SBC membership 16.2 million (all-time high)

Since reading your post, I have been thinking about the seemingly incongruous decline in baptisms and growth in membership. Does this mean that there are fewer new converts in SBC churches than previously? I don't know. Not necessarily. That could be part of it. If membership is growing, while baptisms are declining, it does at least reflect that there is a surge in additions of people that do not need to be or are not being baptized. To show overall growth these persons would have to come from outside the SBC. This must mean that there is an increase in those coming to the SBC from other Baptist groups and/or an increase in receiving members from other denominations without requiring them to be (re)baptized. I think this last part would be on the increase in Southern Baptist churches and could be much of the reason for showing membership increase even amidst baptismal decline. This is just conjecture. Anybody have any facts on this?

 

The SBC CHURCH I AM A MEMBER of has over 1100embers but only about 300 are there on Sunday morning? Is this typical?

 

Yep - 30-40% - Sounds Normal

And this is a problem in the SBC. We don't practice church discipline and we Baptize many folks who have had questionable Salvation Experiences.

 

some churches rebaptize everyone who was not SBC... some just from non-Baptist backgrounds, and others just from churches who have different beliefs on baptism.... ie catholics etc.

 

there also could be discrepencies in tranferring of church letters. Some churches either never know or fail to drop/transfer members from their roles so they keep adding people which would increase membership records.

 

These percentages are not unusual for any denomination. The SBC gets picked on b/c it actually publishes it numbers. Some of the IFB churches with which I have been associated have people "join" by baptism or transfer almost every Sunday never to be seen again. Common problem among most denominations.

There seems to be a trend among the newer, more contemporary churches to alleviate this problem by adding church covenant membership requirements. It is a great and productive idea.

 

The real story here is that the ratio of members to baptisms remained the same - 41:1.

Now perhaps this means that there are 40 prayer warriors and 1 person involved in evangelism...

BTW, according to the studies done by Dr. Thom Rainer at Southern Seminary, the arbitrary mark set for churches that are considered effective in evangelism is 20:1. At the time of his study, less than 800 of the 40,000+ SBC churches qualified.

 

That is a sad but true fact. Our church members fail to realize that the pastor/staffmember's job is to prepare the church member for ministry and evangelism. It is every Christian's job to be about evangelizing.