411 missions
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has 411 missions spread across the world, from North and South America to Europe and Africa and on to Asia and Australia/Oceania. Graphic courtesy of Church News.Copyright 2022 Deseret News Publishing Company.
This story appears here courtesy of TheChurchNews.com. It is not for use by other media.
By Scott Taylor, Church News
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has 411 missions spread across the world, from North and South America to Europe and Africa and on to Asia and Australia/Oceania.
Above is a Church News world map showing an area-by-area breakdown of the 411 missions, and the countries in the various areas.
The map is arranged by general global or geographic areas, not by the 22 area divisions used by the Church.
According to the Church’s end-of-year statistics, the 2021 total of full-time teaching missions was 54,539, with an additional 36,639 service missionaries. Those numbers are up from the end of the previous, pandemic-period year of 2020 — 51,819 and 30,527, respectively.
And the Church’s total number of missions worldwide has moved back up to 411 for 2022, after contractions and realignment had resulted in a dip to 399 missions in 2019. The Church had 347 missions in 2012, when the minimum age for full-time missionaries was lowered to 18 for elders and 19 for sisters.
The following year, the Church created 58 new missions to accommodate the surge of new missionaries, bringing the Church total to 405. By 2017, there were 421 missions worldwide, before contractions in and combining of missions dropped the total to under 400.
Copyright 2022 Deseret News Publishing Company.