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JON - I am trying to figure out the percent of less actives in the LDS church. I thought I heard at one conference meeting that it was around 60% and that we are starting a rescue program to see if we can't get them to return. Which is great. But I wondering about the percent of Less Actives. Have you got an approximate figure on that?

JOEL - This depends on your definition of "less active" (or your deffinition of "active"). How many times do you have to miss going to church to be called "less active"? We don't take a roll call in Sacrament meetings to know exactly who is there; only the number of bodies are counted, which may include nonmember investigators, or visiting friends, and relatives. Because of the uncertainty of the deffinition of "active" or less-active, I don't think there really is any way to measure the number of "less actives" in the church. A study showed that about 75% of church members expereince periods of inactivity lasting a year or more throughout their life.

The best one can do is get an estimated percentage of members that one might find in Sacrament meeting on a given Sunday in a given ward. For this type of statistic the church makes no official claim of activity rate, although there have been some surveys conducted in the past. Activity rates differ from one country to the next. Asia and Latin America have weekly attendance rates of about 25 percent, Europe averages about 35 percent, and Africa, Canada, the South Pacific, and the United States average between 40 percent and 50 percent. The average of those averages is about 35%.
(Source: Heaton, Tim. "Vital Statistics." Encyclopedia of Mormonism. edited by Daniel H. Ludlow, 1992, 4:1527-28)

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