SBC Numerology: Some top ten financial lists for SBC state conventions

How about a part two with CP giving per state, per church and per capita? Maybe a Lottie breakdown too.

My state Oklahoma just barely broke through the noise. However, it should be noted that the largest ever CP giving for a fiscal year by an individual church came from Oklahoma. So that must count for something!

On a more serious note, with the exception of only about four to eight [depending upon your methodology of dealing with income distribution by census tracts] of the 77 Oklahoma counties 90% of everyone else here in this state is flat broke.

I say this a little flippantly but it is true that for states with many rural counties the growing divide between the rich and the poor and the resulting gutting of the middle class has only become more stark in recent decades. This does not bode well for the SBC financially.

Referring back to a previous thread, no wonder entities make customized pitches to fat-cat potential donors. Everyone else is broke!

Here are a few demographic nuggets which suggest that there is not much wealth creation across a broad swath of the population: (a) growing prison population that vastly outstrips population grown, (b) growing divorce rate — while divorce may NOT be a good proxy for income — family formation it is a pretty good predictor of national wealth, and (c) negative population growth in many rural counties across the “south” (i.e. Virginia around to New Mexico) caused by: [1] those with specialized skills and/or higher education moving to cities leaving only poor people, and [2] middle class jobs such as factory jobs moving to the Asia, Mexico, etc. How can churches realistically expect to see a sea change in giving when Walmart is the biggest employer in the United States?

Maybe I’m asleep over here but it seems to me that the SBC at large is only beginning to come to grips with a new demographic reality — to wit: growing income disparity and rapidly growing Black and Latino populations in the Bible Belt. Stated another way our “core constituency” is SLOWLY becoming extinct. Maybe the term “slowly” should be “faster than we realize”

Roger Simpson Oklahoma City

Roger, I am not at the hand-ringing stage you seem to be over the demise of the South. I am not sure what data you are using to support the population decrease but the 2010 US Census revealed the South and West had the fasted growing populations in America. The Census Bureau said,

“From 2000 to 2010, regional growth was much faster for the
South and West (14.3 and 13.8 percent, respectively) than for
the Midwest (3.9 percent) and Northeast (3.2 percent).
https://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-01.pdf

January 31, 2013, Forbes ran an article on how the South will rise again. In the article they gave several reasons why the South would thrive in the future. One huge reason was domestic migrants. SBC churches in the Bible Belt will be held accountable if we do not attempt to reach these souls as six of the top eight states in domestic migrants are found in the heart of the South. One of the telling comments from the Forbes article was the South is getting younger compared to the rest of the nation,

“Perhaps more importantly, these states are nurturing families, in contrast to the Great Lakes states, the Northeast and California. Texas, for example, has increased its under 10 population by over 17% over the past decade; all the former confederate states, outside of Katrina-ravaged Mississippi and Louisiana, gained between 5% and 10%. On the flip side, under 10 populations declined in Illinois, Michigan, New York and California. Houston, Austin, Dallas, Charlotte, Atlanta and Raleigh also saw their child populations rise by at least twice the 10% rate of the rest country over the past decade while New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston and Chicago areas experienced declines.”

The South has been stricken with poverty since Reconstruction. (I wish Alan Cross or some expert would write a cause and affect the Reconstruction had on the attitude of Southerners through the decades.) I suspect things will remain the same in one aspect of the SBC, the southern state conventions will provide the funds for the SBC to minister around the world.