year = 9,457,150 invitations
1/3 of total church membership = 5,554,554
1/3 of 1/3 of total membership (making 1 invitation per year) = 1,851,518 invitations
Total estimated invitations = 11,308,668
125,930 convert baptisms / 11,308,668 invitations = 0.01113571, or 1.1 percent
2019
Total membership: 16,565,036
Converts baptized during 2019: 248,835
Full-time missionaries: 67,021
Approximate number of missionary companionships: 33,511
33,511 companionships (making 1 invitation per day) x 365 days per year = 12,231,515 invitations
1/3 of total church membership = 4,969,511
1/3 of 1/3 of total membership (making 1 invitation per year) = 1,490,853 invitations
Total estimated invitations = 13,722,186
248,835 convert baptisms / 13,722,186 invitiations = 0.01813377, or 1.8 percent.
2018
Total membership: 16,313,735
Converts baptized during 2018: 234,332
Full-time missionaries: 65,137
Approximate number of missionary companionships: 32,569
32,569 companionships (making 1 invitation per day) x 365 days per year = 11,887,685 invitations
1/3 of total church membership = 5,437,912
1/3 of 1/3 of total membership (making 1 invitation per year) = 1,812,637 invitations
Total estimated invitations = 13,700,322
234,332 convert baptisms / 13,700,322 invitations = 0.01710412, or 1.7 percent conversion rate
2017
Total membership: 16,118,169
Converts baptized during 2017: 233,729
Full-time missionaries: 67,049
Approximate number of missionary companionships: 33,525
33,525 companionships (making 1 invitation per day) x 365 days per year = 12,236,625 invitations
1/3 of total church membership = 5,372,723
1/3 of 1/3 of total membership (making 1 invitation per year) = 1,790,908 invitations
Total estimated invitations = 14,027,533
233,729 convert baptisms / 14,027,533 invitations = 0.01666216, or 1.6 percent conversion rate
2016
Total membership: 15,882,417
Converts baptized during 2016: 240,131
Full-time missionaries: 70,946
Approximate number of missionary companionships: 35,473
35,473 companionships (making 1 invitation per day) x 365 days per year = 12,947,645 invitations
1/3 of total church membership = 5,294,139
1/3 of 1/3 of total membership (making 1 invitation per year) = 1,764,713 invitations
Total estimated invitations = 14,712,358
240,131 convert baptisms / 14,712,358 invitations = 0.01632172, or 1.6 percent conversion rate
2015
Total membership: 15,634,199
Converts baptized during 2015: 257,402
Full-time missionaries: 74,079
Approximate number of missionary companionships: 37,040
37,040 companionships (making 1 invitation per day) x 365 days per year = 13,519,600 invitations
1/3 of total church membership = 5,211,400
1/3 of 1/3 of total membership (making 1 invitation per year) = 1,737,133 invitations
Total estimated invitations = 15,256,733
257,402 convert baptisms / 15,256,733 invitations = 0.1687137, or 1.7 percent conversion rate
Now let’s skip back even further in time. Here are the same stats and calculations for the five years with the highest number of convert baptisms in church history. This will give us an idea of the range of conversion rates from the five most recent years versus the five highest baptizing years.
1999
Total membership: 10,752,984
Converts baptized during 1999: 306,171
Full-time missionaries: 58,593
Approximate number of missionary companionships: 29,297
29,297 companionships (making 1 invitation per day) x 365 days per year = 10,693,405 invitations
1/3 of total church membership = 3,584,328
1/3 of 1/3 of total membership (making 1 invitation per year) = 1,194,776 invitations
Total estimated invitations = 11,888,181
306,171 convert baptisms / 11,888,181 invitations = 0.02575423, or 2.5 percent conversion rate
1997
Total membership: 10,071,783
Converts baptized during 1997: 317,798
Full-time missionaries: 56,531
Approximate number of missionary companionships: 28,266
28,266 companionships (making 1 invitation per day) x 365 days per year = 10,317,090 invitations
1/3 of total church membership = 3,357,261
1/3 of 1/3 of total membership (making 1 invitation per year) = 1,119,087 invitations
Total estimated invitations = 11,436,177317,798 convert baptisms / 11,436,177 invitations = 0.02778883, or 2.8 percent conversion rate
1996
Total membership: 9,692,441
Converts baptized during 1996: 321,385
Full-time missionaries: 52,938
Approximate number of missionary companionships: 26,469
26,469 companionships (making 1 invitation per day) x 365 days per year = 9,661,185 invitations
1/3 of total church membership = 3,230,813
1/3 of 1/3 of total membership (making 1 invitation per year) = 1,076,938 invitations
Total estimated invitations = 10,738,123
321,385 convert baptisms / 10,738,123 invitations = 0.02992934, or 2.9 percent conversion rate
1990
Total membership: 7,761,207
Converts baptized during 1990: 330,877
Full-time missionaries: 43,651
Approximate number of missionary companionships: 21,826
21,826 companionships (making 1 invitation per day) x 365 days per year = 7,966,490 invitations
1/3 of total church membership = 2,587,069
1/3 of 1/3 of total membership (making 1 invitation per year) = 862,356 invitations
Total estimated invitations = 8,828,846
330,877 convert baptisms / 8,828,846 invitations = 0.03747681, or 3.7 percent conversion rate
1989
Total membership: 7,308,444
Converts baptized during 1989: 318,940
Full-time missionaries: 39,739
Approximate number of missionary companionships: 19,870
19,870 companionships (making 1 invitation per day) x 365 days per year = 7,252,550 invitations
1/3 of total church membership = 2,436,148
1/3 of 1/3 of total membership (making 1 invitation per year) = 812,049 invitations
Total estimated invitations = 8,064,599
318,940 convert baptisms / 8,064,599 invitations = 0.03954815, or 3.9 percent conversion rate
Looks like the church had a higher conversion rate during the all-time top baptizing years of 1989-1990, 1996-1997, and 1999. Good for them. It still wasn’t as high as it should have been, given the supposed marvelousness of the message. I mean, it’s “a marvelous work and a wonder” isn’t it? And we haven’t mentioned an elephant in the room yet – retention rates. Once they are converted, how many of God’s children stay faithful and stick around in his one true church? The future population of the celestial kingdom seems to be slipping away like so much sand in an hourglass.
*Statistics for the years 2015-2020 were taken from the church’s statistical reports on its website at http://www.churchofjesuschrist.org. Statistics for the years 1989-1990, 1996-1997, and 1999 were taken from the “Raw Data and Calculations” spreadsheet on http://www.fullerconsideration.org.
Mormon Mouse 