Baptist convention faces upheaval and loss

The annual meeting is looking at solutions to multiple problems.

McClatchy Newspapers

DALLAS — The voices in the wilderness of the Southern Baptist Convention have become a chorus. And the message is that the 16.3 million-member SBC, the nation’s largest Protestant group, is in trouble.

Steadily declining baptism rates. A slight drop in membership. A dearth of young leaders.

These realities and more are weighing on the SBC as it conducts its annual meeting this week in Indianapolis, with an unusually high number of six candidates for president.

“People sense that we’re at something of a crossroads in Southern Baptist life,” said the Rev. Bart Barber, pastor of First Baptist Church of Farmersville, Texas.

Among those most concerned is the Rev. Frank Page, who’s stepping down after two years as SBC president. He predicts that, barring major changes, the denomination will lose more than half of its 44,000 churches by 2030.

“Many of our churches are simply not connecting with the younger generation, and they’re certainly not connecting with our increasingly secular culture,” he said. “Because of that, I fear many of our churches will die.”

Page, a small-town South Carolina pastor whose surprise election as president in 2006 signaled frustration within the SBC ranks, emphasized that his prediction is based on impressions and anecdotes.

But statistics document the trends.

SBC baptisms dropped by about 5.5 percent last year and have declined in seven of the last eight years. Thousands of SBC churches annually report having had no baptisms.

Meanwhile, membership in the SBC has been essentially flat in recent years. In 2007, membership actually dropped by 39,000 — just the second loss since 1926.

Even in places where the SBC is gaining, such as Texas, growth isn’t keeping up with population, meaning the SBC’s “market share” is sliding.

“For now, Southern Baptists are a denomination in decline,” concluded Ed Stetzer, a top SBC researcher, in a blog entry analyzing baptism and membership data.

Many SBC veterans blame a waning of evangelism. Longtime evangelist Freddie Gage of Euless notes that revivals, midweek services and door-to-door witnessing are far rarer than they used to be in Southern Baptist life.

He calls the SBC “on life support.”

Others argue that the picture is not so grim, noting that church attendance is up slightly. And they say the SBC’s problems are complicated.

David Key, director of Baptist studies at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology in Atlanta, believes denominational loyalty among churchgoers persisted longer in the South, the SBC’s base, but is fading there, as it has been elsewhere.

Young people in particular are choosing whatever church works for them, even if it’s not the denomination they grew up in. And there are plenty of conservative, nondenominational churches competing.

Another problem for the SBC — one shared with the United Methodist Church, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), and other Protestant groups that have been losing members for years — is that it’s overwhelmingly white, and the birth rate among whites has dropped.

The solution is to attract faster-growing ethnic groups. But that can be a tough sell.

Conservatives gained control of the SBC a generation ago, arguing that fidelity to such tenets as biblical inerrancy would keep the denomination from sliding as more moderate Protestants had.

Jim Richards, executive director of the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention and first vice president of the SBC, said the SBC’s woes would be worse but for the “conservative resurgence.” He thinks that getting back to basics is what’s needed.

But Curt Watke, a former researcher for the SBC’s North American Mission, said the landscape has changed so profoundly that only bold new ministry approaches can save the SBC long term.

Ideas will come from the grass roots, not from annual meetings that illustrate the problem with sparse attendance by graying “messengers” sent by traditional churches, said Dr. Watke.