For a people as tied to numbers as the Southern Baptist Convention, another statistical report such as the one we hear is coming in the next week here in Phoenix is inevitably going to lead to the rending of garments and great weeping and wailing, accompanied by gnashing of teeth on an enamel destroying level.
And the lack of numbers should give us pause, at least. I have heard too many men point to their church’s dwindling attendance as separating the sheep and the goats or somehow “purifying” the church. I’ve seen guys drive anyone who disagrees with them out of the church with smug satisfaction.
I will be honest. My church is not been prospering numerically recently. I’ve identified several reasons for that, but the point here is that it bothers me. I am praying about it. Working on it. Self-examination. Structure and program evaluation. I am not satisfied with numbers that do not reflect growth.
By the same token, it is not biblically warranted to always assume that the presence of bad numbers is de facto evidence of problems any more than the rapid growth is a de facto evidence of God’s blessing.
I would make the following assertions.
- Churches (and denominations) should hope and plan to see numerical growth indicating the work of God as they obey the Great Commission and God saves the lost and the lost grow in obedience.
- Churches (and denominations) should be concerned by a lack of growth or a decline and ought to seriously consider why they are not growing if they are not.
- The presence of numerical growth in a church (or denomination) should never be see as as proof of God’s blessing. The flesh can imitate the Spirit. Numerical growth can occur without divine blessing or approval.
- The absence of numerical growth (even the presence of decline) in a church (or denomination) should not be seen as proof of sin or spiritual infideltty. It should be a cause of concern, but not a proof of unfaithfulness.
We err when we assume that numbers are a sign of God’s blessing or disfavor. They ought to be taken seriously, but perhaps not as seriously as we take them.
Jesus had, at one point, many thousands following him. John 6 tells us that when they fully understood his message, most of them turned away. MOST OF THEM. Was Jesus less perfect when his following was dwindling? Did the Annual Meeting of the Disciples Baptist Convention wring their hands over the falling numbers?
2 Timothy 4 promises a time when people, having departed from the true faith, would gather around themselves teachers who will tell them what their “itching ears” want to hear. They deny truth but gather in large numbers to hear preachers who tell them what they want to hear.
God told both Isaiah and Jeremiah that they would prophesy and no one would listen. Were they unfaithful? Of course not.
In the Bible, numbers are often a signal of God’s blessing, but they are not always a sign.
Are Southern Baptists’ numbers a concern? Of course. We would be fools to ignore them. But they are not necessarily an evidence of disobedience, of spiritual decay, or of sinfulness.
Permit me some observations.
1. Our numerical problems are older than me.
As Ed Stetzer has demonstrated, our numerical decline is nothing new. It actually started about 60 or 70 years ago. We were experiencing huge growth. The rate of growth has been steadily dropping and eventually we plateaued (around the year 2000) and then entered decline in the last few years.
2. The blame game is just plain foolish.
Everyone wants to pin the tail on the donkey of whatever they don’t like about modern SBC life..
- It’s the CR.- that’s a favorite of the moderates, liberals, SBC haters, and those who felt hurt somehow in the CR. The statistical decline preceded the CR (sorry, the “Bold Mission Thrust was winnning the world” is a nice meme – not true) and the trends of liberal denominations shows that we are likely better off than if the leftward drift in our seminaries had coniinued.
- It’s them Cals – the rise of the modern Calvinist movement happened about the same time we hit the plateau. Blame those evangelism-hating Geneva boys with their beards and Piper books. Again, the trend precedes this.
- It’s all this new-dangled stuff- I have heard this more than once from someone old enough to remember those days of rapid growth, “If we would do today what we did then we would see today what we saw then.” It’s the drums, guitars, casual dress – all that contemporary nonsense. In one sense, this is the most cogent of the arguments, because it touches at the heart of the issue. But it is as wrong-headed and destructive as it can be.
We find a bogey-man, whoever we don’t like, and find a way to blame the problems on “them.”
3. We are cultural orphans.
The SBC grew rapidly for godly reasons. It preached the saving grace of Christ and honored the word of God. It grew in spite of problems with racism. It grew because it was part of and identified with its culture. The SBC of the middle part of the 20th was interwoven with the culture of the Deep South.
Then came the 60s, the 70s, the ecclesiological revolution at the turn of the millennium – suddenly the homogenous Southern culture was dying and the SBC was a cultural orphan. Many of our troubles are not over theology, but over trying to find a cultural home.
Who are we?
4. We are in an increasingly secular, hostile culture.
We no longer live in a world sympathetic to our values and morals. This world thinks we are dangerous. Did you see Bernie Sanders’ recent comments?
- We hold exclusively to Christ in a world that is exclusively inclusive.
- We call things sin in a world which does not tolerate our brand of righteousness.
- We old the authority of the word in a world that believes in “following your heart.”
Everything we are is now culturally and practically at odds with the world we live in. And it is no longer required for a person to be a church goer to be a respectable member of society.
5. This world is not going to get easier.
Sorry, eschatology alert. You amils can sit this one out. But the teachings of scripture about the end times promise an increasingly wicked, spiritually unresponsive world. Should we be surprised that what the Bible promised is actually happening?
6. The world will tell us that to survive, we must become more like them. RESIST.
The drumbeat is heard over and over. If we are going to survive, we must get on the right side of history. We must give up our intolerance, our homophobia, our outdated dogma, and join the modern way. It is interesting that those churches that have done this are dying rapidly, isn’t it?
I am currently preaching through 2 Timothy, where Paul admonishes his protege to become more faithful, more tied to truth, more obedient as the days get worse. We must stand against the tide.
But that may cost us some folks sometimes. There are people who won’t come back if you don’t scratch their itching ears.
7. If you aren’t evangelizing, don’t make other excuses.
DUH.
There are churches which are simply not telling people about Jesus. If you aren’t, don’t look for other excuses. Fix that first, then look for other reasons.
There is an undeniable conundrum here, one we will deal with as the days march on. We are in difficult times and ministry is not going to be easy. There are churches that grow rapidly, but many of them grow by draining smaller churches. Some grow through methods and practices we don’t approve of. And some grow by serving God and doing it right. Growth is neither a badge of God’s blessing or evidence of some kind of “downgrade.”
This coming week we will hear much about the numbers crunch in the SBC. It is a legitimate cause for concern. But we must look at this biblically as well. There may be some reasons for our numbers being down that do not warrant dismay. There may be a few that point toward fidelity in a world of compromise.
Numbers are a tricky thing.
My professor at Southwestern Seminary, Dr. Ebbie Smith, in his book, Balanced Church Growth, wrote that the church should grow bigger, better, and broader. By bigger he meant that usually a healthy church will grow. There are exceptions to this, of course, but most church could grow and should grow. By better he meant that congregations should grow in grace–show more spiritual maturity. By broader he meant that churches should become more ethnically diverse. Given the changing demographics in the USA, this is especially important. Our churches should reflect their communities.
Maybe there are two “sides” to the problem. Given that many local churches are declining — to what extent is the problem internal to the church or external to the church?
To me the idea of the SBC being “Cultural Orphans” seems to fit.
To take up the idea of Mark Terry, is it possible we can “adjust” the church experience to accommodate changing demographics? Certainly churches need to be more ethnically diverse. But there are trends in society that churches can’t accommodate. Some of these are LGBT issues.
Another issue in the SBC is embracing politics as a proxy for Christianity. An outworking of this is confusing support for a certain political party, platform or candidate with the proclamation of the Gospel.
The nation is more deeply fractured economically and culturally now than was the case a couple of generations ago. So some default cultural framework is going to only resonate with a decreasing subset of people in any given geographic region — say within 75 miles of the core of a large city. I know correlation does not imply causation. However I think it is legitimate to ask the question: “Is the shrinking of the middle class, who mostly share a common cultural template, at work in those areas where churches are declining in membership?”
Or stated another way: ” Why has most of the explosive growth in the SBC in the last 30 years happened is the suburbs?” I think it is because out there we see a relatively stable situation demographically. Out there we see a relatively affluent population that is fairly homogenous. Out there family formation is relatively high and crime is relatively low. Take a look at he 100 largest churches in the SBC. Where are they physically located? Fifty years ago they may have been center city churches or in neighborhoods a few miles from downtown. Now it is much more likely they are “out there” 10 to 50 miles away from the urban core in enclaves where only “rich people” live. They are out there where property values are holding steady or rising. I’d say the prototype for these trends is to look at Atlanta working north from the city center up Peachtree and then branching out due north as well as branching out NE and NW.
Bottom line: Don’t ignore demographics when looking for a reason that the SBC is declining. There are not enough growing megachurches to backfill for the decline of other churches which are in census tracts which have zero or negative population growth and/or no growth or a decline in average income per family unit in constant — inflation adjusted — dollars.
Roger OKC
Good article thanks for the candor and consideration of the many factors that are affecting our churches. The use of numbers to set/drive policy or programs maybe the central dilemma that is hounding the SBC. As is demonstrated when pastors become leaders and managers or the Body of Christ is reduced to community change agents.
I see more of cultural memory loss of what it means to be a Southern Baptist. Few even know who Lottie Moon or Annie Armstrong are, much less why we set aside special offerings in their memory. The roots of this situation run deep may we seek His wisdom to rise and go on behalf of the Gospel.
This got way longer than I intended……..I’m sorry.
Odd, I see in Scripture that The Church will endure; not that the American Church, the Baptist Church or the Southern Baptist Convention will endure. For the past 100 years or more we’ve been living in a Post-Christian Western culture, granted here in America it was less noticeable, but the Scopes trial was in 1926, ninety years ago. We are entering a period, I believe that is not only Post-Christian but a time that will become increasingly Anti-Christian. If we don’t grow deep we will not last long enough to grow any bigger. It’s time to go deep, to disciple deeply, to believe deeply – but what do we believe, what do the people in our pews really believe?
I’m not a pastor, I never went to a Bible college or a Seminary, but I am a history professor holding a PhD. I was raised Irish Catholic, strayed far from God and my faith in Him, only after He hit me over the head with a 2×4 (figuratively, though I do have a nice scar on my head that looks like a 2×4 did it 😉 ten years years ago this coming October did I start pursuing God again. I’m not a cradle SBC person, I didn’t choose the SBC out of any deep conviction. In fact my wife and I started attending an SBC near-megachurch (6,000 members at the time) when God drew us back because it was close to where we were living and we had a connection to a couple through a non-profit we were involved with. We outgrew that SBC Church after only two years there, we wanted to much deeper than 95% of the congregation, but we weren’t trusted to disciple others because we were so “new”, and I was asking questions that the Senior Pastor and the Lead Pastor were unable or unwilling to engage with, thank God for a satellite campus pastor who took us under-wing and discipled us (huge shout-out to SB). We would have left that church but we already knew that we were moving 170 miles away. We landed in a restorationist Christian Church (Cane Ridge Revival) when we moved. But we encountered the same lack of depth, it was the “right thing to do” to go to church, the church was growing like crazy but the wives in the Pastor’s sunday school class (you know the class, the class all the ‘cool kids’ were in) were more enthralled by Fifty Shades of Grey than they were by the Bible.
My wife and I spent a year visiting church after church in our area and encountered something really scary, people go to church because where we live it is the “right thing to do.” Most can not articulate what they really believe, they’re not worried about theology (the study of God) because “they have Jesus in their heart, cause they walked an aisle thirty years ago at youth camp”, they don’t need head knowledge or book knowledge because you can never really know God. But how many husbands in here or wives in here don’t study their spouse, seeking to know more about them, all the while knowing they will never really know them because after all Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus? How much more should we then seek to know more and more about God, to wrestle with His character and His attributes, all the while knowing that we can never really know Him because after all Man is from Earth and God is from Heaven, how much more that divide must be? Here’s a random thought, does our “yes Jesus loves me, the Bible tells me so” approach lead to us really reverencing God? God is Pure, Perfect, and Holy; do many Baptists in the pews, heck do many Evangelicals of any denomination, shoot do many Christians of any stripe really know that, understand what it means?
We eventually landed in a rural SBC satellite campus of a metroplex SBC mega-church, that if named, every one in here would know. We didn’t land there because it was “our church”, or a “perfect church.” We landed there because of the campus pastor, a friend who had met him told me about him. He was passionate about God, passionate about discipleship, and willing to engage with every question he was asked. He didn’t always tell us what we wanted to hear, but he always gave us an answer that he could defend, or he got back to us with an answer he could defend, or he’d make us give him an answer and make us defend it. He discipled us, he invested time in us, and in me in particular; I’m a lot more theologically needy that my wife. And it wasn’t just us, Sunday lunch, Sunday evening, Monday evening through Thursday evening either he or he and his wife had every meal with someone from the church, a few of us had standing appointments but he was open to everyone in the church and those in our community, we all knew Fridays and Saturdays were their fenced off family time (they have three kids) and we knew they needed it. He knew where the folks in the church stood in their beliefs, from the folks who were still on milk to those of us cracking the bones to suck the marrow. In eighteen months; my faith in God, my trust in the promises of Jesus, and the felt presence of the Holy Spirit in my life is overwhelming, yet the journey is still just beginning. That campus pastor has a new job but the new guy is just as intense, we’re sticking, not because we’re in an SBC church, there’s plenty of those, but because we are now really feeling as if we are part of The Church. I don’t know if we’d feel the same way at our main campus or one of the other metroplex campuses but we are part of a community that is deeply engaged in discipleship, that is what The Church is about; making more of Christ’s disciples.
The weird thing, we’ve gone from a campus of 45 to a campus of about 230 in a little over two years, not because we emphasize evangelism but because we emphasize discipleship and disciples evangelize. We’re still not the deeply rooted community of believers willing to lay down our lives for our faith that I want us to be, that God wants us to be, but there is a critical mass of us that want to get there, to get so deeply rooted in God that we’re not content to do Sunday morning service and small group, but that we seek to do life together every day, all day, that we stand by each other through everything in life.
Ask yourself; or better yet, take lots of members of your churches out to breakfast or lunch, and really dig deep into what they really believe; the average member of Southern Baptist Churches is an inch deep and a mile wide in their beliefs. I’m willing to bet most of them can more clearly articulate the platform from a Values Voters Summit or the lineup of their favorite sports team than they can the Nicene Creed. Oh I know we’re not a creedalist church, but we had better become a Creedal Church. Maybe it is empty ritual or maybe it acts as a constant reminder of at least what we say we believe, but it is at the core of what we as Christians profess to believe.
What do Baptists believe, I mean really believe? Sure there’s the Baptist Faith and Message 2000, all nine pages of it, 4030 words with all the scriptural proofs. How many of your church members have read, assented to, and signed The BFM2000? How many have read it? How many of them even know it exists? Is there anything in the Nicene Creed that contradicts anything in the BFM2000? If there is, I would argue that then BFM is wrong, not the Nicene Creed. The Nicene Creed is 228 words including the title, 577 words with the scriptural proofs.
I am not suggesting that we dispense with the BFM2000, it is the laying out of our distinctives, of what makes us Southern Baptists; but the Nicene Creed is what unites us with that great cloud of witnesses, with the entire Church, past, present, and future. The Nicene Creed is what marks the boundary lines of orthodox belief. It is brief enough that we can actually present it to a prospective member and ask them — “This is what we believe, do you?” We could have folks memorize it as part of our baptism preparation. Effective personal evangelism only arises when our church members know what they believe, why they believe it, and why 12 of 13 Apostles died rather than burn a pinch of incense and the 13th went into banishment on a barren island.
We are facing trying times, but I am convinced that a church that really believes what it says it believes and acts like it really believes it will prosper in a time of spiritual famine. We have the only true food and living water but we have to really believe that in our minds and our hearts and be willing to spend our bodies for our beliefs before we can really share that true food and living water effectively with others. Full churches of people who don’t know what they believe or why they believe it, full churches of people who will melt away at the slightest heat from their peers, their employers, or the state are not worth having. This is not the time to separate sheep from goats, God does that – but I want the SBC to be made up of true believers, people who are passionate about God, passionate about knowing God, and passionate about sharing the truth of God with others, I want us to aim for recruiting more sheep and turning the goats in our pews into sheep. I don’t want the SBC to be a growing church convention, I want the SBC to be The Church. If we are, come Post-Christianity or Anti-Christianity we will be the Bride of Christ eagerly awaiting His Return and we will be a thriving body of believers.
“Numbers are a tricky thing” just gave me a flashback to last year…
“It’s tricky!”
If I were an artist, I would draw a picture of a ship representing the SBC. Then I would draw a picture of Russell Moore of the ERLC drilling holes in the ship. While this is happening I would draw a large group of fellow travelers on the ship asking him, as well as the captain/staff and other paid crew members, what he was doing and why he was doing it.
Then I would draw a smaller group of fellow travelers on the ship defending Moore and arguing with the other group. In fact, they would be chastising the larger group and shouting at them to understand that holes are good for the ship. The larger group would be disparaged for being “racist” and obviously seen as uneducated buffoons that just need to get off the ship.
Meanwhile, the ship would continue to sink.
Wow. Just. Wow.
Ridiculous in the extreme.
That is all.
I second that Tarhell, if I might.
Yes, certainly you may second….
P.S. Two e’s and one l….
Although some might agree with the depiction as you wrote it. 😉
Lol.
Dan,
There is so much wrong with your illustration, ’till I don’t know where to begin, so I won’t.
This is an important SBC meeting for several reasons. If the resolution against the “alt right” is given any prominence and the moral character of public officials gets promoted than it will be a major historical point. If the majority of SBC lay members knew the non transparency/lack of transparency and the direction that leaders such as Dr. Moore are trying to take the SBC there would be major blowback. So tie it all together and what direction is best for the SBC. Stay with the one who brought you to the dance and who got the SBC into the position of success it has held? Most lay people trust their leadership including SBC leadership, they to worship in a local Bible believing church that supports traditional values, they believe in faith alone and not works , they feel blessed to be born in America, they know the difference between loving God above all and their allegiance to the USA, their faith guides their politics as individuals not as a group and they historically have represented the SBC well in their communities. Dan McGhee is pretty good and Dr. Moore is smart enough to quit drilling the holes for now as sit is causing a problem.
Well said Dan.
Well said indeed.
Bring back traditional Sunday School.
Dan,
When you say “Bring back traditional Sunday School” do you intend to indicate the training of children prior to the mandated public school policies where churches taught children how to read, write, etc.? Or do you mean the sit around and study the Bible Sunday School? Or something in between. Tradition will often depend on one’s perspective and starting point. I suspect that there are many churches who preserve what you would consider the traditional Sunday School model.
Grace and peace,
Chad Dougless
Here’s the money statement: “If you aren’t evangelizing, don’t make other excuses.”
This is the heart of the issue. Evangelism doesn’t guarantee us increased numbers, but not evangelizing pretty much guarantees that we won’t have increased numbers (save for some miraculous work of God in the hearts of people like we sometimes hear about in the Middle East).
By the way, if the secular culture doesn’t hate us for evangelizing, we might not be doing it right. We don’t evangelize to be loved. We evangelize because we were evangelized, we love people enough to try to show them the way by evangelizing them, and because we were commanded to evangelize.