by cedars 47 Replies latest jw friends
This must be worrying for the money men of the WT, the U.S.A and Britain are both showing "increases" of less than the population growth.
I don't think that has ever happened before ???
Losing members fast, and not replacing them with new people to empty the wallets of , in the rich West, has got to be a bad sign.
Thank you cedars!
I'm happy to see Germany on that list.
BTW, the biggest german news-magazine (DER SPIEGEL) mentioned this week, that JWs in Germany (and Europe in general) have a very low birth-rate compared to other religions. In the article was stated, that fast growing religions are those who align their members to have offspring.
The jw face two problems: Having kids isn't promoted by the watchtower, because they want all the young folks beeing pioneers. And field-service doesn't bring as much new dubs in, as people leave the borg or die.
I wonder, how much longer they will publish the worldwide report.
I wonder, how much longer they will publish the worldwide report._____borges
The Apostles asked a similar question , I guess we have to look for the
Signs of the times : When the WTS no longer have numbers to publish
It might be interesting about Poland because a large number of Polish have come to the UK over the last year. However the Polish reduction should become the UK growth...
Another interesting trend in recent years is the average time preaching per newly baptized.
In other words, if we divide the total number of hours in FS by the newly baptized members, we can find out on average how much time needs to be wasted spent in the field to gain one new member.
And the number ain't pretty.
For 2010 it was 5,452 hurs
For 2011 it was 6,488 hours
For 2012 it is 6,506 hours
In other words, an increase, albeit not one the WT likes.
This has been pointed out before, but it bears repetition for new JW members:
With an average of 19.33 hours of preaching by each publisher each month, the pour soul will have to spend 337 months or over 28 years pounding the pavement if tasked with bringing a new member.
Of course this does not happen in reality, people get baptized much faster, without haveing been preached to for 28 years, which only shows what a collosal waste of time the whole FS charade is.
I have updated the graphs at http://www.jwfacts.com/watchtower/statistics.php with the 2012 figures.
As expected, growth is back below 2%. During the hype over the last 3 years with the 2009 GFC / earthquakes and Japanese tsunami there was additional increase in publishers, but now that is passing it is back to what now seems to be the normal growth rates of around just 2%.
h
Baptisms have been on steady decline as a percentage, which shows that any spike in publisher growth is based on inactive (slack JWs) reinvorating themselves for a short time on the fear of Armageddon.
The other graph that is most revealing is the number of hours preaching for each additional baptism. As Yan mentioned, this is steadily going up.
I feel sorry for the Watchtower sheep though. Average hours per publisher has gradually increased from 199 in 2001 to 232 in 2012. The leaders are getting their pint of blood, even if there is nothing extra to show for it.
The auxillary pioneer drive from 2011 seems to have lost some of its gloss in 2012, with 50,000 less this year, down from 466,911 to 416,993.
Thanks jwfacts, I've been looking forward to seeing these graphs! The baptism/hours one in particular.
Cedars
For anyone who might like to analyse as I do, here's a link to the spreadsheet, 2013 Yearbook. Numbers are numbers and in neat little rows.
I love these charts!
I wonder how many hours of preaching it took to convert 1 person back in, say, 1973 or 1974?
When my family joined in 1972 my folks had studied for about a year, but some studies lasted a few hours. All the same, it took less than 100 hours of bible study to convert 4 people in my family. The brother who studied with us was fairly new and was a regular publisher, not a pioneer.
