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Hello and welcome to this presentation entitled Top Five Myths and Truths about why

committed Mormons leave the church. My name is John Delin. This is a picture of my family.

For those of you who are just listening on audio, this is also a YouTube presentation that you

can find at youtube.com slash Mormon Stories. Quick a little bit about me. I've spent about

the past eight years or so speaking with thousands of disaffected Mormons from all over the world.

I almost left the church myself to be honest but I've recently returned. I tend church weekly

with my family and I consider myself to be a believer but I kind of call myself a reconstructed

believer because I had to sort of lose my faith and then reassemble it again in a way that

was comfortable to me but I still consider myself a believer for whatever that's worth.

Today we want to talk about sort of a very difficult issue within Mormonism which is

the extent to which some people are leaving the church. This graph that I'm showing you here

shows a quick analysis of our attempt to capture the growth rates of Mormonism but also

the activity rates that the church is currently experiencing. What we find is that even though the

church claims somewhere between 14 and 16 million members of record, the truth is that the number

of active members is much less than that. Current estimates are around 5 million or so active

members of the church across the world which is very different from the 14 plus a million

number that's often quoted. This is something the church has talked publicly about in articles

and elsewhere and it's a real issue. Maybe this issue was captured best by Marlon Jensen

...