Mormons based in Utah like to point to the prophecy in the Old Testament book of Daniel Chapter 2 describing a stone cut out a mountain that grows and grows until it fills the whole earth. This stone crushes a number of other kingdoms until it alone stands.
Mormons believe it describes their church filling the earth. Every year in General conference when they release their skewed statistics on the number of current Brighamites the Daniel prophecy gets trotted it. Currently the LDS church claims to have roughly 16 million members. I am sure in April that number will go up in theory, if not in reality.
Many of the members are inactive, a small number are dead and will not be dropped from church rolls until they reach the age of 110. That 110 is not a typo! If there is something that points to deceitful Mormon attendance numbers it is this ridiculous policy. My parents both lived the Word of Wisdom, but they only made it until their early 90s before passing.
The LDS church apparently believes there is some large group of 100-109 year olds holding secret church services and that they deserve to be counted.
I will concede for this purposes of this post that LDS Inc. has 17 million members just for the sake of argument. The best scholarly estimates put the activity rate at 25 percent. That would make just over 4 million active members of the church. Even if the stat experts are off by a million members, the best possible number for Mormon PR would be 5 million active members.
1. The LDS church was formed in April of 1830 and now has 17 million members.
2. The Pentecostal Church was founded in 1906 and now has 280 million members.
If the stone is Daniel's prophecy is actually a church then which of these 2 churches is actually in the process of filling the earth?
I do not think any religion fits the prophecy, but the numbers are vastly different. The Pentecostal church is 16.5 times bigger than the LDS church. The Pentecostals have pulled this off in 76 fewer years...One church looks like a pebble that has partially filled the state of Utah, and the other looks like a boulder.
