More Than 80% of Southern Baptist Churches are Plateaued or Declining--Part One
Personal reflections as a lifelong Baptist.
More Than 80% of Southern Baptist Churches are Plateaued or Declining—Part One
Check out the September 22nd news release from Baptist Press that states this fact HERE.
ForthTelling Innovations Insights:
It all depends on how you want to spin the data. This news release spins the data to say—”6 in 10 Southern Baptist churches are either growing or have plateaued.” If you want to spin the data to suggest things are a lot better than they really are, then this is a great sentence. The problem is that only 18.5% of SBC churches are growing. The likelihood is that this growth comes from two types of churches. First, churches no more than 15 to 18 years old. Second, churches with more than 500 members. We celebrate that young churches and large churches are growing. That is a typical and predictable pattern.
Spin the data another way, and it says that 8 out of ten Southern Baptist churches are plateaued or declining. The actual figure for plateaued and declining churches is 81.5%. Spin the data this way if you want to use data consistent with that which was used for many years, and which shows a clearer picture of the challenge for the SBC if net growth in churches, membership, attendance, and evangelism efforts are desired end results.
Let’s try spinning the data another way. It can be said that less than 2 out of ten SBC churches are growing and almost 4 out of ten are declining. This would mean that twice as many churches are declining as are growing. This shows the challenge facing the SBC.
Then there is church planting. It has been common knowledge for decades that denominational movements who are growing have a minimum net increase in the number of affiliated churches of at least three percent year-after-year. What does that mean in SBC life? Stick with me as I go through these figures.
Let’s use the number of 47,000 affiliated SBC churches. (It is slightly higher than this, but not much.)
Three percent of this figure is 1410. But how does the SBC get to this net figure annually?
More than 400 churches die/disband, leave the denomination, or are disfellowshipped from the denomination each year. Now we need 1800 or more new churches each year to plateau in the number of affiliated churches.
Then a minimum of 20% of church plants do not make it. Making it means they are still a viable church seven years from the time they are planted. Let’s say that more is another 400 churches per year.
So, a rough guess of the number of new churches (including multi-site campuses) that need to be started each year is 2200 to have a net increase of 1400 or more affiliated churches (or campuses of existing churches).
Lifeway statistics say that 23% of the 47,000 churches were started since 2000. That is around 11,600 churches. The only problem is that the number that should have been started is 35% of 47,000 or 16,600—5000 more than were started. And that is just to stay plateaued with perhaps a little bit of growth.
Here are the points. A. Historically Southern Baptists are seen as a growing denomination. In the past this was true. They are still the largest denominational grouping of churches in the USA. B. Southern Baptists are seen as a great church planting movement. They have been and they are. C. The challenge is that despite successes in church planting even in the 21st century, Southern Baptists have not started enough churches to counteract the decline of the denomination.
One Solution: In the 21st century the SBC has adopted the parachurch model that church planters plant churches rather than that churches plant churches. As Ed Stetzer has said, (a paraphrase) “We went too far towards church planters planting churches. We benched the church as the primary planters of churches. We need to unbench the church and return them to a primary role.”
Coming Wednesday, September 27th— Part Two on taking a more comprehensive look at the pattern of the life of congregations rather than just renewal, revitalization, and replanting.