Survey: What is your average sacrament meeting attendance? UPDATED

July 30, 2007    By: Matt W. @ 10:52 am   Category: Life,Mormon Culture/Practices

UPDATE Ok, I have gotten a sample set of 23 different wards at this point, so I thought I’d give you a bit of info which can be gathered from what I have. The Average size of a Ward, with all the data I have, is about 165 people attending church on Any given sunday. This means that if we take the 13M members of the church and divide them into there 27.5k congregations, 165 on average of the 473 average members are at church any given sunday. This is about 35%, or 4.5M mormons attending church on any given sunday. END UPDATE

I am trying to figure out what the average sized congregation is in the church. If you would please post whether you are in a ward or branch, where you are at, and the average sacrament meeting attendance.

Here’s my Ward, for Example.

Ward
San Antonio, Texas
145

47 Comments

  1. Ward
    SATX
    145

    Comment by Mondo Cool — July 30, 2007 @ 11:05 am

  2. Ward
    The Woodlands, TX
    240 (rough estimate)

    Comment by njensen — July 30, 2007 @ 11:26 am

  3. Ward
    Sturgis, MI
    130

    Comment by Eric Nielson — July 30, 2007 @ 11:38 am

  4. Ward,
    the Valencia County area of NM
    100 (rough estimate)

    Comment by Adam Greenwood — July 30, 2007 @ 11:48 am

  5. Ward
    Dugway, UT
    110

    Comment by Tanya Spackman — July 30, 2007 @ 11:59 am

  6. Ward
    Brooklyn, NY
    145

    Comment by Rusty — July 30, 2007 @ 12:01 pm

  7. Ward
    Escondido, CA
    85

    Comment by Hyrum — July 30, 2007 @ 12:07 pm

  8. Ward
    Montgomery Village, MD
    ~150

    Comment by Darrell — July 30, 2007 @ 12:08 pm

  9. Ward
    Kissimmee, FL
    180

    Comment by endlessnegotiation — July 30, 2007 @ 12:30 pm

  10. Ward
    Glenwood, IA
    110

    Comment by Tim J. — July 30, 2007 @ 12:33 pm

  11. Ward
    Las Vegas, NV
    210

    Comment by Sally — July 30, 2007 @ 12:46 pm

  12. Branch
    Fremont Ohio
    85

    Comment by john scherer — July 30, 2007 @ 12:56 pm

  13. Ward
    Ilford, Essex
    85

    Comment by john f. — July 30, 2007 @ 1:05 pm

  14. Ward (Paroisse)
    Metz, France
    50, but less in summer

    Comment by Paul — July 30, 2007 @ 1:07 pm

  15. Related note: according to cumorah.com, at the end of 2006 there were about 10750 wards and about 2000 branches, with a total of about 5.7 million members, in the United States. If we assume that branches are half the size of wards on average, this makes about 480 members per ward, and 240 per branch). According to the numbers here, that would means that around a third or less of the recorded members show up to church in the U.S. (I suspect, though, this is not a representative sample).

    Comment by ed — July 30, 2007 @ 1:18 pm

  16. Ward
    Queen Creek AZ
    300+

    Comment by Geoff J — July 30, 2007 @ 1:24 pm

  17. Albuquerque, NM Ward

    Attendance 275-300, total members about 500.

    Comment by Derek — July 30, 2007 @ 1:26 pm

  18. I don’t think that attendance on any given Sunday over the total number of members is a good proxy for the activity rate. In LDS terms, activity means something like ‘coming at least 2-3 times a month on average’.

    Comment by Adam Greenwood — July 30, 2007 @ 1:35 pm

  19. Ah, I was replying to a comment that seems to have disappeared and, who knows, I probably misread it anyway.

    Comment by Adam Greenwood — July 30, 2007 @ 1:36 pm

  20. Adam, the church uses for it’s quarterly report an average of the months sacrament meeting attendance balanced with anyone who has gone to “3rd hour” meetings at least once in the month to calculate it’s activity rate, which we are not privy to. So in that sense you are correct, on the other hand, being active in the church, to me, means being actively engaged and having a calling, participating etc. I think using WAGs and averages of butts meeting pews on any given sunday is a decent place to start to figure out the average size of a congregation in the church. I was trying to keep it simple to make it easier to fill out.

    Comment by Matt W. — July 30, 2007 @ 1:42 pm

  21. 300 members on rolls

    About 220 average. True inactives are about 40 tops if even that.

    The majority of our actives are under 18 years old. Figure 100-110 Primary kids and 40-50 YM/YW

    5-7 families with an average of 4 kids are moving this summer. A huge loss for us.

    I have researched this pretty hard. US Activity rates are somewhare between 40-50%. Most likely mid 40’s

    Comment by bbell — July 30, 2007 @ 2:17 pm

  22. Ward
    Vienna, AT
    Pre-sacrament hymn: ca. 50
    Post sacrament: ca. 90

    Comment by Peter LLC — July 30, 2007 @ 2:30 pm

  23. Ward,
    Sandy, UT
    220 though it was higher in the winter.

    Comment by a random John — July 30, 2007 @ 3:15 pm

  24. Redwood City, CA
    Spanish Ward

    135 Average Sacrament Attendance
    ~265 Members total

    Comment by Obispo — July 30, 2007 @ 4:10 pm

  25. My little corner of the world (middle of nowhere in Utah) has a dismal activity rate. I stated that we have about 110 in sacrament meeting, but there are at least 500 or so members.

    Comment by Tanya Spackman — July 30, 2007 @ 4:27 pm

  26. Spokane, Wa.
    Ward
    325 (total ward 525)

    Comment by don — July 30, 2007 @ 5:08 pm

  27. Ward
    Westminster, CO (Denver suburb)
    ca. 105

    Comment by Bruce V C — July 30, 2007 @ 5:34 pm

  28. This update “rough estimate” of 4.5 mil. sounds reasonable to me, I thought I heard somewhere that activity rates rates Church wide average 30% or so (not sure if this was a median of averages or a simple Church-wide average, but I’m not even sure I’m remembering the stat right…).

    Comment by Robert C. — July 31, 2007 @ 1:33 pm

  29. Ward near Logan Utah
    150 attend 300 in ward

    Comment by Keri — July 31, 2007 @ 2:26 pm

  30. What’s the standard deviation here? It looks to be a bit high. With such a high standard deviation, it would seem that to extend that out to the whole church you’d need not a single number, but a range with a +- % amount based on that deviation. No?

    Comment by rcronk — July 31, 2007 @ 2:54 pm

  31. I’m very rusty on this, but I think you just take the mean plus or minus 2*(st. dev.)*sqrt(n) to get the 95% confidence interval….

    Comment by Robert C. — July 31, 2007 @ 4:22 pm

  32. Ward
    Fremont, CA
    150 (estimate)

    Oh, and I’m a different Keri from #29.

    Comment by Keri — July 31, 2007 @ 10:53 pm

  33. rcronk: It’s just an average, not a statistical analysis. I find when you give people a +-% for deviation, they typically use that as an opportunity to take the lowest or highest number given and ignore the facts. Our Rang is 325 to 50 in a single Ward or Branch at this point, but I sincerely believe there are branches out there with less than 50. Of course, the smaller the branch is, it becomes statistically less likely someone from that branch will have read this blog post. What I’m saying is that the numbers given in my update, if anything, are optimistic.

    Comment by Matt W. — August 1, 2007 @ 5:40 am

  34. Matt W.,

    I think you might be able to get to a percentage of US activity this way, but you are light on the international data, and I would guess that international wards tend to have smaller attendance.

    Comment by a random John — August 1, 2007 @ 9:03 am

  35. arj: no arguement there. To keep it all in perspective, more people were reading a book about a certain boy wizard than were attending the LDS church last sunday.

    Comment by Matt W. — August 1, 2007 @ 9:57 am

  36. Branch
    Fond du Lac, WI
    85 members on average
    about 200 total members in branch.

    Comment by Dave T — August 1, 2007 @ 3:18 pm

  37. Yesterday, I was thinking about this and what really impressed me is that about 9 million meals could be financially provided for every month by the fast offerings of the LDS church, based on these estimates. That is amazing.

    Comment by Matt W. — August 6, 2007 @ 9:28 am

  38. Your statistics are flawed. You can’t just take the average of the responses. Your answer will be biased towards large attendance wards.

    Take an extreme case: there are 100 1 person wards and one 100 person ward in the world. Then you would get half of your responses from the 100 person ward and half from the one person wards. Your estimate would be that half the wards are 100 person wards and half are one person wards.

    There are also self-selection effects, but those are harder to estimate or eliminate.

    Comment by Doug S. — August 8, 2007 @ 7:03 am

  39. Ah, I see you pointed that out in comment 33. Just a second, I’ll give an updated estimate.

    Comment by Doug S. — August 8, 2007 @ 7:16 am

  40. Doug, I tried to control for Ward duplication by asking for location. So far as I can tell, the only duplication of Wards was My Ward and Mondo Cools…

    Comment by Matt W. — August 8, 2007 @ 7:29 am

  41. I’m not saying the wards are actually duplicated, just that large wards will be waited too heavily in your survey.

    Comment by Doug S. — August 8, 2007 @ 8:08 am

  42. Doug, I agree, as I said before. The odds of someone in a smaller ward seeing this are lower than someone in a larger ward. As I have said at another blog, another issue is that the blogging community tends to cater to those who have what I would call a decadent lifestyle, ie- they have time and means to participate in this forum. The more decadent the lifestyle, the more time and means.

    Comment by Matt W. — August 8, 2007 @ 8:11 am

  43. I took these values:
    145,240,130,100,110,145,85,150,180,110,210,85,85,50,300,285,220,90,220,135,110,325,105,150,150
    And got this result:
    Average ward attendance is 128

    Using this formula:
    (3915 *25)/(Sum over all 25 wards(3915/ward attendence))
    that is:
    (3915*25)/(3915/145 + 3915/240 + …)

    I’m pretty sure that’s the right way to weight all the responses. If you give me another dataset I’ll run it on those numbers.

    Comment by Doug S. — August 8, 2007 @ 8:31 am

  44. Yeah, I think we agree on all points here, but I could calculate the answer to the point I brought up. I do know that your statistics are weighted heavily (entirely?) toward the US. I recall in my mission in Japan there was between 10 and 20% activity rate of people “on the rolls”. But that’s a problem that can’t be solved without additional data.

    Comment by Doug S. — August 8, 2007 @ 8:37 am

  45. By the way, the numbers I calculated give 27% and 3.5 million in the benches.

    Comment by Doug S. — August 8, 2007 @ 8:41 am

  46. Since there are enough members for each ward to have 473 members, your number of 128 would put average sunday attendance at ~27%.

    Comment by Matt W. — August 8, 2007 @ 8:46 am

  47. Ward
    Mount Airy, MD
    ~120

    Comment by V the K — August 9, 2007 @ 8:18 am