Annual Report

by St George of England 88 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

• 

  slimboyfat

  JWs do also have a very high churn rate compared to other denominations

  Where’s your evidence for that?

  You complain about my response, but what you said specifically was:

  Additionally, we all know that direct comparisons with other churches are invalid where there is no (or trivial) social impediment to leaving the church.

  I’m just trying to work out why you think this is a reason to discount JW growth compared with other groups. JW growth obviously is related to something(s) they do differently from other groups. You think you’ve identified shunning as the key difference is. Even if you’re right that is the key difference (no doubt it is a factor) why would that make comparison invalid? It’s basically saying you can’t compare two things if there is a good reason for a difference between the two things. But of course there’s a reason, that’s what produces different outcomes. It’s like saying one restaurant is more popular than another, and the other person responding that you can’t make that comparison because it’s cheaper than the other one. Well yeah, that might be one reason, but why does that mean you can’t compare?
• 

  Jeffro

  I’m just trying to work out why you think this is a reason to discount JW growth compared with other groups.

  🤦‍♂️ Do you need everything explained to you?

  If I have 5 apples and I eat four, then I buy 2 apples, I have 3 apples.

  If Jane has 5 apples and eats only 1 apple, then buys 2 apples, she has 6 apples.

  Jane has a higher apple retention rate regardless of separate factors related to growth.
• 

  slimboyfat

  What has that got to do with JWs growing while other churches are declining and your assertion that it is invalid to make this observation/comparison?

  You can say it’s invalid to state the facts all you like. JWs keep growing and most other churches keep declining whether you think it’s valid to point it out or not.
• 

  Jeffro

  I can’t dumb it down any more than I already have.
• 

  slimboyfat

  Fair enough.

  Have you got any evidence for your other claim? Because it would be interesting information if there is evidence for it.

  JWs do also have a very high churn rate compared to other denominations
• 

  Jeffro

  https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9142413/#:~:text=Research%20from%20the%202014%20Religious,JWs%20converted%20into%20the%20faith.
  

  Too busy at the moment for this nonsense.
• 

  joe134cd

  Slim I would go as far to suggest that the JWs could even be bigger than the Mormon church. I heard recently that there could be fewer than 1 million temple recommend holders world wide.

  Interesting the lds just built a huge temple on prime piece of land not far from where I live. On the few times I've ventured into the city the temple car park is pretty much empty.
• 

  slimboyfat

  That’s fair enough, Pew provides some evidence for that conclusion. It needs to be qualified because the number of JWs in the sample was very small and has a large margin of error. JWs rely on converts for growth to a greater extent than most churches, so this stands to reason.

  Groups that have a stable community identity, such as the Catholic Church in Catholic countries, and Mormons in Utah, have high retention because members are surrounded by other members and social pressure is to remain a member or to identify as a member even if inactive. For JWs, outside of a few communities, perhaps in places like Guadeloupe and Zambia, JWs are always a minority in larger society, so there isn’t that same pressure on that front.

  Mormons outside of the United States clearly have very low retention rates. It is common practice for missionaries to visit people for only six weeks before baptism. After baptism some new members never see the inside of Mormon church again. This is turnover on steroids and is the reason why the Mormon church ends up claiming 500,000 members in Chile while only 100,000 describe themselves as Mormons, even after missionaries have knocked on their door to try to remind them they were baptised as Mormons years in the past.
• 

  slimboyfat

  Joe, active Mormons are as few as 20% of the official membership in many countries, and even that is taking “active” as a lower bar than JWs. Apply that to their worldwide membership and their active membership could be under 4 million. But it’s probably a little higher than that because activity rates are stronger in the US than elsewhere. Even so, there are far fewer Mormons than JWs worldwide. The most rigorous academic study of Mormons and JWs by Lawson and Xydias concluded that on a like for like basis there are 8.6 million Mormon adherents compared with 17.2 million JW adherents worldwide. That means that worldwide the JW community is around twice the size of the Mormons.

  See details in their article which is available online through a google search.

  Lawson, R., & Xydias, G. K. (2020). Reassessing the size of Mormons, Adventists and Witnesses: Using census data to test the reliability of membership data and accounting for the disparate patterns found. Review of Religious Research, 62(3), 413-437.
  
• 

  Gorb

  Thanks Slimboy for using rational science evidence this time.

  Gorby