Preaching is a waste of time

by konceptual99 42 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

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  Theredeemer

  Also where are you getting your numbers from? How do you know that 50% attend?

  So lets just say that out of all Mormons (15million) 50% attend at any given time then that means that 7.5 millions are actively going.

  Now we know that not everyone is required to preach in the LDS religion. Only the missionaries go door to door. Perhaps this is why you "feel" you dont see them.

  According to wiki about 80,000 are full time missionaries and 272330 converts in 2013. That means each missionary converted 3.4 people! Can you imagine if JW were this efficient or if every mormon was required to preach?!

  So in conclusion, Mormons not only do so much more with so much less they also provide so much humanitarian aid to everyone (hell they were willing to help me paint my house!! haha) something that JWs do not do.
• 

  Theredeemer

  BTW Im not mormon or want to be just saying that JWs are not #1. They need to get over themselves already with that crap!
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  konceptual99

  I stood down as an MS in May 2013. Since then I have had one visit from the Mormons. That's one more uninvited visit from someone to enquire about my spirituality than from the elders in my hall. To be fair they have done one shepherding call but I've hardly been inundated with friendly calls to "encourage" me.

  At least my brothers and sisters are putting the time in babysitting a cart.
• 

  insidetheKH

  @theredeeemer there are several independent sources but also the LDS source that i mentioned in a previous post confirms this in one of their studies. Anyway here is a recent reuters news article that confirms it.

  http://uk.reuters.com/article/2012/01/30/uk-mormonchurch-idUKTRE80T1CP20120130

  A quote from the article:

  The LDS church claims 14 million members worldwide -- optimistically including nearly every person baptized. But census data from some foreign countries targeted by clean-cut young missionaries show that the retention rate for their converts is as low as 25 percent. In the U.S., only about half of Mormons are active members of the church, said Washington State University emeritus sociologist Armand Mauss, a leading researcher on Mormons.

  Sociologists estimate there are as few as 5 million active members worldwide.
• 

  insidetheKH

  @theredeemer worldwide the situation for mormon active membership is even worse

  In the "Vital Statistics" article of the Encyclopedia of Mormonism, Dr. Tim Heaton cites internal church data:

  "Attendance at sacrament meeting varies substantially. Canada, the South Pacific, and the United States average between 40 percent and 50 percent. Europe and Africa average about 35 percent. Asia and Latin America have weekly attendance rates of about 25 percent."

  For clarity, Dr. Heaton cites data as representing the average attendance at sacrament meeting as a percentage of membership. These figures do not appear to include "lost address file members," as sacrament meeting attendance rates are calculated based on total congregational membership, whereas lost address file members are not included in congregational rolls. When "lost address file" members are included in the denominator of total membership, weekly attendance rates as a percentage of total membership would be further diluted by our conservative estimate of the lost address file comprising 10% of total North American membership and 30% of membership in the developing world.

  Read this article written by mormons

  http://www.cumorah.com/index.php?target=church_growth_articles&story_id=13
• 

  Vidiot

  The LDS church claims 14 million members worldwide -- optimistically including nearly every person baptized. But census data from some foreign countries targeted by clean-cut young missionaries show that the retention rate for their converts is as low as 25 percent. In the U.S., only about half of Mormons are active members of the church, said Washington State University emeritus sociologist Armand Mauss, a leading researcher on Mormons.

  Sociologists estimate there are as few as 5 million active members worldwide.

  Huh.

  I'd always thought Mormons were far more numerous than JWs.
• 

  sparrowdown

  Yes, the preaching work as a preaching work is indeed a colossal waste of time.

  But the preaching work as a keeping the "brainwashed drones busy and brainwashed, while flogging the wt brandname" is hugely successful.

  After all there are 8 mill JWs doing it worldwide for them ....for free, voluntarily!
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  insidetheKH

  @Vidiot In the United states and 2 or 3 other countries this is the case in the rest of the world this is not the case. Besides that, Mormons count everyone who was ever baptised as a member regardless if the person still identifies himself as a mormon or not, and they also count all unbaptised children under 8 years old as a member.

  So their numbers are inflated. On the other hand the number of Jehovah's Witnesses is considered (by scholars) to be conservative cause JW's only count those who participate regurarly in the preaching work.

  That is why JW's say that there are only 1.2 million JW's in the U.S and national surveys say there are more than 2 million people in the U.S that identify themselves as JW.
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  konceptual99

  As interesting as the my dad is harder than your dad argument is, I note that no one has suggested that the preaching work undertaken by Witnesses is productive and a meaningful presentation of the Kingdom message that Witnesses claim to have sole custody of at a time they proport is do or die for mankind.
• 

  OneGenTwoGroups

  365,000 babies were born every day in 1997.

  Since humans have a life cycle and some sort of age of accountability, preaching worldwide to a growing/dying changing population makes no sense.

  Everyone would need to stop breeding and stop dying for the worldwide message campaign to ever really matter. When that happens, we'll talk.