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The kindly light of myth in circling glue, lead thou me on the night is dark and I am far from home.

Okay, it is now time to talk about the top 10 discouraging LDS growth and missionary developments.

And he's got 10 of them. So let's jump into number one congregational growth slows in the United States.

He writes that smallest increases in the number of wards and branches during 2016.

There has appeared to have been a net increase of only 69 congregations during the year, 0.49% increase significantly smaller increase than most recent years.

And I think this is something we haven't really mentioned in the past few years, the church doubled, practically doubled its missionary efforts.

So do you guys have any initial comments both about congregational slowing of growth in the US, but also in light of the fact that we, we just almost doubled the eligibility of missionaries that could be out there serving.

And as I understand it, growth per missionary, I actually overall growth didn't really happen as a result of this increase.

Now it didn't that double core cohort is largely home now. So we're back to fairly normal, the bump has worked its way through where you have the 18 year olds and the 19 year olds out at the same time.

And what was the result of that?

It was, it was must have been very disappointing. The number of converts, missionary has been declining steadily. That's one of those metrics where it's been happening long enough that you can see.

But it's a trend now a lot of those when you have that surge, a lot of those missionaries were stationed in the United States because you know you have the sudden bump a huge bump up in the number of missionaries.

And so the missions in the United States had the infrastructure to accommodate all of these new missionaries and there weren't the visa and you know visa and international hassles.

And so you had a huge surge of missionaries in the United States, but it just didn't seem to bear, didn't seem to bear fruit.

Now one of the things that they're saying, you know, you have you have poor congregation growth and poor membership growth and yet they add 42 stakes.

So this would be more evidence that there's some sort of organizational realignment, some sort of structural change in philosophy about how they're going to run local units.

But I mean, you know, the United States has been experiencing a secularizing trend.

And you know, I wouldn't expect that. And plus it's, you know, the United States is the burned over district. I mean, I see missionaries in my neighborhood all the time.

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