Paul I agree with your comments.
I should have described the statistics as showing a decrease in the rate of growth.
Massive Plunge in Number of New JW Congregations from 1990 to 2014
by steve2 48 Replies latest watchtower bible
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paul from cleveland
Steve, it's okay, I knew what you meant. I just thought the initial wording might lead to a lot of unnecessary off topic remarks. -
dropoffyourkeylee
Here are some related stats from the WT yearbooks. I'll follow up with later years:
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dropoffyourkeylee
It is apparent that the number of congregations tracks the number of publishers. The number of publishers per congregation is comparatively flat. -
ThomasCovenant
According to the figures above;
From '89 to '97 inclusive,
Average of 4.3 baptisms per congregation of 62 publishers
From '08 to '15 inclusive,
Average of 2.5 baptisms per congregation of 67 publishers.
Average congregation size has increased by 8%
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Gayle
on 2015 Report, 17 "lands" (7% of lands) dropped 235 congs. Ukraine dropped 142 congs from last year. What's the story there?, government? Poland dropped 23, Germany dropped 14, Spain 12, Slovakia 11. ???? -
steve2
Dropoffyourkey, averages can be misleading - they ignore anything but a so-called "normal distribution" which is why statisticians often use "modes" (the commonest actual number) and "medians" (the exact mid-point in a distribution).
One of my earlier comments - on this thread I think - concerned the large variability in congregation sizes. In some more rural and/or remote places, they can be as few as 10, whilst in some large metropolitan areas, they can be up to 120 to 140, depending on "availability" of brothers to serve in elder or ministerial servant roles.
Following up Gayle's point on congregations shrinkage, a number of rural congregations have closed in New Zealand in recent years, with JWs needing to travel further to meetings elsewhere, but only last year - 2015 - did the report indicate a reduction in congregations in NZ (by 1) - so either new congregations have started in city areas or they are not reporting accurately. Looking at annual numbers of average publishers, I don't think new ones have started.
