Theos-Talk Archives (August 2007 Message tt00262)

In 1920, membership of the Theosophical Society was 36,350. Since
then, world's population has grown by around five times. But the
membership of Adyar TS is reduced to around 30,000 today. That means
membership of the TS as percentage of world's population is reduced by
around 80 % !!!!!
Anand

--- In theos-talk@yahoogroups.com, "M K Ramadoss" <mkr777@...> wrote:
>
> Considering the growth of population world-wide, the membership
seems to be
> almost stationery in numbers but declining as a percentage of
population. In
> addition, after the collapse of soviet bloc, many in those countries
have
> access to info world wide. So if this factored in, the percentage is
> shrinking. So one wonders if the time of growth for the TS is over.
Another
> fact is that most of the upcoming growing organizations are
> usually headed by younger leaders as evidenced by historical facts.
> When i see an organization headed by
> old leaders, in many cases those who had another full life career and
> after retirement take the leadership as
> a second career, I am yet to see a spiritual organization growing. So
> all this seems to point out that either
> we have resign ourselves to the status quo/slow decline in terms of
quantity
> of membership.
> 
> Any one any thoughts?
> 
> mkr
> 
> On 8/13/07, danielhcaldwell <danielhcaldwell@...> wrote:
> >
> > Anand,
> >
> > Thanks for your question. Dr. Gregory Tillett
> > wrote the following on Theos-Talk in 2002:
> >
> > --------------------------------------------------------
> > In researching the influence of Leadbeater on the Adyar TS, I
> > accumulated large amounts of membrship statistics and included an
> > appendix on membership figures in my PhD thesis. The following is a
> > brief summary of the figures. For all sorts of methodological reasons
> > (e.g. different "official" sources sometimes give different figures)
> > they cannot be regarded as definitive, and are drawn from a range of
> > sources (e.g. Annual Reports). I have figures for every year from
> > 1907-1983, but only give sample years below. No accurate records
> > exist for 1875-1906. Josphine Ransom estimate 10000 as the memebrship
> > in 1900.
> >
> > Year
> > 1907 14863
> > 1910 20356
> > 1915 25696
> > 1920 36350
> > 1925 41645
> > 1928 45098
> > 1930 39311
> > 1935 30317
> > 1940 23644
> > 1945 29327
> > 1950 32564
> > 1955 32902
> > 1960 33875
> > 1965 31424
> > 1970 31721
> > 1975 34357
> > 1980 34391
> > ----------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > Read more of Dr. Tillett's posting at:
> >
> > http://groups.yahoo.com/group/theos-talk/message/5012
> >
> > Hope this helps.
> >
> > Daniel
> > http://blavatsky.info
> > http://theosophy.info
> > http://hpb.cc
> >
> > 
> >
> 
> 
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>