How many souls are Mormon temples saving?

As of this writing, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints operates 147 temples, with 12 more under construction.

That’s almost the only official statistic you will find. But we can estimate how many baptisms, endowments, and sealings are performed from the one (?) time when the Church did give actual numbers. In 1988, the Church announced that 100 million endowments had been performed, with 2/3 of those done between 1970 and 1988. The executive director of the temple department also speculated that “the next 100 million endowments for the dead might be performed within fifteen years or less as the Church grows and as members become busier in temple work.”

I am not aware of any announcement of the next 100 million, but I assume that if the church had beaten its estimate of 15 years, it would have said so, and we can thus treat that estimate as an upper bound. Since growth would make later years more productive than earlier ones, a reasonable estimate for endowments in 2003 is 10 million per year.

It’s interesting to note that Church growth peaked in 1989 and never recovered. In fact, after 1989 growth went from supralinear — accelerating every year — to stabilizing at a flat 300,000 new members per year. If growth had continued at the rates that would have been expected in 1988, the Church would have an extra 7 million members today, or nearly 50% more.

But in 2003 it would only have been about 300,000 members short of projections, or one year’s worth of actual growth. So extrapolating out to 2014 gives us 12.75 million endowments per year.

I also note that Church growth was to account only for part of the director’s projected numbers; the other part was an assumption that temple activity per member would increase. If this did not materialize, then the actual number of endowments performed today would be proportionally lower.

On the other hand, the decision to build drastically smaller temples closer to population centers may have increased temple activity by now past what could have been foreseen in 1988.

It seems that the best we can do is to treat 12.75 million per year as a reasonable guess, probably not too far off either high or low. This means that with over 56 million people dying per year, we Mormons are getting farther and farther behind in our ordinance backlog to the tune of 43+ million per year.