Southern Baptist Convention Continues Decline

According to the latest statistics, the Southern Baptist Convention is continuing its death spiral, with the largest decline in membership last year in more than 130 years. The SBC lost nearly a quarter of a million members in 2014 and has lost 800,000 members since 2003. The median age is now 54 years old. More than half of the churches baptized no “millennials” (roughly ages 12 to 30). Baptisms declined by 300,000. The convention claims to have about 15.5 million members, but that is a meaningless statistic. Most of these “members” are nowhere to be found. Sunday morning attendance is about 5.6 million, and that includes visitors, and the number of those who attend Sunday evening or mid-week prayer, typically, is much smaller. Ed Stetzer, executive director of LifeWay Research, says the decline actually started in the 1950s (“As Church Plants Grow, Southern Baptists Disappear,”Christianity Today, June 12, 2015). I am not surprised, as I grew up in SBC churches and they were spiritually lukewarm even then. Though there were some outstanding saints in the membership, the leadership and the congregations as a whole were lukewarm at best. At least that is my experience. The leaders were hirelings who were more afraid of man than God, and the people were in love with the world, a thing that God hates. “Ye adulterers and adulteresses, know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God” (James 4:4).

(Friday Church News Notes, June 19, 2015, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143)

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