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[Lorelei]

Complete list of all official Orgs/Missions in the World

Data compiled by a Washington, D.C.-area critic known as "Hubbard Telescope".

How many orgs and missions ARE there?

According to Katherine Fraser at Gold Base: "We have, you know, 6,000 groups, churches, missions internationally." In 2008, Tommy Davis told CNN that they had 7,500 orgs and missions. Let's go to their official source and see what Scientology.org says. http://www.locator.scientology.org/scn/index.html

This is just the official list from the Scientology site itself as of April 8th, 2009. If you know any other orgs or missions, or if you see any that have closed or moved, please let me know. I know I must have missed a few with the sucky system they've got set up, so if you see one I've missed, tell me! Feel free to check my research and my math.

Interesting things I noticed:

    * There are a lot of countries I've never heard of before.
    * There are more Scientology centers listed in France than all of Canada.
    * Italy has more Scientology centers listed than any other European country.
    * There are a disproportionately large number of Scientology centers in Taiwan and Italy.
    * There are Scientology centers in only four African nations.
    * Pakistan is the only Islamic nation with a Scientology center.
    * There are 1.6 billion people in China and not one Scientology center.
    * Gold Base in Hemet is not listed as a Scientology location in the Scientology.org provided search. Neither is ASHO ANZO Sydney. I had to add them separately.
    * There are more Scientology sites listed for California than any other state in the US.
    * There are 17 US states without any official Scientology orgs/missions.
    * 27 countries have at least one Org no change from 2007.
    * 23 countries have missions only, down 7 from 2007.
    * Most countries show little change in the number of service units. As noted in our previous surveys however, a few countries are different.
    * Russia has two Orgs supporting a lot of Missions, but growth has reversed (30 down from 73) perhaps due to competition from Rons Org.
    * Italy also has a lot of Missions, the number seems to have stabilised.
    * Several other countries experienced a big growth in Missions such as Hungary, Slovakia, Taiwan and Ukraine but these like Russia appear to be in decline.
    * In the USA the number of Missions has now fallen after a decade of steady increase.
    * US-based Orgs: 128 (no change) Missions: 322 (down 61 from 2007)


Historical geographic breakdown of orgs/missions: http://www.newsfrombree.co.uk/stolgy_5.htm

Results and Number Crunching
There are 472 listed Orgs and Missions in the whole world according to the official Scientology site

6,000 - 472 = 5,528 apparently missing orgs/missions that are not officially listed by Scientology.org

If there are 8-10 million Scientologists in the world and 472 missions/orgs officially listed by Scientology.org, there would have to be an average of 16,949 to 21,186 members for every single mission and org in the entire world.

**Note, this number includes Gold Base and ASHO ANZO buildings in California and in Sydney that were not listed by the Scientology.org website.

Note: Tally does not include un-opened Ideal Org bldgs...there are probably 20 or so in the US that I know about.. let alone other property.


If we go by Scientology's stats, and assume "an average of 16,949 to 21,186 members for every single mission and org in the entire world," the parking / congestion issues at the SS building just got a LOT more serious. Also, they are "expanding" and are the "fastest-growing religion in the world," so they are going to have to hire fleets of double-decker busses to get them all to the Org, I guess.


Critics weigh in and discuss:

Another equation to laugh at: If Scientology is hoping to CLEAR the planet, then each Org/Mission will currently need to have the capability to CLEAR 14,209,791 people (1/472nd of the world population).

Italy was the testbed for a major CoS project. The idea was to reg for money for opening lots of new Missions, country by country. In Italy, it worked in that the new Missions have survived. The system was then tried in Hungary, worked there too. DM was obliged to sanction the opening of a new Org in Budapest, and that's most unusual.

Next was the UK. The money was raised, the locations chosen, and then... nothing. I wrote to SMI and they assured me the new Missions were ready to roll. Nothing. It wasn't until several years later that a new Mission started up in the UK. The money raised? Hah!

So what went wrong? My guess is that DM lost interest in favour of the 'Ideal Org' project - bigger, upmarket buildings that would attract rich punters.

Taiwan seems to have taken off entirely on its own. The religious climate is permissive and there is no anti-cult pressure. It has no Org, I've heard the Missions are supported by Orgs in California, and they are doing OK.

The 'mission' in Pakistan has been on the books for a long while, I suspect it's just a pile of books in someone's apartment. DM knows as much about Islam as your average American (fuck all), and so no one in the CoS dares to know more. The CoS was caught peddling 'Dianetics' at an Egyptian book fair and their people were lucky to be deported and not arrested - trying to convert Moslems to another religion is a serious offense in most Islamic countries.

There was a Mission in Hong Kong under British rule, it closed recently. The Chinese government takes a strong line on cults due to its bad experience with Falun Gong: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falun_Gong
DM has evidently decided that China is a 'no go area' for Scientology.

Hemet is officially a film studio.

'6,000' includes 'groups'. Critics keeps getting confused about this! 'Groups' are all the front groups, EVERY BRANCH of CCHR, WISE, Narconon, Delphi, the lot.

Every Org and Mission has, on paper, a separate 'Dianetics Foundation' in a filing cabinet, so that's an instant doubling of statistics!

What HP (a critic) meant by the "doubling" is that wherever you have a "Church of Scientology of __________" (fill in the blank for the location), you also have a "Dianetics Foundation of _________" (same location).

Like, for example, Los Angeles. Same building, two entrances - one for Scientology, one for Dianetics. Same receptionists will sit at either entrance, depending on need. Same staff, same bookstore. It's literally just two entrances to the same place.

What HP didn't mention is that some of these orgs also have two orgs operating within the same location -- a DAY org and a FOUNDATION org.

DAY meant roughly 9-5 M-F. FOUNDATION meant evenings and weekends.

Same building. Same rooms. Sometimes the same "customers". Two different staffs. The DAY staff is supposed to train during the FOUNDATION time period, and FOUNDATION staff are supposed to train during the DAY time period.

HP listing out the "secular groups" (front groups) was meant to just say each individual corporation there counts as one. Example: Narconon NETWORK could have 200 Narconon groups. HP implies that these count 200 towards the 6,000.

Part of the 6,000 "groups" would also include all field groups - including field auditors and probably things like the Clearwater Community Volunteers (who sponsor an Easter Egg Hunt and a Sand Castle competition) and the Scientology Surf Club by Rob Hoover (which only ever did beach cleanups followed by passing out The Way to Happiness booklets).

Yes, though in the CoS 'Org' is normally used to refer to the building, not what's on the Org Board. Day and Foundation are two shifts. Now and then someone copying onto the Internet used to include both, something to watch for when counting.

When I was in (which was not too long ago) these were two ORGS. They were called "the Day org" and "the Foundation org". Each had it's own org board and staff, separate from the other. Students could sign up with one or the other org. Though there was some "slush" allowed (like a student could attend course in the "other org" on extra days or to make up lost time) the public were either signed up with the Day OR the Foundation org, and not both.

Each org has it's own stats and GI (gross income) which it distributes to ITS staff (and doesn't share with the other). They even sometimes have their own files (central files, ethics files, student files, etc.) which is the case with ASHO.

So to call them "shifts"... I don't think so.

Though... when an org is small, there's only one org. When they get a lot of staff recruited, that's when they "split" into day and foundation.

Perhaps the day/foundation concept is just another Hubbard ruse to separate liabilities and to push the staff harder.

Every Org's OSA office also operates as "Citizens Commission on Human Rights," "Youth for Human Rights," "Say No to Drugs," "Crimanon" and any other front group they want to print up a letterhead for. These are just the same single individual, usually, operating as different front groups. Check the addresses - it's either the Org address or a PO Box. But they count each one of these letterheads as a separate "group." And yes, each org also operates a "Hubbard Dianetics Foundation" as a DBA, and count it as another org. So there is lots of double-triple-quadruple counting. In addition to the just plain old fabrication of figures.

Missions are usually someone's house. The mission here in Portland is a renovated single-story house, in the middle of a residential neigborhood. They are open two evenings a week, Wednesdays and Sundays.

I recommend actual inspections of each area. In Portland, for instance, Scientology has contracted over the years. There used to be a booming Celebrity Center and an Org, now there is just the org (and an empty "ideal org" building).

I'm not the brightest (as many here will attest) But I don't get how/why anyone would think of counting a "secular group" as an org or mission.

And it still looks like each org/mission would need to include 11 others.
(12 x approx 500 = 6,000)

Does this have anything to do with liability? I looked at one of the contracts for joining as a member and it looked to me like it was trying to make each org its own entity. So if someone was going to get sued you couldn't sue scientology, you could only sue the org. (Btw I aint a lawyer)

The problem is that you're trying to be logical with this. Scientology is all one thing - everything Hubbard. The "secular groups" are NOT "secular". Scientology only calls them that so that they can teach their crap in places where "religion" is not allowed, while still calling the main Hubbardology a "church".

Every Church of Scientology is supposed to head up and run the "secular groups" through their Division 6 and supported by the Clear Expansion Committee.

Here's a link to dox re Clear Expansion Committee: http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Scientology_cult_Clear_Expansion_Committee_documents

So if there are 472 orgs. w/ 50 members each (and we know that is a high number for some orgs - and even some countries) that would put scientology at about the 23,600 mark. So I would say that the estimated 25,000 members world wide is actually a little on the high side.

Orgs can have a couple hundred members. In Clearwater and LA it's a bit more. DC has about 100-150 including public, though many are off lines and don't come to events. The mission in Alexandria VA, however, is basically dead. LA I know had about 4,000-5,000 people show up at their LRH Birthday event. While much less than their anticipated 6,000-8,000, it's more than the average.

The Trinity College survey found about 25,000 self identifying Scientologists and shrinking in the US. Based on the census information we have from the countries with the "largest" reported number of Scientologists (Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, etc) and the number of IAS donators for the past few decades, it's a safe bet to estimate maybe +/- 50,000 including offline publics who haven't officially blown yet.

Of possible interest:
Scientology cult uses dozens of front groups to make money and recruit followers : Indybay
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2008/06/05/18504549.php

"Non-profit" entities with links to Scientology: 990 filings
http://www.xenu-directory.net/documents/corporate/990s-index.html

Scientology front groups: "Division 6C"
http://www.xenu-directory.net/documents/corporate/scnlink-div6c.html

STOP-WISE.BIZ : The Command Channels of Scientology
http://stop-wise.biz/Command_Channels_of_Scientology.html

What's a "Service Org"?
http://scientology.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Service_orgs

Mod edit: linked directly to Clear Expansion Committee documents.