SBC Statistical Follow Up

Following up on yesterday's post (here) concerning the statistical membership decline in the Southern Baptist Convention,  Lifeway Research has just released its "Annual Church Profile" for the SBC for 2012.  As reflected in the title of a Baptist Press article entitled, "Churches increased in SBC in 2012; members, baptisms fell," the SBC statistics for membership, average attendance, baptisms and total giving all declined again for the sixth straight year.  Membership decline was only 0.7%, but worship attendance dropped by 3.1% and baptism by a still steeper 5.5% to the lowest level since 1948.  Only in the number of new churches, which rose by a modest 0.6%, did the SBC see positive growth.

Frank Page, SBC Executive Committee president, is reported in the article as saying, "When I first heard the report of our ACP, I said, 'God forgive us and God help us.' We are thankful for every person won to Christ and every person enrolled in Bible study and discipleship and involved in missions. We are thankful for the millions who are a part of worship in our Southern Baptist churches. However, my heart breaks when we realize the overall decline in our numbers."

If the Presbyterian Church (USA) experience is any measure,  continued decline gives birth to an unhappy brood of offspring—denial, fault-finding, anger, resignation, and then quiet acceptance of what seems to be the inescapable reality of decline.  Massive institutional inertia makes it very difficult for denominations to do anything truly effective to address decline.  But eventually some people in some places begin to think outside the box.

And that is when things get interesting—and hopeful.

When You Know Something Is Wrong

You know that there is something wrong when a leading voice in your denomination, one involved in church-based research, writes a blog post entitled, "A Humble Plea for Church Revitalization."  Dr. Thom S. Rainer, President of LifeWay Christian Resources of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), recently posted a posting with that very title. He was previously the dean of the Billy Graham School of Missions, Evangelism and Church Growth at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville and is also the founder of LifeWay Research, the research arm of the SBC.

In his posting, Dr. Rainer writes, "I cannot get away from the conviction. At times it seems as though I am consumed by it. And I don’t even know fully where it will lead. My burden to see struggling churches become turnaround churches grows daily. There are an estimated 100,000 churches in North America that would be deemed terminal by most pundits. There are another 100,000 to 200,000 that are very sick and could soon be on the deathwatch." He also states, "According to our estimates, only 15 percent of the Millennial generation, born 1980 to 2000, are Christians. We are losing our nation for Christ. In the meantime, hundreds of churches close each month. Many more are on the precipice of death."

It is, of course, not unusual in our day and age for national church leaders, especially those involved in church-based research, to write in this vein.  It is remarkable, however, when that church leader is a Southern Baptist.  For decades, the SBC was the engine that drove Protestant church growth in America, but beginning in 2006-2007 SBC membership has persistently declined year by year (see here).  It is still not as precipitous as that of the Presbyterian Church (USA), but it is decline, it persists, and it is forcing SBC leaders to discover the importance of church renewal.

In his posting, Rainer proposes a personal five point plan for moving forward. Number five states, "As much as possible, I will encourage good leaders to move into church revitalization. I fully understand why many leaders are not moving in that direction. There are many obstacles to overcome. Sometimes it’s just easier to start from scratch." One assumes that this point reflects the attitudes of many leaders in the SBC, which almost surely remains focused on their historical commitment to evangelism and statistical growth.  One of the challenges the SBC is going to face is getting its church leaders to focus effectively on local decline, emphasis on "effectively".  PC(USA) is still struggling, after six decades of decline, to get its local folks to focus on decline in ways that make a difference.

What I also suspect is that eventually Dr. Rainer is going to find is that local church decline is not a statistical issue.  It is a spiritual one.  It is not about evangelism as a project for converting the world to Christ.  It is about the inability of local church folks to share their faith with others in a way that spreads the good news about Christ and about their own church.  It is not about training local church leaders so much as it is inspiring local church followers with a more vital personal faith.

The SBC a Year Later

Just one year ago, I reported (here) on the continuing membership decline of the Southern Baptist Convention.  In 2011, the SBC marked its fourth strait year of decline.  As I said then, the decline was modest compared to that of several mainline denominations, but it was real and continuing.  Now, a year later, SBC decline continues and is increasing.  Ed Stetzer of LIfeWay Research reports on his blog (here) that not only is this accelerating trend clear, but it also replicates the pattern of decline seen in mainline churches such as the United Methodist Church.  He writes that he has been warning the SBC year after year that the decline has to be addressed, but his warnings have largely fallen on deaf ears.  In the past, there has been some denial over the weight of the data, but Stetzer claims that such denial has to come to an end.  The facts are clear.

The decline in SBC membership becomes more and more significant the longer it continues.  It suggests that the national decline in organized religion is spreading to the South, the most religious region of the nation.  It also suggests that institutional religious decline is a growing reality across the nation.  From the perspective of mainline churches, it points to a third important reality.  Church decline is not a function of theological position, liberal or conservative, and specifically it is not related to a declared commitment to evangelism.  In the case of the Presbyterian Church (USA), the point is that those churches that are leaving the denomination because of its supposed lack of commitment to evangelism and an evangelical theology are not themselves going anywhere significant.  Withdrawal into evangelical ghetto denominations offers no assurance whatsoever that they will discover new growth.  Indeed, the likelihood is the opposite.

The SBC apparently is also following in the footsteps of the mainline church in another way.  The mainline has been declining for fifty years, that's two generations.  Everyone knows it is declining.  A vast literature of decline has emerged.  A ton of research has gone into studying the phenomenon.  There are a large variety of programs and approaches designed to reverse the decline.  And yet it continues.  While not a few mainline churches are growing, they are the minority.  Most are not.  Something much larger is going on, and I don't think we really understand it for all of our books, studies, journals, seminars, and programs.  We certainly have not learned how to contend with it.  If any denomination in the United States today has the size, resources, ideology, and commitment to transcend decline, it is the SBC.  And the SBC is headed in the same direction as the rest of us.  Something is going on.

Complacent Evangelicals

While many so-called mainline churches remain healthy and engaged in vital ministries, the center of Christian gravity in the U.S. has definitely shifted toward the evangelical churches.  They are where the growth and the enthusiasm have been for several decades.  But, as we've noted before, there seems to be a fundamental shift taking place among American evangelicals.  The optimism and enthusiasm appears to be dwindling.  Early in July, we noted that a recent survey of international evangelical leaders showed a serious contrast between the almost heady optimism of third-world evangelicals and the much less rosy hope of those from the U.S. (here)  We've also seen that the Southern Baptists are beginning to show the statistics of decline that have plagued ecumenical denominations for many decades now (here).

Still further evidence of this shift among American evangelicals comes from research done by the Barna Research Group as reported in a posting on the Christian Post website entitled, "Study: Born-Again Christians Have Become Complacent." According to Barna, self-identified evangelicals are attending worship less often, and more of them have stopped attending worship entirely.  They spend less time reading the Bible.  They take less part in church activities.  The article quotes George Barna as saying, "In the past decade, even the proportion of born-again adults who say their faith is vitally important to them has dipped substantially."  Although the article suggests some causes, the reasons for this decline are not immediately clear.

Organized religion seems to be in general decline throughout the Western world including here in the U.S.  The growing signs of evangelical decline only signals how difficult the current cultural climate is for all of us.  At the same time, we should not overstate the decline.  There is still an immense amount of life in American churches and denominations, which are not going away any time soon.  It's just that the indicators are trending downward and the downhill slope seems to be  getting steeper.  It seems unlikely that America's churches will decline as severely as those in some parts of Europe.  It may even be that eventually we will go through another round of American revivalism, one of the hallmarks of Christianity in our nation.  Still, for the time being the downhill slope is getting steeper.

Making It In Today's Religious Market

UUA Logo

In June, the Religion News Service posted a news item about the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) entitled, "Can a creedless religion make it another 50 years?"  The UUA recently celebrated the 50th anniversary of its 1961 merger of Unitarians and Universalists into a single denomination dedicated to pluralism, social justice, and doctrinal openness.  Now, according to the article, some UUA leaders are beginning to wonder if they have gone too far in rejecting any talk about God and beliefs.  While promoting progressive causes, UUA congregations evidently habitually avoid discussing doctrines in order to avoid imposing one set of beliefs or another on their congregants, who are very much a mixed bag of people with many different backgrounds and ideas of their own.

Like many other denominations, the UUA is showing signs of statistical decline, which raises questions for the future.  The decline seems modest by Presbyterian Church (USA) standards.  According to the article, the UUA's 2011 statistics record a loss of membership of less than 1% and that the UUA has only shown such losses for the last three years.   The PC(USA) runs 2-4% losses annually and has been declining statistically for decades.  Still, the question of renewal is being discussed, esp. in terms of finding ways to state what the UUA does believe.  There is a feeling that it has been so open as to have lost a sense of commitment necessary to growing into the future.  At the same time, UUA leaders see an opportunity in the millions of Americans dropping away from organized religion, feeling that the UUA could and should be a home for them.

Among the questions facing the UUA according to one of its leading voices are, "What do we believe? Whom do we serve? To whom or what are we responsible? Those are the questions with which every viable religious movement must wrestle,"

They are good questions, but one wonders whether wrestling with them or even finding acceptable answers to them will make much of a difference in the UUA's statistical decline, assuming that decline continues.  Mainline denominations with many more members and resources have devoted time and talent to restating their creeds, restructuring their structures, and redefining their mission pretty much to no avail.  As noted in an earlier RPK posting (here), the Southern Baptist Convention has also begun to experience statistical decline and has similarly begun to seek ways to address it.  On can hardly accuse the SBC of a lack of clarity in its doctrines or its sense of mission.  Yet, decline has set it.

Something deeper is going on, a shift in American spirituality.  The literature trying to define and deal with this shift is huge.  But the decline continues.

American Evangelicalism's New Condition

The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life has very recently issued a report entitled, "Global Survey of Evangelical Protestant Leaders," which reports its findings from a questionnaire distributed among participants at the Third Lausanne Congress of World Evangelization held in Cape Town, South Africa, in October 2010.  Some 2,196 respondents from 166 countries and territories filled out the questionnaire.  The results show broad unity among evangelical leaders in some areas and interesting differences in others.  On the whole, they provide a fascinating snapshot of the global evangelical movement.

One of the most significant findings was the difference between "Global South" and "Global North" respondents' answer to a question concerning the "current state of evangelical Christianity in their country."  Those from the South (Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, & East Asia) collectively felt that the state of evangelicalism is good (25%) to moderately good (57%).  In contrast, of the Northern leaders (from Europe, North America, Japan, Australia, & New Zealand), 13% ranked the state of evangelicalism as good and 60% as moderately good.  When asked to evaluate the "progress of evangelicalism over the past five years," 50% of Southern leaders felt that the state of evangelicalism had improved in their country over the last five years.  Only 27% of Northern leaders felt it was better in their countries.  Finally, when they were asked about the "future outlook for evangelical Christianity" in their nations, 71% of the Southern respondents were optimistic about the future while only 44% of the Northerners felt optimistic.  By way of contrast, just 17% of American respondents felt that the state of evangelicalism has improved in the U. S., and only 31% were optimistic about the future.

Evangelicalism has progressed: 50% of Southerners, 27% of Northerners, and 17% of Americans agreed.
Evangelicalism's future is good: 71% of Southerners, 44% of Northerners, and 31% of Americans were optimistic.

The Southern optimism and Northern pessimism revealed in these numbers point to possibly the most important development in the global church over the last two or three generations, namely the international church's demographic shift from Europe and North America to the Southern world.  Southern Christianity is growing at a rapid pace while it is dwindling in much of the North.    There are, for example, more Anglicans in Nigeria than in the United Kingdom (source).  Even so, the lack of optimism among U.S. evangelical leaders at the Lausanne Conference is notable.  It may reflect the sense that the evangelical movement's almost astounding growth has finally peaked and may even be receding.  Research indicates that evangelical young people drop away from the church once they leave home at about the same rate as mainline kids.  We saw here in a previous post that the Southern Baptists have begun, modestly, to share in the same statistical decline experienced by mainline denominations.  Recent studies all indicate that the number of "unchurched" is growing, especially among younger people.


Now, objectively speaking, Christianity in general and evangelicalism in particular continue to have a huge presence in the United States and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.  But, something feels different.  The whole church is loosing its privileged place in American life.  Not only has it failed to prevent Sunday morning soccer, but even many of its most faithful members, when faced with the choice, choose soccer over worship.  Something is changing—even for evangelicals.