I returned home from my hiking trip at the Grand Canyon to a bundle of unread emails and Google Reader items. I tried in vain to get cell phone and Internet/email reception in the backcountry, but God has preserved the canyon from these mind-zapping communication trinkets.
Perhaps like many of you, I was disheartened to find several commentaries on the declines in the SBC. For those of you who don’t know much about the Southern Baptist Convention, click here for some information. It is the denomination to which I belong, and the way in which my church cooperates with other churches for the sake of the gospel.
The facts are fairly straightforward:
Baptisms in the Southern Baptist Convention fell for the third straight year in 2007 to the denomination’s lowest level since 1987, dropping nearly 5.5 percent to 345,941, according to LifeWay Christian Resources’ Annual Church Profile (ACP). Baptisms have declined annually seven out of the past eight years. Total membership also declined by 0.24 percent to 16,266,920.
My father stated it well, “Although we pray God will bring revival and change, the trajectory is not positive. If current trends don’t change, it seems we are about to enter a period of declining membership.”
News on these declines can be found here, here and here. Good conversations around this issue can be found here, here, and here.
I’ve purposely decided not to write much about this issue. Quite frankly, there isn’t much I wish to say about these declines. But there is a whole lot that I can do to help reverse the trend. As a pastor, I will take personal responsibility for leading my church in the Great Commission and the Great Commandment.
Yours is the best response I’ve seen. Instead of placing blame, just respond by being more obedient to the Great Commission ourselves. Thanks for the reminder that we can all do more and better.
As a Southern Baptist pastor in Washington State, I would say that it breaks my heart that we are experiencing decline. There are several factors, however, that seem to explain this statistic. People are not “joiners” as they once were in America. The media has hit Christianity pretty hard, especially Southern Baptists. Hollywood is portraying evangelical Christians with utter contempt. Other, more charismatic denominations, seem to be experiencing the most growth. Most of all, sadly, is the fact that we are not making evangelism as much of a priority as we once did. It use to be that churches grew without much effort on our part. Those days are long gone. Church and personal evangelism is the only way we will grow in the future, but our members are ill prepared and often unwilling to reach out to their neighbors. Unless this changes, we will continue to decline. In Washington, Southern Baptists are not “around every corner” as in the deep south. We can’t grow our churches the old fashioned way; we have to win each new believer.