Salt Lake City, USA - The 12-million member The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints more than doubled the number of people on its membership rolls in the last 25 years and has long been described as the fastest-growing religious faith in the world with its global missionary work.
But since 1990, denominations such as the Seventh-day Adventists, Assemblies of God and Pentecostal groups claim to have grown much faster.
Perhaps even more telling, the number of Mormons who are considered active members is only about a third of the total or about 4 million people, The Salt Lake Tribune reported.
According to LDS-published statistics, the annual number of converts declined from a high of 321,385 in 1996 to 241,239 in 2004. In the 1990s, the church's growth rate went from 5 percent a year to 3 percent.
In comparison, the Seventh-day Adventist Church reports it has added more than 900,000 adult converts each year since 2000 for an average growth rate of about 5 percent, bringing the total membership to 14.3 million.
The Assemblies of God now claims more than 50 million members worldwide, adding 10,000 new members every day.
"Because membership statistics are prepared and reported differently by various religious groups, the LDS Church does not publish comparisons of total membership to other faiths," LDS Church spokesman Dale Bills told The Tribune.
When the Graduate Center of the City University of New York conducted an American Religious Identification Survey in 2001, it found that about the same number of people said they had joined the LDS Church as said they had left it. The CUNY survey reported the church's net growth at 0 percent. In contrast, the study showed both Jehovah's Witnesses and Seventh-Day Adventists with an increase of 11 percent.
In the Encyclopedia of Mormonism, Brigham Young University demographer Tim Heaton noted that attendance at weekly sacrament meetings in the early 1990s was between 40 percent and 50 percent in Canada, the South Pacific and the United States. In Europe and Africa, the average was 35 percent. Attendance in Asia and Latin America was about 25 percent.
Using those numbers, researcher David G. Stewart Jr. estimates worldwide activity at about 35 percent, which would give the church about 4 million active members.
Stewart, a Mormon who served a mission to Russia in the early 1990s, has been conducting research on LDS missionary work in 20 countries for 13 years, examining census figures and analyzing published data.
In Brazil's 2000 census, 199,645 residents identified themselves as Latter-day Saints, while the church listed 743,182 people there on its rolls.
"There may be any number of reasons for the discrepancy including personal preferences of some citizens regarding disclosure of their religious affiliation," Bills said.
Stewart said Mormons need to be aware of the statistics to be more effective missionaries. To that end, he is publishing his research, along with a description of what he calls "tested principles to improve growth and retention," in a forthcoming book, "The Law of the Harvest: Practical Principles of Effective Missionary Work."
"It is a matter of grave concern that the areas with the most rapid numerical membership increase, Latin America and the Philippines, are also the areas with extremely low convert retention," said Stewart, a California physician. "Many other groups, including the Adventists and Jehovah's Witnesses, have consistently achieved excellent convert retention rates in those cultures and societies. Latter-day Saints lose 70 to 80 percent of their converts, while Adventists retain 70 to 80 percent of theirs."
Perhaps the best measure of LDS Church growth is the rate of new church units, such as wards (congregations) and stakes (similar to a diocese). Because they are staffed by volunteers, such units cannot function without adequate active members.
In 1984, University of Washington sociologist Rodney Stark discovered that the LDS church's growth rate from 1940 through 1980 was 53 percent. He estimated that if it continued to grow at a more modest 30 percent, there would be 60 million Mormons by the year 2080; if 50 percent, the figure would explode to 265 million.
He famously predicted that the LDS Church "will soon achieve a worldwide following comparable to that of Islam, Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism and the other dominant world faiths."
Latter-day Saints were on the threshold of becoming "the first major faith to appear on earth since the Prophet Mohammed rode out of the desert," Stark wrote.
Many people, especially Mormons, eagerly embraced Stark's assessment. In recent years, though, some scholars have challenged his assumptions.
True Pure Land Buddhism, Sokka Gakkai, Baha'i and Sufism are all of comparable or greater size and have arisen since Islam in the 7th century, said Gerald McDermott, a religious studies professor at Virginia's Roanoke College who presented a paper at a Library of Congress symposium on Mormonism in April.
One key to Mormonism becoming a world religion, McDermott said, is how well it can transcend its founding culture to become universal. Catholicism, for example, began in Jerusalem but found a home in many other places, where it assimilated into local cultures.
The LDS message has found an audience in Latin America and the South Pacific, where Mormon missionaries can tell people God did not neglect them. The Book of Mormon is the story of a Hebrew family that migrated from Jerusalem to the New World and tells of a visit to their descendants by Jesus Christ after his resurrection.
Still, the church may not fare as well as other Christian religions in Africa and China, since it has no such reassurance for them, he said.
Mormonism is "so thoroughly American," McDermott told The Tribune in a recent phone interview. "God visited (Mormon founder) Joseph Smith in upstate New York. Eden began in Missouri and the millennium will end there. The new exodus took place in North America."
Stark, who now teaches at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, is amused by the critiques.
"The church liked the results and people who are against the church are desperate to figure out why it won't happen," he said. "Everyone takes the thing too seriously. I've tried to make clear all along that I was just trying to bring a little discipline to a lot of crazy conversations."
Stark, whose work will be republished this fall in a new volume, "The Rise of a New World Faith: Rodney Stark on Mormonism," said he never meant his projections to dictate the future of Mormonism. Others may have more complex models that challenge his findings.
"They may be right," he said. "But again, if (Mormon growth) has slowed a little, it can always speed up again."