It is no secret that we Southern Baptists are in a bit of a statistical funk and since we venerate statistics as we do, our numerical decline has been the source of great weeping and wailing, and of course, finger-pointing. Every year, the ACP statistics drop shortly before the SBC annual meeting and we don sackcloth and ashes to bemoan the slide.
The idealism of the Conservative Resurgence has not panned out. We believed that when we turned our convention “Back to the Bible” and grounded it once again in inerrancy, all good things would follow. Since evangelism is rooted in sound theology and the greatest threat to our future is liberalism, if we dealt with aberrant theology and set ourselves once again on a conservative course, baptisms would increase, church planting would grow, and the SBC would see explosive expansion across the United States.
It did not happen. In an article written in 2015 in “Between the Times“, Dr. Ed Stetzer did an analysis of our statistical trends. He demonstrated that we plateaued in the early part of the 2000s and began around 2006 or so to decline slightly. In 2008, some leaders described it as a blip, but it was not. The decline continued and is accelerating year by year. We are now a declining denomination and have been for more than a decade.
Here is a LifeWay Research graph that shows SBC Membership from 1950 to 2014. The trend has not reversed in the last 5 years.
The good Dr. Stetzer made an assertion in this article that struck me, one which, I believe, puts the problems of the SBC in perspective. There is another way to look at these statistics. Our decline did not begin in the middle of the 2000s, or even in the 1990s, but it actually began BEFORE I WAS BORN (and I will soon turn 63!). Yes, the SBC continued to grow during the 50s, 60s, and all the way up until the turn of the millennium. However, the rate of growth began to slip around the year 1950 and was at a fairly constant rate of decline over the 7 decades since then. While the rate remained positive until after the year 2000, it was steadily declining until it turned negative around 2005 or 2006. The decline continues. Look at a second graph that shows this year to year percentage change in total members. It has yearly ups and downs but the decline over time is basically a straight line.
Read Stetzer’s article.
Yes, we can look at these graphs and say, “We continued to grow until the middle of the 2000s” and wonder what happened then to change things. We can try to find out what might have changed during these times and seek to pin the blame on those trends. Baptists love to play the blame game, as long as we are the ones pinning the blame and not the ones on whom the blame is pinned.
People have found several trends to blame. Some have blamed the Conservative Resurgence for all our problems. It is a convenient target. Others take aim at the growth of Calvinism in the years after the CR. Calvinism increases and voila, the SBC begins to decrease. Others seek to pin the blame on all things contemporary. “If we did today what we did back then, we’d see today what we saw back then!” We need to go back to patriotic, cultural, American, Christianity of the 50s and 60s and all will be well.
There is a problem with all of these. They ignore the facts.
The statistical decline of the SBC is older than I am. I will turn 63 in September and it started 7 years before I was born!
The decline of the SBC began BEFORE the Conservative Resurgence, BEFORE the Calvinist Incursion, and BEFORE the Contemporary Invasion. It has been going on since just after World War II. The annual growth rate of the SBC back in 1950 was over 4%. Not too shabby. By the 60s, that rate had been cut in half and was still 2%. If we could reach a 2% growth rate today, cessationists would begin speaking tongues. Still, that was a 50% decline in the rate of growth in one decade. I will restate that – our growth rate was cut in half in TEN YEARS. By the time the 70s were passing by, it was around 1%. After a series of ups and downs, we plateaued in the 90s and crossed the line into decline around 2006.
If you are looking at trends in the 1990s or 2000s to figure out how the SBC went wrong, you are 50 years late!
This was not the result of our denominational war, but has been happening since the Korean War. This didn’t start with Al Mohler’s administration but during Harry Truman’s. The world changed. The genesis of our decline took place in the middle of the 20th Century and if we want to seek solutions for it, we need to look at what happened then.
So, What IS the Problem?
Here is my theory, one which I believe fits the evidence. The SBC was a perfect cultural storm in the Southern United States in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. It became part of the heart and soul of the Deep South – in good ways and in ways we now regret. Southern American culture and Southern Baptist culture fit like a hand in a glove. Southern Baptists influenced and impacted their culture in significant ways and were also influenced and impacted by their culture in significant ways.
We were a culturally acclimated church – few churches have been as much a part of the warp and woof of their community as the SBC was. We grew in the fertile soil of the Deep South, becoming the de facto established church in many areas. In the Virginia town where I pastored in the 80s, virtually every White person in the town was a member of our church, though most never scuffed the carpet unless they were being married or buried.
Then It All Changed
In the post-war era, the world began to change. Women went to work during the war and many didn’t return to the kitchen when the soldiers came marching home. The Civil Rights movement began to ramp up. The changes that began to swirl in the 50s led to the radical changes of the 60s. Our nation has undergone radical cultural and social changes in the last 50 years that have left us baffled, confused, and bumfuzzled.
This change, I believe, led to our denomination’s problems.
There have been arguments over what was the glue that bound the SBC together. Moderates argued it was missions, not theology. In the CR, we often said that we were bound by our confessional theology and that is what united us in mission. Both of these statements were a bit optimistic. Having grown up in the SBC in the 50s and 60s, I am convinced that there was another glue that held us together.
Southern Baptists were held together by a cultural glue – it was “Southern Baptist Culture” that united us more than anything else.
When our Southern Baptist culture fit with the monolithic Southern Culture, all was well. When the world started changing, we lost our identity and the SBC has never found that again. The SBC
The Problem: Who Are Southern Baptists?
In the early days of my blogging, we argued about “Baptist Identity.” I wrote a post asking this question, “What makes a person or a church Baptist?” What is the sine qua non of Baptist identity, the irreducible minimum? No one knew. No one could give a simple, comprehensive definition.
In 1962 it would not have been that tough. You could walk into a Southern Baptist church just about anywhere and know you were in an SBC church. They all had a piano and organ, a music leader who stood and waved his arm to the beat, used the Baptist Hymnal. Our Sunday School classes used BSSB literature and our children has RAs and GAs. We had a spring and fall revival. The people were as white as the shirt the pastor wore.
When the world changed, we were slow to adapt. I will conclude this now, and continue this in a future post, but here’s my final thought.
The decline of the SBC started 70 years ago when the world began to change rapidly. The monolithic SBC Culture became archaic and began to fade. As the world changed, our denomination was no longer a perfect fit to its culture and we did not adapt well. We lost our identity and have never figured out who we are in this changing world.
Part 1 of this series was Building Better Baptists: An Allegory
Well stated Dave. I attend a Baptist church here in SW New Mexico, that has dropped the Baptist name. They are very much baptist in preaching and singing, but no Baptist in their name. Look at the churches in the Des Moines area..Family Church, Grace Church..etc.
I wonder if an SBC church has been planted in the last 10 years that INCLUDES Baptist in the name. The % is low.
2020 in CA:
New St Paul Missionary Baptist Church in Oakley
True Zion Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles
Irvine Joongang Baptist Church in Irvine
2019:
The Vine Baptist Church in Bakersfield
New Community Southern Baptist Church in Artesia
Grace Chinese Baptist Church in Bakersfield
Primeria Iglesia Bautista del Sur Castro Valley
Overflowing Baptist Church in Fremont
One Way Baptist Church of California in La Habra
Iranian Baptist Church of Orange County in Lake Forest
Iglesia Bautista Renacer in San Rafael
Genesis Baptist Church in Santa Rosa
Korean Baptist Church of WalnutValley in Walnut
Iglesia Bautista Monte Horeb in Visalia
I could go on and on but you might have noticed that the growth areas of the SBC are non-Caucasian majority congregations and the churches planted with Baptist/Bautista in the name are not Anglo-majority.Apparently it is important to let people know what type of church they are from the start.
I know a few. Most are ethnic churches using Baptist to distinguish them from the more Pentecostal ethnic churches in their community.
One of your best. Not sure why birth rates are AWOL from Stetzer’s article. Post WWII boom in births started declining early 1950s. It’s not very spiritual to say that babies = baptisms (after a few years for us Baptists) but biological growth is the easiest kind. As you explain, not so much anymore.
…and it’s not too early to start talking about the new CR movement. Criticism is that we’ve gotten soft on evangelism and the restless, power seeking Trads can fix that. Long declines in baptisms laid at the feet of current leadership. But forgive me for soiling your fine article with sordid SBC politics.
More finger-pointing there, but I kinda started it. I believe they are part of the “nostalgia” group that seeks to rebuild the old SBC culture instead of biblical truth. But that’s me.
Hi, Dave!
Apropos the “nostalgia” group — if I mailed you a slender little book of maaaaaaaybe 200 pages, would you have the time (and inclination) to read it?
I think of it often; in its pages you’ll find almost every modern SBC debate played out in miniature — albeit in a very different context.
It’s called “What Went Wrong?”, and it shows a society grappling with a sudden, sharp decline in fortunes & trying all manner of ways to reverse it.
In this case, the society is the Ottoman Empire (and to a lesser degree, the rest of the Islamic world), but the behavior it describes is universal.
In its pages, you’ll see religious conservatives who call for more prayer, more fasting, more personal piety; you’ll see others who try to build mass movements that will sweep away the modern, corrupting influences that have turned God’s face away from the nation.
You’ll meet reformers who think the problem is narrow and technical, and can be solved with sufficiently clever approaches, and others who think the only way forward is a near-total break with existing ways of life — that it’s better to leap off the cliff than to wait ’til modernity shoves you.
And you’ll encounter the vested interests who, for reasons of their own, resisted and endorsed these approaches.
It is, in short, a /really/ good book!
So yeah: want a free copy from an Internet stranger? 😀
To be honest, I have a backlog of books I’m supposed to read, but I’d be glad to add it to the list.
Sure, toss it on the pile. Worst come to worst, you can re-gift it to a history nerd.
I’ve shipped it to your church; enjoy!
Sounds like a winner.
Birth rates declined in part because women entered the work force. But more education for women and better health care and survival of their offspring is correlated globally to smaller family size. We in essence went into pupal mode and hoped all that would go away. I think the start might have been substituting a new gospel of be like us for the true Gospel. Regrettably it coincided with the end of the Jim Crow era and was a magnet for some of its true believers. And we did little at the time to rectify that. The opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment on biblical grounds avoided loss of religious freedom, but alienated many of what was then very much a majority of young activists. They fought what they perceived was the good fight but it arguably was a rejection of the uniform cultural interpretation that some (many? most?) of especially the rural church’s—the backbone of the actual political support for the later Conservative Resurgence supported. I’ve argued here it mostly traces to E.Y. Mullins and his efforts to bring SBTS into Princeton Presbyterial modernity scholastically. I’ve also argued the original Baptist Faith and Message and its changes from the Abstract of Principles (itself neatly made more universal than the confessions it was derived from) project a trajectory towards bridging the gap especially that the Scopes trial exposed between what we might call secular scholarship and our interaction with that. In essence it he sought with the committee to not require believers to.abandon science to confess Jesus Christ. No…I didn’t write a paper. And I am not interested in arguing it. Just the thoughts I’ve collected over the years for anyone that wants to think through an utterly conservative and inerrant position that isn’t what everyone else thinks. I firmly believe effective discipleship corrects all of this. But we may lack the humility to admit we are ineffective at it today. My primary model on this was Avery T. Willis. His testimony was seeing that his witness was ineffective and asking God in prayer why. God told him he lacked the power of the Holy Spirit and asked him to commit to full obedience so the Holy Spirit could fully empower what he said and did. I’ll further note he wasn’t a Pentecostalist/Charismatic and did a very interesting book on how the revival in Indonesia in the 1960s wasn’t mainly… Read more »
Brother, thanks for your post and honesty “I don’t know how to get there from here”. I think you are 100% correct in stating “The secret does seem to be the Holy Spirit.” From a church member who has a huge burden for the church I say emphatically that it is the Holy Spirit ( not in a Pentecostal or Charismatic way) but through convicting, prayer saturated sermons that brings repentance to the attendees. All of the sermons I hear ask the listener if “they want to be a follower of Jesus (who doesn’t want to follow a good man) and get baptized (the culturally acceptable way of saying “I‘m a Christian”) and the listener leaves confused about their true Born Again salvation.
Back to your point about the Holy Spirit being the answer. Without repentance being preached sin will continue to permeate the lives of the listeners and the Holy Spirit WILL NOT show up, resulting in further declines in the SBC churches.
A truly interesting & informative article. I look forward to the continuation.
Our perceptions of the past are generally rose-colored. The good old days are usually not as good as we remember.
Do you think the SBC should work toward a cultural makeover that is Convention generated and institutionally focused so that we present more effectively to the broader public, even if we risk further rancor among our family?
Or do you think the SBC should focus solely on evangelism and discipleship and not try to press for unity on cultural presentation issues, but allow churches to go their own way on those matters?
Do you think either of these approaches will help SBC churches reach more people?
Actually, the rest of this post gives my ideas. William has harassed me mercilessly about the length of my posts. So I split this one in 2.
I think we need to let Christ unite us, not culture, social things, race, or politics. We have to find something that unites us other than traditional SBC culture. I would love for that to be cooperative missions in a confessional fellowship.
Amen brother-it is not culture, race, society or other man made attempts. It is through Christ alone through the work of the Holy Spirit (See Greg Harvey’s post above)that salvation and unity comes to this lost world.
The timing of this trend also coincides with broader affluence in our society as well. I would like to see trends with per capita income to butt up against those baptism statistics. My family legacy of faith began when my grandparents were in poverty. I sometimes wonder if our (relative to the world) affluence is a bigger indicator of our decline.
Quick question with sincerity why is it that southern baptist that are so critical of southern baptist don’t just start a new denomination? I mean it seems the convention is split on near bout every thing. I pastor a SBC church have pastored 3 in fact and they have been amazing churches great people none of the 3 churches could even tell you who was president of the SBC the congregations seem to care less. I did not have a problem with it than and really don’t have a problem with it now. My dad always said it all about the money anyhow. I linger and read all the SBC voices post well I skim them and just can’t see it here any of this garbage makes a difference.
Dave, I believe you are correct in your statistical analysis and in identifying our decline with cultural changes in the South. William makes a salient point about declining birth rates. If you compared our SBC decline graph with a graph of the declining birth rate among Anglos (Whites), I believe a direct correlation would be clear. Thom Ranier has written that Southern Baptists abandoned the use of revival meetings, but they did not replace them with anything. It is clear that Southern Baptists are not as evangelistic as in times past. Another factor that has affected us, I believe, is urbanization. In 1950 most of our churches were rural and small town churches. The population movements to the cities of the South and Midwest have depopulated rural areas. So, I’m saying there are multiple factors that have led to our long-term decline.
Doesn’t the excuse of declining birth rate (as a reason for declining SBC membership) ignore the overall adult population growth in the US. I understand organic growth may be easier but there are plenty of opportunities for growth outside the traditional sources. Also, it seems that urbanization would aide growth since more of the population is concentrated in a smaller area-logistics etc. I’m convinced it’s much deeper than these reasons.
Bryan, I love this convention and my motivation is to try to help it.
As a small town pastor in a rural context the decline of the birthrate is an important key to the decline of the SBC and the local church. But that is not the only thing I see. Most seniors in my church who were raised there and then raised there children in the church do not have children that attend there any longer and many do not attend church at all. I am unsure the reason but I would say it was probably a lack of discipleship within the church as they were children in the 80’s and 90’s. This means a whole generation is absent from the pews and leaves the church scrounging for a means of growth through evangelism in a changed culture that they do not understand.
But the trifecta of a lack of a declining birthrate, lack of discipleship, and lack of evangelism is definitely the means by which the SBC is declining.
Early efforts get rid of “Baptist” from church name now focus is get rid of “Southern” and folks pontificating why decline is happening….factor in US population growth and percentages shrink exponentially…..total membership >5% US population…..active membership -2%…..nothing worrying in the numbers….for the record “there is none good no not one”.
Bro Dave,
This was a fascinating article. I think your assessments are very accurate. Look to forward to the future posts.
Had to chuckle about how every SBC church was so alike. You’re a little older than I am but I’ve even remarked they all smelled the same. Never understood why that was.
My only question is at one point you noted that 4% growth wasn’t too shabby. But as compared to what? For as long as I can remember, SBC’ers have been preoccupied with growth. But how can we statistically decide if a growth rate is shabby or not?
Great work Dave. Keep ’em coming!
Yours in Christ
Above my pay grade to do more than state my opinion but here it is:
This is a timely post for me. I was saved in 1967 and studied the churches in my area before choosing the SBC. I am no longer SBC.
The pandemic has forced almost everyone to miss church for a time, and to force us seniors to miss church for a longer time. So I listen to a local couple who do excellent blue grass gospel and then head to the tv and youtube to “watch” church. Really to listen to a sermon. I’m still SBC at heart, and mostly choose SBC preachers. Usually I have some fun and choose something from the 1950’s through the 1990’s. Fun to watch the fashions and hair change as I listen.
But I have come to realize something that chills me to my very bones. I listen to all the local SBC churches that have their sermons online, and have attended the others when we moved here. So I am well aware that preaching salvation and being born again just ain’t happenin here. Period. Full stop.
I had not realized that until this pandemic sent me listening down nostalgia lane. The contrast is to put it mildly astounding.
And I would humbly submit the idea, from just a grandma not able to be in the pew at the moment, that the problem is that lack of evangelistic preaching. And the cure would be evangelistic preaching.
Converting dispy’s to Calvinists is not gospel preaching. Nor is preaching aiming to fix up the lives of the saved or the lost. Nor is preaching aimed at growing the church.
I remember a preacher who told us in the 1990’s the SBC was moving from believe-belong-behave to belong-behave-hopefully believe. The difference is vital.
And maybe Ichabod has been written over the door, and will stay there until the SBC returns to evangelistic preaching.