How many people have heard of LSM/Lee/Recovery

[Evangelical]

On another thread, it was stated and agreed upon by 2 or 3 witnesses that about 99% of a bunch of other believers have never heard of TLR or WL:

After getting out, I’ve met a bunch of other believers and about 99% of them have never heard of TLR or WL for that matter.

I agree that 99% of believers haven't heard of WL or his church.

Like you said, "99% of them have never heard of TLR or WL for that matter."

It was stated that this is not meant to be a literal number:

Many times people use "99%", not literally, but rather to indicate a small portion. I don't think anyone was attempting to provide statistically meaningful numbers. That was clearly not the intent.

That being the case, I decided to look into it and arrived at a number of 32 million people (10% of 320 million people) have heard about Lee, based on my own modelling to which I received this response:

Originally Posted by Koinonia

Evangelical, you are completely delusional if you think that 32 million people in the USA know who Witness Lee is.

I then explained further how I arrived at that number:


It seems like a lot but that's because you have not considered exponentiation every year for 10 years. I used a model based on the number of bibles distributed each year and a re-distribution factor to account for the bibles distributed in previous years. That's the power of exponentiation and many people underestimate it.

Here's the formula I used:

Np(t) = Np(t-1) + 2 x 140000 + 2 x 290000 + r x Np(t-1).

Np is number of people who know who Witness Lee is, t is time in years.

2 x 140,000 is the number of people reached by the distribution of bibles each year, assuming 140,000 bibles distributed each year (BFA figures) and each one being seen by two people (e.g. a husband and wife). 2x290000 is the number of books.

r is a re-distribution factor - I assumed 5% of all bibles distributed in previous years are re-circulated (e.g. through continued use every year, people leaving them on coffee tables or passing them onto other people). I assume the other 95% are thrown away.

There is no way to know this number but I think 5% is reasonable - the growth rate of Christianity worldwide is under 5% and it is difficult to be saved. It is easy to read the name "witness lee" on a book or a bible compared to adding a member to the church, so I think 5% is being conservative.

I repeat the calculation for proselytizing- assuming 10,000 local church people each tell 1 person every week about Christ, or 52 people per year, for 10 years, it all adds up. I assume that each person will encounter the ministry of Lee either through a gospel tract, new testament bible or book.

I do the math in Excel and over 10 years it comes to 10.8 million people who know about Lee from the bibles and books, and 13 million from evangelism. That's 23.8 million at least. Internet exposure is on top of that - it would have to be as much as the person to person evangelism, maybe more. Add another 8 or 9 million and that comes to 32 million.

If there's a problem with my figures feel free to point it out or propose another model.