One of the more replayed video clips over the last few years was that of NFL head coach Dennis Green of the Arizona Cardinals. Following a loss to the Chicago Bears in 2006, which his team had led 24-3 in the fourth quarter, came the inevitable press conference. An obviously ticked Green exploded like a man who’d been celebrating Cinco de Mayo for a month. “The Bears are who we thought they were,” has become a favorite line for sports fans ever since. What Green was saying was, “They had nothing on us. They were the team we prepared for and we let them off the hook. We should have won the game.” It was slightly more colorful in the original language.
In thinking through this series, the word “disintegration” was intentionally chosen over the word “collapse.” I do not think that we will wake up one morning in the next year to find that the United Methodists, the Lutherans, Episcopalians (in their various stripes) or SBC will have closed the doors and shuttered the windows. I do think that we will continue to see decreasing viability of meaningful gospel influence in these organizations to the point that, like water against a rock, the slow erosion results in an unstable foundation and eventual cessation of denominational existence.
Linked in Ed Stetzer’s warning shot were two papers by J. Clifford Tharp, Jr. one with the following chart indicating “Total Membership” and “Resident Membership.”
Tharp’s brief analysis included these three points: 1. Trends in Membership (both Total and Resident) are becoming very flat; 2. Total Membership is dangerously close to beginning to decrease; 3. The gap between Total Membership and Resident Membership is widening. Observant readers will notice that if the top line flattens and the gap between the two widens, then necessarily the bottom line is beginning or continuing a downward arc. On this chart, that means that Resident Membership is decreasing. As we know and will soon reconsider, Resident Membership itself is a misleading measure of biblical membership and should not be considered an accurate accounting.
We’re not who we thought we were.
A second chart (below) tracks SBC baptisms from 1950-2004.
As you can see, baptisms have remained virtually static for more than 1/2 a century (there is a minuscule increase of 45 per year). The US population in 1950 was 152,271,417. Non-stop growth brought us to 281,421,906 by the year 2000. In a non-scientific but well thought through series of observations, Nathan Finn suggests that the Southern Baptist Convention is probably reaching no more than 100,000 “unreached Americans” per year while in their book, “Who Will Be Saved?,” Paul House and Greg Thornbury write:
Statistics compiled by the North American Mission Board…reveal that as many as half of all adults baptized in Southern Baptist churches are rebaptisms of persons already baptized by Southern Baptist pastors. Another 40 percent of adults baptized are Christians from other denominations who have never been immersed. Only ten percent of all adults baptized in Southern Baptist churches are making first-time professions of faith.
And this from what is widely considered the most evangelistic denomination in the U.S.
We’re not who we thought we were.
In her new book, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, Christine Wicker takes both Southern Baptists and evangelicals to task for their faulty reporting of their actual membership totals. She notes, for example, that:
Only 7 percent of members who’ve been in a Southern Baptist church five years of less are true converts, meaning sinners who weren’t raised in the church but came through a profession of faith in Jesus. If you took out the Southern Baptists who married unbelievers and brought them to faith, hardly anybody would be left.
Behind the thesis is that there are not nearly as many committed, Bible believing, Bible following Christians in American as we have all been led to believe, the former Dallas Morning News writer (and former Southern Baptist) pegs SBC active membership at just north of four million. Though Wicker finds herself somewhere between an agnosticism and an reluctant atheistism, her understanding of what genuine church membership should be is decent. She refuses to acknowledge that the SBC consists of 16+ million members, stating, “How many members a church has is a pretty worthless measure of reality…[only] about two-thirds are even residents of the same town as the churches they belong to.”
We’re not who we thought we were.
Not content with exposing the SBC’s lack of clothing, Wicker also points out that the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) does not have its claimed and oft trumpeted 30 million members. There are sixty denominations that make up the membership of the NAE including the Assemblies of God, Church of God, Church of the Nazarene and the Evangelical Free Church of America. According to Wicker’s research, the total membership of the fifty member denominations listed in the Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches 2007, the American Religion Statistical Archives and the denominations’ own Web sites the grand total of the members is 7.6 million people. Active membership would be much less–less than half actually. So, what of the elusive 30 million count we’ve all heard. No one, not even NAE president Leith Anderson knows for sure. The 1990 NAE record listed only 4.5 total members.
We’re not who we thought we were.
What does this mean? Is the issue a matter of simple math? No. The issue is that, not only have we been well behind the population growth curve, we didn’t have as great a number in the starting blocks as we had been led to believe. Since every age group of baptisms is decreasing except those who are under five years old and since the number of those graduating from high school and leaving church is increasing and since the ranks of admitted unbelievers is the fasted growing “faith” category in the US, there simply are not going to be enough people to keep denominations, which are dependent on heavy financial investment, afloat. As denominationally oriented church members age and die (and they already are) younger people will not give tithes to churches that insist on supporting failing bureaucracies, thus leading further down the Post Denominational road.
We’re not who we thought we were.
Marty…all I can say is “wow.” May God help us to re-focus and re-tool for the real task at hand.
Could it be that in this great “falling away,” great revival could ensue as God’s people are forced to rely totally on Him as a remnant in a strange land? Maybe God is at work doing a “Gideon-like” work of reduction, even if only on paper. When the “strength” of our numbers and the crutch of socio-political power and influence is gone and we honestly face our situation, we should be driven to our knees in utter and total dependence upon a movement of God’s Spirit. Sounds like we could be on the verge of another “book of Acts” kind of period of expansion.
If, that is, if we read the signs and respond accordingly.
Thanks, and keep it up.
Terry
Comment by Terry Leap — May 7, 2008 @ 3:10 am
This comment is going to be somewhat random, but I think everyone will get the point:
1. Whenever I was in college, the majority of college age and twenty something Baptists did not go to Sunday morning church. A greater number would show up for evening services on Saturday night or Sunday night that were aimed at their age group. An even greater number would go to small group studies on Sunday nights, or weeknights. From what I hear of my former students this remains the case. There are many, many people interested in God and Jesus who simply won’t go to a “church” to find out about Him, and would never “join the club” (i.e. membership) even if they did start going and following Jesus.
2. I’m a fan of evangelical preaching, and I still struggle to stay focused through a forty minute sermon. I wonder what it’s like for someone who’s not a fan of preaching. Or even worse, what about someone who’s not a believer at all and just came with a friend. I bet it’s really hard to stay focused or get anything out of the message at all. I bet it’s much easier to get something out of a small group study, and I bet they feel a lot more comfortable in a home than in a sanctuary.
3. It’s no coincidence that the majority of churches over here in China are growing in homes with smaller groups of people and with lay leadership. No, most of the leadership has never stepped inside of a seminary nor has a single degree in anything related to the Bible. Yet it’s amazing how their doctrine ends up being almost identical to mine. It’s amazing how the Holy Spirit is just as good of a teacher as the professionals at our seminaries. Don’t get me wrong, I love biblical studies and I particularly enjoy studying Christian origins, but none of the research I’m doing (or have done) is essential to being in community and living in communion with Christ, and I can verify that fact from the leaders I know over here who have no interest outside of reading and teaching the Bible in a very simply manner, and letting the Holy Spirit do the rest.
4. The church I worked at back in the states gave a lot to missions, and was proud of that (as they should have been). Yet when you broke down the budget about half went to paying building loans and maintenance, about twenty percent went to paying salaries of staff, support staff, etc. and about fifteen percent went to funding programs and paying for curriculum. Granted some of that money went to outreach programs, and outward focused ministries the vast majority of that 85% (which was well into the millions of dollars) was very inward focused. It’s time to be honest and realize that buildings (even gyms, cafes, etc.) end up being more flock focused instead of lost focused. We say they are for outreach in order to get funding, but they end up being primarily used by the membership. Furthermore, whereas I believe we need trained staff training other lay leadership, I think our salaries are way too high at times. Granted, ministers are underpaid compared to the amount of hours they put into their work, isn’t that more because we aren’t adequately training the laity to take part in ministry, which is a result of years and years of not training them so that they now expect that we do so much?
5. I think it’s hypocritical that we on the field are told to plant churches that meet in houses, with lay leadership, that don’t waste money on buildings, etc. and do so based on the New Testament model, while we do the very things we preach against back home, and do those things very proudly! Just look at the mass celebrations at the end of building campaigns that were probably unnecessary to begin with!
Sorry this seems somewhat like rambling and that the ideas are very loose, but I think you get the picture. In the end, the younger generation not tithing as much doesn’t scare me nearly as much as it scares some, because hopefully it will call us back to a more local, home-based, laity driven community ministry, which doesn’t require vast amounts of money, is much more reproducible and much more unbeliever friendly and focused. Furthermore, I would suggest that this type of focus in our churches would also increase overall missions giving as our people started being more outward focused in the way that they viewed ministry and life in the Baptist church.
Comment by Ranger — May 7, 2008 @ 3:12 am
Terry-
Insomnia?? Man, oh man, you are up early or late.
I think you are all over it. I’ll argue in this series that the disintegration of the denomination may be the best opportunity for local churches in decades.
Ranger-
No rambling that I see. I understand you and you are right on target.
Comment by Marty Duren — May 7, 2008 @ 3:21 am
Just think of the money that would be freed up with the disentegration of the SBC. Think of all the money we spend on conventions, offices, local and state associations, administrative support…..all of that would be freed up to actually be used for ministry.
Ranger,
Dead on. I’ve been saying the same things for years. I not only think it’s hypocritical of us to try and do CPM but we’re also ill equiped to minister in most of the places that we do because of our backgrounds. Most of us are from large group, class driven churches. Now we’re out here trying to help guys start house churches, with no paid staff, no buildings, no materials…..we’re not equipped for this.
Comment by Camel Rider — May 7, 2008 @ 4:26 am
I’d agree with the assessment that the numerical strength of the SBC is somewhere between 4 and 5 million, and I think our records of attendance and giving would support that. As far as our baptisms, and thus, the measure of our evangelistic effectiveness is concerned, we’ve had a statistical analysis of that every year that shows us the majority of baptisms, perhaps as many as 90% of them, are “family” conversions, and a significant number of them are under 12 years of age. But looking at the age breakdown of our Sunday School enrollment, we are not even baptizing everyone in the family. The statistics we really need to look at involve how many kids we keep between high school and young adulthood, and how many adults we have who haven’t reached 50 years of age yet. We’ve been statistically declining in those areas for quite some time.
The other side of this issue is the fact that, with 45,000 independent, autonomous churches, a denominational initiative won’t solve the problem. The churches have to do it themselves. Denominational leadership can talk about it, but they don’t have the means to bring about the genuine spiritual revival that the churches need to experience. And over the last decade, I don’t think you will find as many churches listening to the leadership as there used to be.
Comment by Lee Saunders — May 7, 2008 @ 7:12 am
Welcome back Marty. This is one of your bests posts.
Comment by Kevin Bussey — May 7, 2008 @ 8:36 am
You must be pretty smart. Good stuff, and I could even understand it.
I’ve always wondered about “resident members”, and the shortfall from there to total membership. Does that mean people who moved away but we did such a lousy job training them, or we couldn’t even tell whether they were born-again, and they never ever joined another church after moving?
If that’s the case, that’d be enough for God to take some action in our midst.
Maybe He has.
Comment by Bob Cleveland — May 7, 2008 @ 10:22 am
I’ve come to believe that the disintegration of the SBC might benefit the Kingdom in some ways, if it caused local churches to engage instead of just send money.
The most accurate stats say that church attendance in America is actually around 17%, instead of the oft quoted 40%. Even in the South, we are at 25-30%.
We are losing America, not because of an evil culture, but because the church is sick. Southern Baptist leaders will only attack others and never look at our own problems. It is time to move on.
Comment by Alan Cross — May 7, 2008 @ 1:05 pm
It could also be beneficial to those of us on the field….how? First, it would free us of all of the BOT junk and bureaucracy. As if thats not good enough a reason it would also force us to actually parter with US churches. As of now few os uf blog, send out regular updates or seek to actually engage the US church. A good bit of us take for granted their support and the disintegration of the SBC would week out the IMB guys who just don’t get it. Our work would be much more effective if we actually partnered with US churches instead of this far removed impersonal approach. Just some thoughts.
Comment by Camel Rider — May 7, 2008 @ 1:57 pm
Thank you, kindred spirits!
Any conferences, summits, meetings, or retreats need to be focused on one issue: reinventing church structure. We are headed the way of the church of England and are already seeing it in many places. Baptist churches in many small towns are dying, even if they are the ONLY Baptist church, for one reason: new people do not engage in old traditions with blind acceptance. The church needs to: reconsider a different pattern to ministry than the seven day cycle, reconsider the role of professional clergy, engage all members in some aspect of the church’s ministry TO the world (not just one another), replace Bible study for the sake of Bible study with Bible study with a purpose–discipleship and disciple making, etc. We have to do locally, as each church, what and old institution needs to do: be reborn or die. But we must do it while maintaining a firm footing on Biblical truth.
Ben Macklin
Comment by Ben Macklin — May 7, 2008 @ 2:27 pm