Record convert baptisms could have resulted in 1,797 congregations. Instead, it only resulted in 370. Members celebrating the baptisms are also left wondering - where are all the new wards?

Assuming 50 members per branch, 250 members per ward, and branches accounting for 20% of all congregations, the church could have added 359 branches and 1,438 wards from its 377,431 effective new membership. Instead, it only added 370 congregations total.

Today, the church's statistical report for 2025 page was published with the following (2024's data added by me to the table under 'April 2025'):

Subtracting the Total membership between two years gets us the "Effective New Members" for a year.

As it stands today, 250 members are required at a minimum to create a new ward. From those numbers, we can make some estimates on the expected number of units that "should have" been created from the effective new members. To do this though we have to make some assumptions on when a ward or branch gets created. Ultimately, I assume things are more nuanced than simply "our ward has hit 500 members, it's time to split it" so the table below shows a range of membership numbers to try to account for the numerical subtleties of creating a new ward. This is meant to also be fair towards the church by not assuming rigidity to its own threshold requirements, which, in my opinion, are more like guidelines anyway when it comes to practical application.

The table below shows the number of branches (B.) and wards (W.) that could have been created from 377,431 effective new members for varying numbers of members for each. Also, branches currently account for about 20% of all units so the calcs in the table reflect that. For example, if all branches are assumed to have 50 members and all wards are assumed to have 150 members, 581 branches and 2,323 wards could have been created.

Branches and Wards that could have been created from the 377,431 effective new members.

As a reminder, the number of Wards and Branches only increased by 370. Using the 20% rule, that would be 74 branches and 296 wards. Let's say that on average a branch is a third of the size of a ward, that would mean each branch has 392 members and each ward would have 1,177 members. For reference, the largest attendance I was able to find in Return and Report was about 400 for a Holiday weekend in Alpine.