Right before our non-convention comes the release of the SBC Annual Statistical Report. For some years it has been lamentable; thus, my personal descriptor of it as the “annual SBC statistical weepfest.” General reaction from denominational leaders usually ranges from despair to depression and calls for SBCers to do better are noised about widely, the thought being if we just worked harder, prayed more, witnessed more, and had more money and programs we would be seeing mid-twentieth century rocket ship numbers.
Baptist Press story: Southern Baptist Convention continues statistical decline, Floyd calls for rethinking ACP process.
More on Floyd’s clarion call for statistical simplicity down this article a bit. So, how bad was it?
- Membership was down about 2%, with 287,655 members lost. The total membership number, 14.5 million, is the softest of soft numbers. Has been forever. My colleagues can look at their own church and see a number and judge what exactly it means. But we have been collecting this metric for scores of years and the year-to-year comparisons are generally legit. We are a declining convention by this measure. (The integrity in church membership movement is a sham ploy BTW. Churches should keep the membership numbers they feel led to keep and report what they want to report.} Inexplicably, the Oklahoma state convention didn’t even ask their churches for this number. Explain that Sooners.
- Baptisms were down about 4.5% with 10,694 less than the previous year. That’s about five per church or mission which doesn’t sound too bad. SBCers should take this lockdown time to make more babies, since that’s a major component of baptism numbers. We have more kids. We have more baptisms. Simple as that. I had thought that we would see an increase in baptisms this year. My reading of the tea leaves was incorrect. File that away when I speculate about future years.
- Total churches were up by 74, insignificant statistically but any positive number gets touted. We know there are church closures and mergers. NAMB is planting churches. Some states and other groups are as well. Good for them or we would be down here as well.
- We’re counting satellite locations, multisite congregations these days. The number of “additional campuses” is 505. That number is not added to total churches or church type missions. I’ll have to look a little deeper here. Basically, the ACP hasn’t folded this number in with churches to make the number look better. One church with ten sites is one church in the ACP.
- Average weekly worship attendance dropped about a percent to 5,250,230.
- Giving was down 1.44%
More on the data later but one typical manner in which denominational leaders and others handle these statistical reports is to decry the lack of reporting.
“If all of our churches would just report then things would look better.” Implied in this statement is that things aren’t as bad as they look.
This is a wrongheaded and silly notion. We’ve never had total participation in ACP reporting and LifeWay has protocols to adjust numbers somewhat to reflect non-reporting churches.
So, what about Ronnie Floyd’s call to rethink the process? Here’s what he said:
“In our high-tech world, our processes cannot have this much lag time,” Floyd said. “It simply cannot take this long and be this complicated. It is past time for us to rethink and re-innovate the SBC Annual Church Profile process.”
With about forty years of ACP experience, I agree with him on this. I don’t know how successful he would be to try and lead the stakeholders in the process to a new, truly uniform, simpler, more timely statistical reporting.
State conventions tweak the ACP for their state. Oklahoma didn’t ask for total membership. Two states didn’t ask for total receipts. Four states didn’t ask for “other additions,” i.e., membership increases that weren’t baptisms. There is general rebellion against reporting Great Commission Giving with seven states not asking for that number. Six states didn’t even ask for total mission expenditures.
If Ronnie could get state conventions on board as a group with a consistent approach to the ACP, that would help, I think. I’ve never liked the reporting in mid-year. Seems like calendar year reporting would make better sense. Churches have a lot of slack time in January.
But, I’d agree that our main problem is not statistical or demographical but spiritual. We can all do better.
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There’s a bit of glee noised about when this report comes out and is again negative. You should have no trouble finding a raft of articles and tweets about what great news it is that the SBC is hemorrhaging. Word for the critics: The SBC is still a huge organization with enormous funding streams. It will remain that for the forseeable future.
I would agree that the time for the mid-year reporting is past. Calendar year makes so much more sense, though it would be awkward for that first year. I do think that there is something to the “fewer churches reporting”. I know there hasn’t always been 100% but I actually think there are more churches that don’t have a clue that this is a thing than in decades past. If I mentioned Annual Church Profile in my church, not one person on staff would have a clue what it is. Now that’s on me to correct, but we would have… Read more »
One day we will learn two things. First is that the Commission is to make disciples (not just “win souls”), and it’s hard to claim that we’re doing such with 2/3 of the membership not there on Sunday. The other thing is that it’s God who is our source of supply, not our programs. That applies to dollars and Baptisms both. And attendance. The first annual convention I ever attended was 2006 in Greensboro. Mark Dever held a workshop in which he discussed the problem of the open back door of the church, and how to close it.. What I… Read more »
I’ve listened to the promoters of the church discipline movement for decades. It may tidy up numbers but, seems to me, to have caused more problems than it solves. It is the perfect solution for proponents in that it cannot be imposed on our autonomous churches and will never be voluntarily implemented by large numbers of churches; thus, promoters may loudly opine that it works but never have data to prove it. It’s odd, Bob, this perpetual, casual slap at the SBC about how many show up on sundays. Not every member attends every Sunday. A regular attender is pegged… Read more »
That Mark Dever plan (if your memory of his presentation is accurate) is one absolutely lousy plan. It would fail in that you really would never feel comfortable opening the front door because your people would never be perfect, meanwhile your community splits Hell wide open. I can’t imagine Paul doing something like that, even in Corinth.
However accurate these statistics are, they do confirm and continue the downward trends we’ve seen for many years. The Associated Press released an article on our statistics today. I agree with Ronny Floyd that we need a more modern, more efficient way to gather statistics. It is amazing and appalling to me that there is no consistency in the statistics the various state conventions gather. That surely makes no sense. I used try to gather statistics in the Philippines. I explained to the pastors that these statistics are like the vital signs nurses record in the hospital. You want to… Read more »
We’ll, all I can say is that 14.5 million members reported and average attendance of 5 million is a much more weepable statistic than any other mentioned here. One of the first things I’ve done at both churches I’ve pastored in the past five years was have it placed in the bylaws that we will only report active members on the ACP. In both cases active membership consisted of attending church ONCE in the previous year. In the first church church membership reported dropped from 150 to about 75. In the second church membership reported dropped from 300 to 100,… Read more »
Maybe the ACP should only consist of what’s truly measurable, and probably most important to the SBC.
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Good for you DE. Each church should report members as they wish. Not my business how you count yours.
So you’re okay with SBC churches counting dead folks and counting the same person multiple times if that’s how they choose to do it? Does autonomy mean we throw logic out the window? I’m not suggesting all churches have to do it the same way. I am suggesting they make a distinction between active and inactive members by whatever criteria the church sets and only count active members on the ACP. Personally, I think the minimum standard should be that they are indeed breathing. But I suppose that’s up to the autonomous church by SBC standards. Let the dead count… Read more »
Your church, your business. Not your church, not your business.
Okay. I’ll file the report in an approximate place. No need for further discussion or consideration.
Thanks again for the confirmation.
I may need to move to OK. They seem to understand.
“Let the dead count the dead.”
Just so they don’t vote at business meetings.
We report accurately. Purged our rolls when I first arrived here and dropped from 200 to 60. Had folks who moved 30 years ago and are probably on 3-4 other SBC rolls as well. Does anyone even add members by letter anymore?
Jeff,
I would say I’m glad your church took that initiative. But it appears I’m now being moderated out of the conversation. I guess my argument offened the powers that be. So I don’t know if you’ll get this or not.
Sounds like a reasonable approach. Good work. Many churches do this periodically.
Having attended a church for more than a dozen years now where the attendance is larger than the membership, it has become difficult to see how the opposite can occur, except by sheer neglect of the Biblical ministry function of the church. Shouldn’t the church be aware of members who move, join other churches or die? And if the SBC is collecting, analyzing, and evaluating its collective ministry effectiveness based on the data it collects, then it should establish a standard for counting someone as a member, not an independent, autonomous church that has set aside its autonomy and independence… Read more »
“The SBC” is the churches, not some bureaucratic entity created by the churches to collect data, among other tasks. Each church decides in their own way how to create and maintain a membership. If LifeWay or a state convention wants to suggest best practices for membership rolls they may. Such cannot be imposed on any autonomous congregation. “Total membership” is not meaningless. Comparisons over the years show growth or decline. As a matter of doctrine, a membership roll is meaningless. The BFM doesn’t address it. As I said, I think Ronnie is right on the need to address the ACP.… Read more »
You bring up a very good point. Our church too has a good many in attendance who are not members. Assuming that pattern holds true for many churches that would mean a relatively large number of that 5 million in average attendance are not a part of the 14.5 million membership. Let’s say 20% of the average attendance reported (rough guess) are non-members. Then that would mean the average membership in attendance are about 4 million out of the 5 million reported. That would indicate that only 28% of our 14.5 million members attend church on a regular basis. That’s… Read more »
William, Our clerk does a great job compiling our data and sending the ACP every year. What a job. I don’t know about what is going on around the country but I suspect that there is a widening gulf between “membership” and “attendee” fewer people being disposed towards the former and embracing the latter. Part of this trend I think is that we live in a much more mobile society than even 20 years ago. People move to where the opportunities are and are less inclined to “ move by letter” as many by laws stipulate partly because they have… Read more »
William,
I goofed, I meant to say it was “easy to feel Ronnie Floyd’s pain”
woody