by booby 19 Replies latest jw friends
Question: what difference does it make what the attendance was? Only the number of partakers is really interesting to me and we won't have that for months. In the past re: memorial attendance, haven't there been big fluctuations that ended up meaning nothing really?
StAnn
My congregation uses what an elder told me is 'creative counting' in the weeks leading up to the CO visit. I wonder if this also applies to memorial figures?
George
Hypothetical:
In a typical congregation of 100 publishers, let's say it breaks down this way -
Without stepping outside the home, there should be 10 or 11 'Bible studies' being conducted. [10 minor children and half the teenagers]. How many congregations in the US? 75,000?
If so, then they should be conducting 750,000 studies of just the minor children and unbaptised teenagers.
Of course I made up the figures - just seemed typical crosscut to my experience. If so, they are not even getting all the kids studied with. Someone with better demographics could break it down more accurately - but it seems that > 700K students would not even cover the kids.
Jeff
There are only just over 100,000 congregations in the entire world. 75,000 in the USA is rather high. I would guess there are 12-15,000 congregations in the USA. Probably 175-200,000 kids needing Bible studies.
So things aren't as dire as all that in the Borg as far as numbers go.
But the growth just isn't there like it used to be. There is an illusion of growth because so many JWs end up having to move around a lot due to not having any sort of real career. You often hear from people in your old congregation: "if you came to visit you wouldn't recognize it, there are so many new people!" But when you ask for details they really only add about one person per year from the field and the rest of the "new" publishers are either kids growing up or move-ins.
If I have time later I'll throw some numbers into Excel and see what the trends are.
I heard from the mouth of a JW recently, "the people are just coming in so fast!"
--------------------------------------------
Translation:
1) a family of four moved in from Georgia (4)
2) Brother Strong and his family were asked to move in and help the congregation (5)
3) Sister Talkative's sister's family changed congregations because she doesn't like the elders in hers (4)
Increase 13 (all already baptized)
New people baptized who aren't children of jws: ZERO
I really don't get why the WBTS is so excited over the numbers. I did a spreadsheet a couple months back and when you're talking about a 2% average increase each year, that's not saying much. The exit rate is almost as high and some years higher than the increase.
The turn over rate in JDubland is atrocious by industry standards.
In 2009 there were 12,800 congregations in the US.
Ok MadSweeney - point taken. Looks like 12,500 congregations is the number. 12,500 X 100 = 1,250,000 dubs in the US. That's about right.
Wow. My thinking cap was on crooked this morning early when I wrote that. Sorry.
12 to 15 kids per congo x 12,500 = 150,000 to 177,500 students from within the congo. That means that they are reporting about 500k from outside? That figure seems inflated to me. That would be what? 40 per congo? NO WAY they are doing that many outside studies.
What am I missing here? When I was a jdub and handling the reports the outside nymber of 'studies' was almost always single digits. 40? Never saw anything remotely close to that number in our hall.
Did I mis-calculate again? If not this must be a lie.
Jeff
When I had a weekly "family study" that is, myself, wife and children.
I used to put in a report that we had a family study.
But the Service Overseer said I had to put a report for each individual child.
As none of them were baptised at the time.
I had 7 children, which meant that every month I reported that I had held 7 separate Bible studies,
when in reality it was only one combined.
If other families were doing the same they the number of Bible studies was a distortion.
I bet they're doing 500K Bible studies according to their lax definition of Bible study. If you spend more than 15 minutes with someone and you talk about info from the same book most of the time and you do it more than twice a month that's a JW Bible Study. 500k studies is around 39 per congregation. Six pioneers with 6 or 7 studies each and there you have it. It's pretty easy for a pioneer to have 10 or more studies.
Remember too, they no longer report WHO the studies are or WHERE they live. They ONLY report the raw number now. They can make stuff up.
When you compare the number of Bible studies to the number of baptisms you see these for what they really are. Time wasters. All you gotta do is convince a handful of lonely householders to let you hang around for 15+ minutes every couple weeks and you're golden.
