Is the Southern Baptist Convention in Decline?

Aug

On Wednesday Night, August 17^th, we will be discussing the current status of the Southern Baptist Convention. SBC LIFE magazine just arrived in the mail with a summary of reports from the June Meeting of 2016 Southern Baptist Convention in St Louis. Most of the following statistics were from the report from Dr. Frank Page, President and CEO of the SBC Executive Committee.

*We have fewer members of our cooperating churches than any time since 1992, we can nolonger boast, inaccurately, that we have over 16 million. Now we only claim less than 15.3 million.

*Our baptisms are the lowest since 1948 when they first crossed the 300,000 hundred thousand mark.

*Our baptism ratios continue to plummet. It takes 52 church members to see one person won to Christ.

*This year, we have 3,645 missionaries on the field, fewer than any time since 1993. According to the International Mission Board, the number of Unreached, Unengaged People Groups currently number 3,080.

*70% of church attendees from the millennial generation (born between 1980-2000) give up on church by the age of twenty-three, with many never returning. One-in-four adults under age thirty are unaffiliated, describing their religion as “atheistic,” “agnostic,” or “nothing in particular.”

*While Tithes and Offerings to churches were up, the amount of money forwarded by the churches through the Cooperative Program for Missions was the lowest in 15 years.

Dr page summarized these numbers with the following question – “Is there anyone here who would not agree that we (the SBC) seem to have lost our way?”