Growth, AZ Clergy Privilege, Holland Health - Patrick Mason & Jana Riess | Mormon News Weekly 02

The LDS Church recently celebrated crossing the 17 million member threshold, yet a closer examination of LDS Church growth statistics reveals a more complicated picture than the official press releases suggest. On a recent episode of Mormon Stories Podcast, scholars Patrick Mason and Jana Riess joined host John Dehlin to dissect the latest Mormon news, exposing gaps between institutional claims and ground-level reality that should concern both believers and observers of modern religious movements.

The Numbers Game: Membership vs. Reality

The Church reported nearly stagnant growth for 2022, with total membership rebounding to pre-pandemic levels. The panelists noted something the official announcements buried. While raw membership ticked upward, the number of children of record, a key indicator of future retention, dropped significantly. Even more telling, international census data from Brazil, Chile, and Mexico consistently shows self-identified Mormon populations far smaller than official Church rolls would indicate.

Unit growth (the creation of new wards and branches) may provide the most honest metric available. As Riess noted from personal experience in Cincinnati, wards that split prematurely often struggle for a decade, exhausting volunteers and driving active members to relocate. The Church has learned, perhaps painfully, that creating new congregations without sufficient local leadership produces burnout rather than expansion. When two struggling wards recently recombined after years of strain, it signaled what the raw statistics obscure: contraction dressed in administrative reshuffling.

Legal Shields and Moral Responsibilities

The conversation shifted to a darker subject: the Arizona Supreme Court ruling that affirmed clergy privilege protects ecclesiastical leaders from mandatory reporting requirements in abuse cases. The Church issued a statement agreeing with the decision while maintaining it has "no tolerance of abuse," a formulation that struck the panelists as legally precise but morally hollow.