While The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints can celebrate its 2025 record increase in converts, all adherents to the global faith should be wary of so-called baseball baptisms.

That was the warning of church historian James Perry at this month’s FAIR Conference.

In a presentation about church growth in Europe and the data behind it, Perry emphasized the responsibility of the church and its members to focus on faith beyond the numbers.

As resident of the United Kingdom and the church history area manager for the faith’s Europe North Area, Perry shared a story about the British mission in the 1960s and a pragmatic plan offered by the mission’s president, T. Bowring Woodbury.

Woodbury, Perry said, leveraged athletic activities in order to connect with area youths.

His missionaries began playing sports, including baseball, with young men and women in the area. On paper, he said, this strategy yielded an unprecedented spike in the number of converts as many of the young participants were quickly befriended and baptized.

The mission grew to have one of the highest baptism rates in the church with more than a thousand joining the fold in July and August of 1960.

But the surge came at a cost. What started as an innocent idea, Perry explained, turned into a race for the most baptisms without “proper support or deep conversion” — and came to be known as “baseball baptisms.”

“It got to the point where to join a baseball team, a boy was required to go through an initiation: baptism,” independent historian Gregory Prince explained in a 2024 interview with the Latter-day Saint website “From the Desk.” “Many of those boys had no idea what the initiation rite meant, which was confirmed later when elders were assigned to visit the homes of the boys and inquire as to their religious affiliation, only to find the parents oblivious.”

When the sports activities ceased, the rate of the young converts’ attendance slumped. The result: widespread membership inactivity in the mission.

“When humans and human decisions are involved,” Perry said, “a quantitative appeal rarely tells the whole story.”

The latest membership stats

In the decades since these ill-fated baseball baptisms, Perry said, the church has become more careful in the conversion process and with numbers regarding membership growth.

Last year, the Utah-based church reported a record rise of 385,490 converts, boosting worldwide membership to 17,887,212 (nearly 530,000 in Europe). These totals, of course, represent individuals listed on the church’s rolls, not whether they still practice or identify with the faith.

Criticism that the church inflates its statistics by retaining nominal members instead of using Sunday attendance measures, Perry said, does not represent the faith’s intentions.

“Counting only fully participating members could unintentionally imply that less-engaged members don’t matter,” he said. “By retaining them in membership records, the church emphasizes continued responsibility to minister and invite them back.”

Attendance doesn’t mean everything, Perry said, arguing that baseball baptisms were instances when “sight of the Savior was lost for the sake of baptisms.”

Desire for more details

Even so, some observers desire more details and variation in the church’s reported stats.

Independent researcher Matt Martinich, who tracks Latter-day Saint growth for the websites cumorah.com and ldschurchgrowth.blogspot.com, said he would like to see the church release a country-by-country breakdown of the convert baptisms and baptisms for children of record (infants added to the faith’s membership totals).

“That way it would give you a lot more insight into where the church is growing,” Martinich said. “And how it’s growing up.”

As for the church’s hesitancy to release these numbers, he believes there might be a couple of reasons why.

“The church has felt very victimized over the decades,” Martinich said. “And so there’s a lot of hesitancy to get people information that could get turned around and used against them.”

As for the numbers, Martinich said, it is likely the church wants members to focus on other aspects of their personal devotion, including spiritual stories of individuals and their experiences.

Note to readers • Dylan Eubank is a Report for America corps member covering faith in Utah County for The Salt Lake Tribune. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep him writing stories.