JWs in the UK: 27 years of yearbook stats and stagnation

by 88JM 44 Replies latest jw friends

• 

  villagegirl

  BUT - judging from this forum ALONE there seem to be a lot of people who are not mentally or spiritualy

  convinced anymore that the GB are who they claim to be or the WT is what they claim to be,

  but are still showing up to meetings and sitting there like zombies.??

  So extrapolate that over all congregations and the numbers are not really representitive of what is going on.

  I came here - to this forum after an absence of all contact with witnesses for the last 20 years. When I left, I left on my own, by myself, and had not contact with any other person who had left. I left for a multitude of reasons, and then finally the Crisis of Conscience Book took me completly into freedom. This forum is a complete surprise to me, that it even exists. The early ex-witness sites in the 1990's were run by some pretty lunatic people.

  I am encouraged by this site, even though I seem to be one of the few "Jesus Freaks" here.
• 

  88JM

  I thought this was relevant - statistics released by the ONS today on Internet Use:

  http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171778_301822.pdf

  (They actually release statistics like these every quarter, but these are from the LFS which is a bigger sample group)

  Points I found interesting, though not surprising:

  • Approximately 87% of adults aged between 16 and 24, used social networking sites in 2012
  • The UK is the 4th biggest user of social networking in Europe in 2012
  • 68% of those aged 16 and over in Great Britain use the Internet every day, or almost every day in 2012 (it was 64% in 2011)
  • Only 16% of those aged 16 and over never use the internet at all (17% in 2011)
• 

  never a jw

  Compared with most other denominations JWs are doing pretty well.

  How many other denominations are spending 6,000 plus hours to get one soul baptized?

  Villagegirl,

  I agree, even though the numbers got worse, they are not representative of reality. Too many in-but-not-in in the congregations, and many new rules skew the numbers to make them look better than they really are.

  Jgnat,

  As a non religious nut, I can say that I like your graph. People are waking up. R. Dawkins must be happy
• 

  never a jw

  "There's three types of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics [especially when coming from the WT]" Mark Twain, I think
• 

  88JM

  Just sent this to Jeffro - wondered if anyone else might find it useful:

  http://depositfiles.com/files/gjrlcxi1j
  
  "I thought I would give it a go last night, just to see if it was even possible. It turns out it is - my scanner and OCR program can spit out an Excel table from the Yearbook. The only thing that slows the process down is when countries change from year to year - i.e. Hawaii is now included in the U.S. as of 2011.
  
  I can compensate by adding blank rows for countries that get merged etc. which means that the same country is always on the same row number on each sheet. Sometimes I need to remember my politics and geography a bit for places like East Timor (I think they changed their name in 2012). If you're in Excel, you'll see each year is in a new sheet at the bottom.
  
  I don't know how well you know Excel - I'm not a super-heavy user myself - but in theory you should be able to make a chart that sources data from different sheets of the document i.e. "K29" will always give you the number of congregations in Britain. Alternatively, you can just copy columns over from each sheet if you're looking for specific data.
  
  I will see if I can work on adding more years and make it a "slow-burn" project for me. The attached spreadsheet took about 1.5 hours, but I wouldn't be able to do this much every day - I reckon I could probably do 25+ years over 6 weeks though if I chip away at it."http://depositfiles.com/files/gjrlcxi1j

  Perhaps if they would like, someone like Cedars could help fill in the population of the "30 Other Lands" - I guess the countries might change from year to year, but hopefully the statistics can be found?
• 

  slimboyfat

  Just to put the so-called "decline" of JWs into some perspective...

  According to Peter Brierley of Christian Research, church attendance in England has declined as follows:

  1979: 5,441,000

  1989: 4,742,800

  1998: 3,714,700

  2005: 3,166.200

  That's a decline of 42% in just 26 years!

  In contrast Jehovah's Witnesses grew from 74,000 in 1979 to 121,000 in 2005, an increase of 64%.

  So let's not get carried away talking about JW stagnation!
• 

  cedars

  slimboyfat

  So let's not get carried away talking about JW stagnation!

  Good on you my friend for introducing some perspective. However, the claims of "declinists" such as myself are that the real stagnation began after 2005, not before. It's quite a recent thing.

  Cedars
• 

  slimboyfat

  I only chose 2005 because that's when the last church census was completed by Christian Research. The fact is that JWs in the UK have increased since then, and other churches have continued to decline. Using 2005 or 2012 is not the issue.

  In fact using 2012 would have shown a greater JW increase of 76% since 1979 rather than 64%.

  So what was your point?
• 

  cedars

  slimboyfat

  In fact using 2012 would have shown a greater JW increase of 76% since 1979 rather than 64%.

  So what was your point?

  The point is that growth has slowed down or stagnated, not gone into reverse. I don't think anyone on this thread is arguing that the number of JWs is in retreat.

  • 2006 - 1%
  • 2007 - 3%
  • 2008 - 1%
  • 2009 - 1%
  • 2010 - 1%
  • 2011 - 1.22%
  • 2012 - 0.6%

  The word "decline" is applied not numerically, but respecting the organization's own aspirations for divinely-backed growth - especially when you consider that the majority of those getting baptized in the UK are born-ins.

  Cedars
• 

  88JM

  The growth is slower over the period you mention, but (and I know I'm "cherry-picking" here) there was also real-terms decrease in JW's in Britain as well between 1996 and 2001. It took them until 2007 to get back to where they were in 1995.