I got the following as an email from a family member. HAs anyone read this book? Anyone know where they get the LDS and wt stats?
This an excerpt from a text by David D. Stewart who is a writer for the LDS (Mormons), and it really shows who has Jehovah's spirit on their work!!
The Law of the Harvest
Practical Principles of Effective Missionary WorkExcerpt:'Rodney Stark and Laurence Iannaccone noted: 'Except for the years immediately following the prophetic disappointment of 1975, [Jehovah's] Witness growth has consistently outpaced Mormon growth. In 1954, there were 7.7 Mormons per Witness publisher. By 1994, this had been reduced to 1.9.
Given that the Mormons are generally viewed as the world's most successful new religion and had about an 80-year start on the Witnesses, this is an astonishing achievement.' [25] It is even more astonishing when we consider that there are far more participating Jehovah's Witnesses than Latter-day Saints, since Jehovah's Witness statistical reports consistently cite attendance rates far above official membership, while only a fraction of nominal LDS members are active. In 1935, there were 56,000 Jehovah's Witnesses worldwide and 746,384 Latter-day Saints.
Since 1935, the number of active Jehovah's Witnesses has increased more than a hundredfold, while LDS membership has increased by a factor of twenty, with only a fraction of those members remaining active. After more than fifteen years of proselyting in Russia with the largest full-time missionary force of any denomination, LDS membership has risen to only 17,000, and only a minority of those members participates. The same period has seen the number of active Jehovah's Witnesses in Russia rise to over 140,000, with some 300,000 individuals attending conferences. There are more active Jehovah's Witnesses in the countries of Georgia or Armenia than active Latter-day Saints in all of Eastern Europe, Central Asia , and Russia together.
There are over 1.4 million proselytizing Jehovah's Witnesses in Europe and 2.7 million who attend Jehovah's Witness conferences, compared to fewer than 100,000 active Latter-day Saints in all of Europe , including the United Kingdom . One Austrian saint observed: 'A friend of mine is a Jehovah's Witness .' When he came to Vienna with his family at age eight, there were forty Jehovah's Witnesses in Vienna . That was all for Austria . Now, twenty years later, there are 20,000 active Jehovah's Witnesses.
Twenty years ago we had 400 LDS members in Vienna and some more in other cities of Austria, and now, we only have about 750 in Vienna . Whenever we talk about missionary work in Church, we always hear those saying 'it's so hard, and the Austrians are an irreligious people.' That cannot be entirely true, or else the Jehovah's Witnesses would not have had such a growth!'