Some Thoughts on Convert Baptisms per Missionary

For the past couple of years, I’ve been anticipating the April 2015 conference. I was curious to see what the statistical report would show about the surge in missionaries and whether the expanded numbers would yield a comparable increase in convert baptisms. The average in 2013 was only 3.41, by far the lowest figure since at least 1960, but that number was artificially low because the year-end number of missionaries (83,035) was about 24,000 higher than the 2012 year-end number, meaning that many of those 24,000 had not served the whole year. The large increase skewed the average. If we divide the convert baptisms instead by the average number of missionaries during the year (71,012), we get a more reasonable average of 3.98. The increase in the missionary force from 2013 to 2014, however, was only 2,112, which yields a truer number of convert baptisms per missionary. I was quite surprised, therefore, that the average for 2014 was only 3.48 convert baptisms per missionary, barely above the artificially low 2013 average and well below the adjusted average of 3.98.

So, what does this mean? The Deseret News ran an article trying to explain the low numbers, but before I offer a few thoughts on the topic, let’s look at the relevant figures in some sort of historical context. The following table shows the number of convert baptisms, missionaries, and average baptisms per missionary for each of the past 55 years.

Year	Convert Baptisms	Missionaries	Convert Baptisms per Missionary
1960	48,586	9,097	5.34
1961	88,807	11,592	7.66
1962	115,834	11,818	9.80
1963	105,210	11,653	9.03
1964	93,483	11,599	8.06
1965	82,455	12,585	6.55
1966	68,843	12,621	5.45
1967	62,280	13,147	4.74
1968	64,021	13,018	4.92
1969	70,010	13,291	5.27
1970	79,126	14,387	5.50
1971	83,514	15,205	5.49
1972	91,237	16,367	5.57
1973	79,603	17,258	4.61
1974	69,018	18,109	3.81
1975	95,412	22,492	4.24
1976	133,959	25,027	5.35
1977	167,939	25,264	6.65
1978	152,000	27,699	5.49
1979	193,000	29,454	6.55
1980	211,000	29,953	7.04
1981	224,000	29,702	7.54
1982	207,000	26,606	7.78
1983	189,415	26,565	7.13
1984	192,983	27,655	6.98
1985	197,640	29,265	6.75
1986	216,210	31,803	6.91
1987	227,284	34,750	6.54
1988	256,515	36,132	7.10
1989	318,940	39,739	8.03
1990	330,877	43,651	7.58
1991	287,770	43,395	6.86
1992	274,477	46,025	5.96
1993	304,808	48,708	6.26
1994	300,730	47,311	6.36
1995	304,330	48,631	6.25
1996	321,385	52,938	6.07
1997	317,798	56,531	5.62
1998	299,134	57,853	5.17
1999	306,171	58,593	5.23
2000	273,973	60,784	4.51
2001	292,612	60,850	4.81
2002	283,138	61,638	4.59
2003	242,923	56,237	4.31
2004	241,239	51,067	4.72
2005	243,108	52,060	4.67
2006	272,845	53,164	5.13
2007	279,218	52,686	5.30
2008	265,593	52,494	5.06
2009	280,106	51,736	5.41
2010	272,814	52,225	5.22
2011	281,312	55,410	5.08
2012	272,330	58,990	4.62
2013	282,945	83,035	3.41
2014	296,803	85,147	3.48

Some interesting trends are noticeable in these numbers. The most obvious is the drastic increase in baptisms during the early 1960s. These were the years when Henry D. Moyle, a counselor to President David O. McKay was responsible for missionary work in the Church. These years were known for baptism quotas, proselytizing methods that can only be considered unethical by any standard, and masses of “converts” who never became active members (many who were never taught the gospel and never entered an LDS meetinghouse). Michael Quinn chronicled this era in a 1993 article titled “I-Thou vs. I-It Conversions: The Mormon‘Baseball-Baptism’ Era.” Alvin Dyer was president of the European Mission during these years. I was a missionary in Germany fifteen years later, and we were still haunted by a book Dyer wrote, titled The Challenge. The basic idea was that if the missionary had enough faith, he could challenge investigators at the end of the first discussion to be baptized. In theory, people would come flocking into the Church. My companion and I actually tried his method, very briefly, with no success. Perhaps this method had worked for Dyer’s missionaries, but the success was superficial. In one ward where I served, the bishop showed us the ward membership list. Almost all of the inactives on the list had been baptized between 1960 and 1962.

In the mid-1970s, we were under no pressure to baptize like the missionaries during the “Baseball-Baptism” era were. So we felt the investigators who chose to join the Church were doing so for the right reasons. Still, retention was a significant problem. Over the years, to my knowledge, only thirteen people I taught were ever baptized, some of them years later, and only three of them were baptized by me or my companion. Of those thirteen, only two or three remained with the Church for any appreciable length of time. Being a Mormon is hard. I’ll come back to this idea in a minute, but first let me talk about a few more numbers.

If you look at the total missionaries year by year, you see mostly slow but steady growth, reflecting the steady growth of the Church. A couple of aberrations are apparent, though. One was in 1975, the year I became a missionary. This was when President Kimball made his clarion call for more missionaries. The summer I entered the LTM (which, I was told, stood for Longest Two Months), there were so many new missionaries that the regular facilities would not hold us all. My district lived in Heritage Halls, the girls’ dorms. Some missionaries lived in motels, others in St. Francis School, an abandoned elementary school. Toward the end of my stay, we were booted out of the dorms to make room for students, so 140 of us were packed into the gymnasium at the old Brigham Young Academy on 70 bunk beds. The next year, the new MTC was completed to handle the higher numbers.

The increase in 1975 was 24.2 percent, and in 1976 it was 11.3 percent. The 1976 number is 38.2 percent higher than the 1974 figure. By contrast, the increase in 2013 was 40.8 percent, much of it due to a significant increase in sister missionaries. The increase in 2012 was an additional 6.4 percent, and the two-year increase was 49.9 percent. What is significant, though, is that convert baptisms per missionary increased substantially during the mid-1970s, even though there was a 38-percent surge in missionaries. Baptisms per missionary were only 3.81 in 1974, but rose to 4.24 in 1975, 5.35 in 1976, and 6.65 in 1977. By contrast, the baptism rate dropped from a modest 5.08 in 2011 to 4.62 in 2012, 3.41 (or an adjusted 3.98) in 2013, and 3.48 in 2014 as missionary numbers surged, an exact opposite trend from the mid-1970s.

Another aberration in missionary numbers occurred between 2002 and 2004, when total missionaries dropped by 10,571. During this period I was working at Church magazines and was responsible for articles on missionary work, so I had a contact in the Missionary Department. He warned me that this decrease was coming. It was a simple matter of demographics. I forget the exact numbers, but he told me there were many thousand fewer young men age 15 to 18 than age 19 to 22. This translated into fewer missionaries. At the same time (about 2002), the Church “raised the bar” for missionaries, weeding out in advance many who were not prepared to serve, so the combined effect was a drop of over 10,000 in the missionary force. This decrease had no significant effect on baptisms per missionary.

The two years that stand out for convert baptisms are 1982, when baptisms per missionary hit 7.78, a high-water mark (ignoring the Baseball-Baptism era), and 1996, when total convert baptisms hit an all-time numerical high of 321,385, exactly 24,582 more than in 2014 (but with 32,209 fewer missionaries).

So, what is going on today? Why the sudden precipitous drop in convert baptisms per missionary? Several theories have been put forward. One is that the world is becoming more secular. I’m not sure I buy that. As several online commenters have pointed out, studies show that, by some measures, the world is actually getting more religious as well as less violent. Young people are perhaps less attracted to organized religion, but the old story that the world just keeps getting more and more wicked doesn’t add up. We’ve been telling this story for decades, primarily, I believe, to convince ourselves that we are the only refuge from a deluge of wickedness that is sweeping the earth. Yes, sexual standards have loosened and the callousness of political conservatives toward the poor is troubling, but in many other ways the world is safer and less “wicked” than it was when I was young.

Other explanations I’ve read are that missionaries are spending more time working with members who have become inactive (sorry if I refuse to use the modern euphemism); they spend more time performing acts of service; the surge has oversaturated certain areas where there were already abundant numbers of missionaries; and the Internet has provided potential members with easy access to information about the Church and its history that is not exactly flattering. I’m sure each of these factors contributes to the low number of baptisms per missionary.

I’d like to offer a couple of additional reasons that I haven’t seen elsewhere. First, I can’t help but suspect that lowering the age for young men to eighteen and young women to nineteen has had an impact on missionary success. I don’t know many boys straight out of high school who are mature enough for the rigors and realities of missionary work. I wasn’t ready at nineteen. At eighteen, I would have been a basket case. Our youngest son was in the mission field when the age change happened, and he made it very clear he was glad he’d had a year of college and had lived away from home before going off to Ukraine. He felt it made a huge difference. As for young women, when the minimum age was twenty-one, most sister missionaries were quite mature (certainly more mature than the elders) and had decided to serve after careful consideration, not because it was “the thing to do,” as may often be the case now that the age has been lowered. So, the maturity factor may play a role.

Second, over the past three years, I’ve read the weekly emails of my son and two of his cousins, who have served in Eastern Europe, the southeastern U.S., and South America. While their experiences were so different as to make one wonder whether they were even engaged in the same type of work, I noticed one common theme in their missions: they did not spend nearly as much time finding (tracting and street contacting) as I did. In my son’s case, they were not allowed to tract in Ukraine, and when he served as an assistant to the president in the mission’s main city, they were not allowed to proselytize at all or even wear their name badges. He was always excited to go to different cities to work with other missionaries because they could openly contact people. But none of these three missionaries seemed to be out talking to strangers like my companions and I did, for long hours every day. Granted, this wasn’t a very effective method, but we did find, teach, and baptize people through tracting and street contacting.

When I left the mission field, I brought home one of our tracting books as a memento. I pulled it out a few months ago and made an estimate based on the information I found there. I calculated that in the twenty-two months I spent in Germany, I spoke to between thirty and forty thousand people on their doorsteps and another three to four thousand on the street. I would wager that hardly any missionaries today speak to that many non-Mormons. Does this translate into fewer baptisms? If the time is spent working with inactive members rather than talking to nonmembers, I would have to answer yes, although the difference may be slight. Certainly all the reactivation work brings some positive results, but it also probably contributes to the lower conversion rates.

And this brings us to the uncomfortable thread of truth running through and behind all these numbers. Inactives. Lapsed Mormons. From Baseball-Baptisms to my little share of thirteen converts to current missionaries spending lots of time on reactivation, the common theme is that most people who join the Church don’t last. Yes, being Mormon isn’t easy, but if this is why we came to earth, and we were all on board in the premortal existence, why is the restored gospel so unappealing to so many of us when introduced and why does it have so little ability to sustain our interest when we do embrace it? I mean, out of perhaps forty thousand people I contacted in Germany, only three—yes, three—joined the Church (I baptized just one of them.) And of those three, only one remained active for any appreciable length of time. One out of forty thousand. Of course, most of those forty thousand refused to hear what we had to say. But our overall success rate at attracting and retaining new members is not encouraging. What is it we’re failing to grasp?

An online commenter on the Deseret News article, who identifies himself only as Wilf 55, gives us a reality check: “It is all too easy to blame outside reasons such as alleged increasing secularism. First, surveys show religion is on the rise, especially among the younger generations, but not necessarily the ‘strongly institutionalized’ kind. Second, the Mormon church does not seem able to look critically at its own programs in order to appeal to these younger generations. Countless hours sitting in church, bland lessons, supporting anti-SSM legislation, fundamentalization, condescension toward women—these are not the things that appeal to millions of young people who are increasingly sensitive to social justice, ecology, and equality. There is potential for missionary success within the boundaries of the Restored Gospel, but then perhaps we need a return to the original tenets of this Gospel.” Sobering words, and I don’t necessarily agree with all of them, but when we look at the institutional demands of Mormonism, we need to start asking ourselves how many of them are really mandated by the gospel and how many are simply cultural, traditional, or institutional. Are we making the Church a lot harder to embrace than we need to? I’ll have more to say about this in future posts, but if the restored gospel really is the “good news,” why does it not appeal to more of God’s children? Is it all about marketing or packaging (as current Church outreach efforts seem to suggest)? Being a self-professed anticorporate, I have to say no. So what is it all about? That, my friends, is the question.