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SBC Baptisms Decline
Southern Baptist Convention President Bobby Welch's plan to "rev up a rundown romance with reaching people" may be in need of a jumpstart, with statistics released Wednesday showing a decline in baptisms for the fifth time in the last six years.

According to LifeWay Christian Resources, Southern Baptist churches reported 371,850 baptisms in 2005. That is 16,097 fewer than in 2004 and the lowest figure since 1993....

...For years Southern Baptist leaders though the denomination was immune from numerical decline. That is in part because of a popular but controversial 1972 book by Dean Kelley called Why Conservative Churches are Growing that linked decline in mainline denominations to secularization and liberal clergy.

Many conservatives assumed that the "conservative resurgence" of the 1980s and early 1990s would stop Southern Baptists from following the same path.

Freddie Gage, a Texas evangelist, told the audience at the 2002 SBC annual meeting in St. Louis that he remembered being in an all-night prayer meeting at the launch of the conservative movement in 1979 in Houston. "I felt we were going to experience a revival, a revival of souls," Gage said. "It has not happened."

Before coming to LifeWay, Rainer wrote while teaching at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary that the SBC's baptism statistics had not improved since 1979 and were essentially unchanged since the 1950s.

"An honest evaluation of the data leads us to but one conclusion," Rainer wrote in the Spring 2005 issue of The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology. "The conservative resurgence has not resulted in a more evangelistic denomination."

The SBC's high-water mark for baptisms was in 1972, when they numbered 445,725. And that was with a much smaller church base. In 1950 Southern Baptists recorded one baptism for every 19 church members. Today the ratio of baptisms to total membership is 1:44.

More recently Rainer wondered in an article in Baptist Press is the church is America "is headed down the path of many European congregations: decline and death."...

...The 2005 SBC statistics show miniscule growth in total church membership of 0.02 percent, to 16,270,315. The number of churches grew by 234 (0.5 percent) to 43,699.

Another traditional strong indicator of church health, Sunday school enrollment, declined by 137,660, to a total of 8,068,780....