Decrease of numbers in Jehovah's Witnesses via Deaths, DFings, or Turning Inactive

by flipper 44 Replies latest jw friends

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  flipper

  Thanks for the comments ! And especially a thanks to THE GIRL NEXT DOOR for making the chart more legible into a much neater chart than I did in the initial thread ! LOL !

  CRAZYGUY- That's a very good question that you ask . I'm not sure if a person is just counted only once as a publisher - but- just separately counted as a person newly baptized or if both are counted in the increase. It is kind of confusing. I'm honestly not sure how they count it. Maybe someone can clue us in on it.

  HOSER- Yeah. I've heard that the WT Society fudges on lots of the numbers. Wow, with those attendance figures you shared- it really shows that the numbers attending are definitely going down.

  DBQ 407- That's interesting to see what you say about baptism numbers going way down at assemblies now. I haven't attended meetings or assemblies since 2003 so I'm really out of the loop as far as knowing what the attendance or baptism figures are. But like you say I remember years ago that yes- about 25 or so would get baptized each circuit assembly that I attended and now about 0 - 4 ? That's quite a drop , thanks for sharing that info.

  LISA ROSE- That's interesting what you say about the mortality rate per 100,000 people each year in the U.S. I'll have to figure that out. Thanks !

  HEAVEN- So you've had a lot of JW family that's died over the last 40 years + or so. My condolences to you on your losses. Interesting. I'm just curious how the deceased numbers stack up against those exiting while still alive ? I'll have to add up Lisa Rose's suggestions.

  POSSOM- That's another very valid question that you ask - " Do they inactive/faders as actually leaving if they don't leave officially through disassociation or dfing ? Another very good question I don't have the answer to.

  THE GIRL NEXT DOOR- Thank you so much for providing the clear reading chart done much better than mine for sure ! Good job. Thanks for the clarification of being inactive for 6 months putting a person into the exit column. That makes sense. Thanks, Peace out, Mr. Flipper
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  lostnotfound

  Its too early to call this anything more than a temporary spike. With the heavy emphasis on 2014 you notice that year only 40,000 left that year. Im sure a lot of those were fence sitters waiting to see if the end panned out. The massive 250,000 that left the next year include some of those.

  I expect we will see a down turn at least for a few years just like after 1975. The next ten years will show what the future holds. Still I think the society has peaked. Plus the majority of witnesses are aging. The number of qualified elders is dropping. The information age is here. With out it I would still be stuck in. Kids are using computers and the internet from their preteens. The society cant hide its past.

  However I dont see a collapse. Religions rarely go out of business. People keep saying the pedophile cases will add up and bankrupt them. Its not going to happen. It will hurt their pocketbook for sure, but only so many people have been abused and only so many of them will come forward and risk losing their friends and family.
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  TheOldHippie

  You cannot do the math this way. The only certain thing is that 1 % of a population die each year. But otherwise, the math is totally incorrect, Why? Because you do not have to be baptised to be counted as a publisher. Therefore, you have persons coming into the numbers as a publisher, then quitting after a year, then coming into the figures again etc. Furthermore, the df'ed ones to a certain degree also come back, and they then also quit - reenter etc. In the math shown above, the same persons therefore appear many times and thus are counted twice, thrice etc. The only way such a tabulation could be correct, were if baptism was a must for preaching.
  
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  jookbeard

  I always thought it was one of the most pointless stats counting unbaptised publishers as publishers because when they get baptised they haven't created anything new at all they've just come from another list, the R&F are starting to realise this, their decades of boasting obsessionally about how great their growth is has clearly started to to bite them, experts like us scrutinise this data, you cant keep being creative with stats and accounting forever , we also have lists of other stats they dont publish; the amount of hours its takes to gain one single convert, currently 7500 hours!
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  Listener

  The 40,000 death or exit figure for 2014 seems very odd. There would likely have been more deaths alone in this year without even considering the number who left.

  A possible explanation would be a large number of previously baptised persons returning.
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  Mephis

  Something which stands out to me, using the average percentage increase in publishers is the different phases.

  The post-75 exodus with falling numbers. Reversed with the Reagan era nuclear holocaust fears and build-up to 86 and maintained as communism collapsed. Then the collapse at turn of the millenium which is partially masked by the 2002 changes to reporting 15 minutes if elderly/sick and then the financial crisis.

  Is this the centennial step down then? The 100 years after 1914? Does it usher in a drop to marginal (ie 1% and less) percentage gains, or a decline? If not a decline, then the next step down will certainly be full flatline and decline. 1914 and its generation is the millstone for them. Pinning prophesy to events gives them the boost in numbers, but the comedown for being wrong hammers them worse each time.

  Demographics are hammering them. They have to have 3 kids to keep 1 in - 6 just to maintain numbers across a (non-overlapping) generation. The average age is rocketing up. Even now they're preaching to women unable to find a partner the virtues of staying single past the age of being able to have children rather than encouraging marrying outside of the organisation. Whole congregations can go a year preaching with the only baptism being a born-in. Such a waste of so many lives. Kind of sad watching people still clinging to it as it slowly implodes. And that includes my family.
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  Phizzy

  Interesting figures, and thanks for spending the time to present them here Mr Flipper.

  Over the years I have been on this Site we have struggled to find an easy way to make sense of the JW produced figures, and to derive trends from them. Not an easy task.

  I get the impression that there is a definite decline in the rate of increase, but of course the bottom line figures keep going up.

  We may have a further confusion to come, I think that with all the Terrorist activity going on at the moment they may well make a few more new recruits than is usual, and will certainly get some JW's reactivated due to the fear that Armageddon is close.

  In a year or two that will settle down, I think that they have now peaked, and over the next decade the decline will be obvious.

  Just my thoughts based on nothing much.
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  Zoos

  While impossible to calculate, I'm sure the number of those who remain in for family, put in minimal hours to remain "active", and refuse to donate have gone up, up, up.
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  Coded Logic

  I'm sorry but these numbers are entirely fallacious. You CANNOT get the number of people leaving simply by subtracting the number of baptisms by the number of publishers.

  Why? Because baptised people are ALREADY counted as publishers. The number of people baptised says nothing about the number of new publishers. We would have to know the number of new publishers and then subtract that by the total number of publishers to figure out how many people are leaving. But we simply don't have those numbers.

  For example, imagine if there were a year where a 100,000 people were baptised and not a single person left. What kind of growth in publishers would we expect to see?

  Well, the answer is we wouldn't know. Because zero people could become new publishers and the number of people baptized could still be positive.
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  sir82

  Old Hippie is specifically correct regarding the numbers, but there is definitely a strong correlation between "new publishers" and "new baptisms", because in the vast majority of cases, someone who begins to "publish" will be baptized within a year or 2.
  

  Given the lack of true transparency with the numbers, it is (IMHO) a reasonable proxy to closely correlate "new publishers" with "new baptisms".