The organisation reports roughly 9.2 million publishers, members active in preaching, in about 120,000 congregations, and an annual Memorial attendance above twenty million, which it publishes as a measure of wider interest rather than membership. The gap between the two figures is large and the organisation does not treat the higher one as a membership claim.
Growth is slow and uneven, strongest in parts of Africa and Latin America and close to flat in Europe and North America. Retention is a known weakness: survey work in the United States has repeatedly found this among the lowest retention rates of any tracked religious group, with a majority of those raised in it no longer identifying with it as adults.
Legally the movement has an outsized footprint. Its refusal to compromise produced a long series of constitutional cases in the United States on free speech, door-to-door canvassing and compulsory flag salutes, and the resulting precedents protect everyone, not only Witnesses. In Russia the organisation was declared extremist and banned outright in 2017, with property confiscated and members prosecuted and imprisoned; the European Court of Human Rights has ruled against Russia on the point.
Its most serious current difficulty is the handling of child sexual abuse. Government inquiries in Australia, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and elsewhere have examined the organisation's internal procedures, in particular the requirement that an allegation be established by two witnesses before elders may act and the historic reluctance to report allegations to civil authorities. The Australian royal commission found more than a thousand alleged perpetrators recorded in the organisation's own files with no case referred to police by the organisation. The body has revised some procedures and continues to dispute characterisations of others.