Baptisms may be in freefall, the Cooperative Program may be half of what it used to be, membership may be declining, and we might be in the grips of nasty controversies and extremely bad behavior by prominent SBCers…but Southern Baptists can always brag. Here are a few bragging points for some of the state conventions:
Most Baptisms: Florida. The 2,709 SBC churches in Florida baptized 26,162 folks last year and that is tops among the state conventions. The Baptist General Convention of Texas had the second most, 23,181 but the venerable BGCT has over 1,600 more churches than the Florida convention. Some academic can explain why.
Largest state convention (numbers of churches): Baptist General Convention of Texas. The older of the two state conventions in the Lone Star State reported 4,354 churches. North Carolina reported 4,059 to be the only other state over 4,000 in this datum. Bit of a caveat here: some states are very soft on counting churches; that is, maybe you can find all of them, maybe not.
Largest state convention (membership): BGCT, 2.05 million. Four states report over a million members: BGCT, Georgia, Southern Baptists of Texas Convention, and North Carolina. Note: in Texas some churches get counted twice, nice.
Largest state convention (attendance): BGCT, 564k in average weekly attendance. Georgia, Florida, and NC all follow with over 400k in attendance.
Sunday School/Small Group attendance: BGCT, 390k; Georgia and SBTC follow a good ways behind. Sunday School ain’t what it used to be even if you try and cajole churches to report all of their various groups that meet whenever during the week.
Money (total receipts): BGCT, $1.6 billion; Georgia and SBTC report over a billion also. Memo to church treasurers: I hear total giving to churches declined by a couple of billion last year. Chances are belt-tightening is in order across the board.
I don’t hear much bragging by the mammoth BGCT these days, perhaps because they have been hemorrhaging churches to their upstart convention in that state. Florida, with a lot fewer churches, is certainly baptizing at a higher rate. I assume they aren’t counting Haiti baptisms any more. My state, Georgia, is in the throes of a long term decline by most measures even though we are a top state in population growth.
Baptists live and die by numbers…just ask the closest SBC pastor that you know.
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It’s a slow time in SBC life, everyone who is anyone is on a sabbatical or takes a month or two off in the summer; hence, some boilerplate articles here at SBCV. I’m happy to contribute having a vast stockpile of boilerplate stuff to draw upon.
By way of a SBC convention report, my wife and I went to Saw BBQ close to downtown. It was very good. My plate alone would make three meals.
Anyone who didn’t make it to Saw is likely a liberal and should be formally shunned.
I missed Saw but did make it to Dreamland in Montgomery. Amazing.
I always had my doubts about you.
Dave, I guess I stand formally judged (opps I mean shunned). I wonder what the verdict is?
I have heard from many of my other pastor friends that Georgia in in trouble. What are the primary problems there?
The GBMB is in the doldrums. My wild conjecture from the hinterlands is that the state convention leadership and staff has difficulty engaging the average pastor, nothing unique about that. You can’t be far in trouble as long as you have tens of millions of dollars to spend.
New leadership…we will see how things go.
William, I served in the GBC two separate times and although things might have looked good by some factors, the decline has been years in the making. Did the GBC need new leadership? Without question, yes it did but “under new management” will not and cannot fix the spiritual problem that is evident. The declining numbers are but a symptom of a broken system that had lost its way and forget the purpose of why they exist.
General trends prevail here as elsewhere. We have a huge pot full of cash to spend in this state. We should spend it where results are demonstrated.
There is only one reasons to brag and one reason the cooperative program should exist. That reason is to win souls for the Lord Jesus Christ
Good stuff, William, but I don’t see anything about number of people coming to Christ. I’ve mentioned this many times to Rainer, and others, but they haven’t been interested in counting the number of people who made professions of faith. For example, in the last two years, my church (50-60 attendees) have led 25 people to Christ. We’ve baptized 11. There are a lot of reason why the other 14 weren’t baptized (parents won’t let them “they’ve been baptized when they were babies”,) or they wanted to be baptized in their home churches, etc. My point is that more people are coming to Christ through Southern Baptist churches than is being reported. Number of baptisms is the minimum number, not the actual number.
That number may well be offset by the number of folks like me, who were sprinkled as a child and belonged to other denominations which counted that as “baptism”.
And then there’s the fact that now church or denomination, or Christian, has any reason to “brag” about anything they’ve done..
Metrics are always tricky on this and I wouldn’t argue your point. We’ve just always counted baptisms, a concrete and measurable act, and these numbers are the best indicator of evangelism that we have.
Sure, many baptisms are repeats. Same view applies here: we compare year-to-year.
People led to Christ is, and I hate to say it, a soft number because it is more readily falsified or put as a “ministerial estimate”. We all know how some evNgelists count POFs.
Regardless, good work in your church. By any measure excellent.
I think even the baptism number is far larger than the number actually saved. We all know numerous people who have been baptized multiple times, or especially those baptized who later walked away from faith. In fact I think the vast majority of those I knew baptized in middle or high school fall into this category. Even given its limitations, baptisms may be the best metric we have for evangelism.
Several years ago Lifeway did a study and found that approximately 40% of adults who were baptized had been baptized previously. I’ve wondered what it would do to our statistics is we went back and subtracted their first baptism from the statistics from that previous time.
Can remember a time when my Baptist minister brothers would shake my hand and say, “Whattya runnin’ in Sunday school”?
Or “Whatya runnin’ in church”? Heard about a preacher that attended the associational pastor’s meetings. Each time someone would ask that “whatya runnin” questing and he would answer, “Well, we had to put folding chairs in the aisles.” Turned out that EVERY week they put out a couple of folding chairs for the ushers! They had plenty of empty pews.