What Missionary Activities Lead to Baptisms? Evidence from a Latter-day Saint Mission in Brazil

Alexander Poulsen

Abstract. What missionary activities lead to convert baptisms into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints? Is it most important to contact many new people, making it more likely that missionaries find potential converts with whom the church’s message resonates? Or is it more important to teach lessons in cooperation with local members, to help potential converts learn what the church participation might look like in their lives, and begin to be integrated into the church community? I provide a statistical framework to answer these questions using data on weekly missionary activities (missionary key indicator data). While the answers to these questions may vary by setting, I provide an answer for one setting by analyzing weekly missionary data from 89 mission areas and 233 missionaries in a mission in southern Brazil for the year 2011. I find that lessons taught with a local member of the church present are associated with almost two times greater an increase in baptisms compared to lessons without a member present, and over two times greater an increase in sacrament meeting attendees. I find that in the mission being studied, contacting additional new people and finding new potential converts does not increase subsequent baptisms.

These findings suggest that (1) social connections are an important driver of church affiliation; and (2) in the mission studied, there could have been an increase in convert baptisms if missionaries spent less time trying to find additional people to teach and more time recruiting local members to join them for lessons. This same statistical framework could be used to gain similar insights about other settings, given the appropriate data.

Poulson, Alexander. 2025. “What Missionary Activities Lead to Baptisms? Evidence from a Latter-day Saint Mission in Brazil,” Journal of the Mormon Social Science Association 3, no. 1: 79–101. https://doi.org/10.54587/JMSSA.0304