The church reports around 17.9 million members worldwide in some 32,000 congregations, with roughly 78,000 full-time missionaries serving and over two hundred operating temples. Those figures are the church's own and count everyone baptised and not formally removed; independent researchers and the church's own congregational counts both suggest active participation is considerably lower, particularly in Latin America, where retention after baptism has been a long-standing internal concern.
More members now live outside the United States than inside it, with the largest concentrations in Mexico, Brazil, the Philippines and across Latin America and the Pacific. Growth in the United States has slowed to close to flat; the temple-building programme has accelerated sharply, which is the church's own signal of where it expects durable membership.
Two distinctive institutional facts are worth naming. The missionary programme, two years for young men, eighteen months for young women, self-funded, worldwide, is the largest lay missionary force of any religion and functions as a formative rite for the membership as much as a means of growth. And the church holds very large investment reserves: a 2019 whistleblower disclosure and a subsequent settlement with United States securities regulators in 2023 over the structuring of those holdings put the figure in the tens of billions of dollars, and the size of the reserves has been debated by members and outsiders since.
Where the church stands in relation to the rest of Christianity remains contested by both sides. It affirms Christ, uses the Bible, and asks to be counted Christian. Catholic, Orthodox and most Protestant bodies decline to recognise its baptism, on the ground that its doctrine of God is not the trinitarian one the creeds define. Both positions are consistently held.