Today, the Biblical Reporter breathlessly reported:
The North American Mission Board (NAMB) spent 2023 serving Southern Baptists in their efforts to reach North America with the gospel through church planting, compassion ministry, evangelism and chaplaincy.
In 2023, NAMB celebrated a milestone in church planting—more than 10,000 new churches started since 2010—and a record-setting total of $70.2 million given to the Annie Armstrong Easter Offering® (AAEO).
“If we make the Great Commission the top priority, our best years of ministry are ahead of us,” said NAMB president Kevin Ezell. “As Southern Baptists, we’ve faced challenges within our family of churches and dealt with external pressures from our secularizing culture. We continue to focus on Christ and His mission through it all, proclaiming the gospel and participating in God’s mission to build His kingdom in North America and around the world.”
Every year, NAMB tabulates the number of churches Southern Baptists planted the previous year. In 2023, NAMB noted that the class of 2022 church plants—639 new churches—pushed the total of churches Southern Baptists have planted since 2010 beyond the 10,000 mark.
Wow! The Southern Baptist Convention has planted over 10,000 churches since 2010. Reading the excerpt above might give the uninitiated reader the idea that the SBC is g-r-o-w-i-n-g. It’s not.
In May 2023, Lifeway Research reported:
Within the Southern Baptist Convention, multisite congregations reported 585 campuses in addition to their first location. The SBC saw 416 fewer churches and 165 fewer church-type missions associated with the convention in 2022 than in the previous year.
Fewer churches, not more. The SBC is known for playing games with statistics. “We started 1,000 new churches in 2022! Praise Jesus.” The small print says, “We closed 1,416 churches in 2022, a net loss of 416 churches. Further, a ploy the SBC uses to prop up new church numbers is to close churches and re-open them with a new name. First Baptist Church of Podunk, Kentucky becomes Grace Fellowship of Greater Lexington, Kentucky. Same people (or perhaps more people from a merger with another declining congregation), same pastor (or perhaps a super-duper church planter), and same building.
The numbers are clear, the SBC is in numeric freefall. Having a record Annie Armstrong offering doesn’t change the fact that 13.2 million were on Southern Baptist church membership rolls in 2022, yet on any given Sunday, only 3.8 million people were in attendance at a particular church. Less than 1/3 of Southern Baptist Christians attend church on Sundays. This statistic is the true measure of the health of the SBC.
Membership peaked at 16 million in 2005. That same year, almost 10 million members were nowhere to be found on Sundays.
Bruce Gerencser, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
Connect with me on social media:
Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.
You can email Bruce via the Contact Form.
It’s still true that it’s crucial to examine statistics closely, and the way they are communicated, to cut through the bias from the presenter.
Every poll and report that I have read in the past several years shows that fewer and fewer people are participating in religion.
My wife is one of those members that hasn’t been seen at Sunday at her family’s SBC. I’ve never been a member and never plan on joining.
The church I grew up in never removed anyone from it’s membership files unless the person specifically asked them to do so. I’m probably still on it. Stopped attending services when I was 12. People on paper don’t equal people in pews.
The Roman Catholic Church considers you a member unless it expels you. From what I understand, it’s not easy to get kicked out. I guess the wise old men (snark) who run it are like the “once-saved-always-saved” Evangelicals.
Speaking of whom…The Evangelical Church I attended when I was “saved” probably has me on its roster, even though I haven’t gone anywhere near it in about four decades.
Like OC, everything I’ve read and heard during the past few years indicates that religion is on the decline in the US and most of the industrialized world. There is one thing that might lead people to think otherwise: The most orthodox and fundamentalist members of Christianity (and, to a lesser extent, other religions) are growing louder and more assertive, at least in the US. I would guess that some others, such as Islam and Hinduism, might be growing, but they are still small minorities. I would also guess that those religions are growing in the US (and in other increasingly-secular societies like the UK, France and the Nordic countries) mainly through immigration. It will be interesting to see whether those religions grow or fade among the children and grandchildren of those immigrants.
At this point I’m not sure I care as much about how many are in the pews as how many of them are in the voting booth.
Let them fudge the numbers all they want, the ship is still going to sink.