The various Methodist churches were assiduous counters of members, ostensibly recording the numbers of membership tickets issued in the final quarter of each reporting-year. These were held to represent their core following, but Alan Gilbert provided good reason to view the results with caution some four decades ago. Methodism's most pronounced growth era was the nineteenth century, but half of its eightfold increase was the result of population growth. In terms of membership density, Methodism grew sharply to 1841, dropped a little to a plateau between 1861 and 1881, then declined inexorably to 1901 and beyond. Yet there are further doubts about what was being counted here.

When WM returns in 1819 and 1820 were manipulated by canny circuit stewards anxious to minimise the impact of new funding rules, and when itinerants were powerless to prevent it, it is plain that these were not innocent totals arrived at by simple counting of issued tickets. An anecdote in a PM autobiography confirms that the practice of massaging presentation was not restricted to the Wesleyans: the itinerant, Thomas Russell, wrote that when he set out on his career at the end of the 1820s, he had been advised by James Bourne to declare only one third of recruits in a new cause; ‘then you will have a good reserve’. Nor was it a practice confined to the maverick early years, because the returns for the period around the 1849 Fly Sheets Controversy indicate that it probably happened on a significant scale then, too. Methodism as a whole prospered more in the five years after 1846 than in those immediately before, and went into reverse in the five after 1851. This suggests that most of the earlier WM losses found homes in other strands, but that later losses exited Methodism altogether, creating a contagion that hurt the smaller movements too. This is intuitively unlikely. WM losses after 1851 were in no small measure the result of centrally-directed disciplinary action designed to root out Fly Sheets sympathisers; and if they had stuck with the Old Connexion for two years they were surely more, not less, likely to seek another Methodist home than those who left earlier of their own volition. Inspection of the PM numbers suggests that the anomaly is probably the product of opposing reporting behaviour by the two churches’ returners.