Southern Baptist leaders release new analysis of their decline

For years now, Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) members have watched their denomination decline in both cultural dominance and memberships. Recently, the branch of the denomination devoted to information gathering and analysis, Lifeway Research, released some new information about that decline.

In short, that decline’s nowhere near over yet.

How Southern Baptists use the Annual Church Profile—and how they don’t

The Annual Church Profile (ACP) is a yearly survey of Southern Baptist churches. It asks them a variety of questions about:

• Baptisms
• Total membership
• Attendance in-person (and online, since the pandemic)
• Sunday School and small group enrollment and attendance (a small group is something like a Sunday School class for adults; members pray together, study the Bible, and have Jesusy discussions)
• How much money the church has given to SBC projects

The SBC operates as a kind of mother ship to dozens of state-level conventions. Most American states have one. Some states have so few Southern Baptists that they must combine with other states, while others are so large they have more than one. But generally, each state has its own state convention. Churches operate more or less independently, as do the state conventions representing them. Each state-level convention runs its own ACP.

Note two major facts about the ACP.

First, some state-level conventions sometimes ask questions in a different way than others. Or they may leave out some questions entirely.

Second, it’s completely voluntary. Southern Baptist leaders do not require participation in it. So a church may elect to answer all questions, or just some, or only one, or none at all. Participation has no effect on membership in the denomination.

For the ACP discussed here today, 69% of Southern Baptist churches participated by answering at least one question on the survey.

Sidebar: Now consider why a Southern Baptist church might not participate

Given what we know of the SBC as a whole and about Southern Baptists in particular, we can make some educated guesses about churches that refused to participate in the ACP.

I’m betting that the 31% of churches that didn’t participate weren’t exactly doing great, metrics-wise. If they’d been baptizing people left and right, running stunningly effective evangelism programs, and growing so fast their pastors’ sermons were standing-room-only, no way no how would they forget to tell the mother ship about it, or simply refuse to participate.

It’d be extremely interesting to see what Southern Baptist stats would look like if the denomination’s leaders required ACP participation. But I don’t think it’ll ever happen. When such two-edged proposals come up, Southern Baptist leaders begin sweating greasy droplets of muh autonomous local church.

(That’s also why Southern Baptist leaders in the Old Guard faction don’t want to do anything about the denomination’s sex abuse crisis. They’re just so incredibly concerned, you see, about muh autonomous local church. But of course, when those autonomous local churches decide to be inclusive toward gay people or hire women to be pastors, suddenly even the Old Guard faction finds its teeth; archive.)

What Southern Baptist analysts found in the 2022 ACP

You can find a summary of the 2022 ACP here. It looks like the state-level conventions are still gathering the information together from 2023 to send to the mother ship for last year. On the site for the California Southern Baptist Convention (archive), I found a due date for the 2023 ACP: March 1, 2024. So we’re a ways off from knowing how the denomination did last year.

Usually, though, Southern Baptist leaders release a little tickle in the early spring. They like to do that in the run-up to their big Annual Meeting every summer. So keep an eye out for it around April. For now, we’ve got 2022 to keep us company.

And oh, what company it is!

Overall, this new analysis paints a picture of deep decline that is nowhere near even bottoming-out yet. In almost every single way imaginable, Southern Baptist congregations are in trouble. The pandemic only accelerated their decline.

This is probably one of the most dire graphs I have ever seen out of the SBC:

That can’t have been easy for some poor Southern Baptist graphic artist to make. But it’s truthful. After their disastrous pandemic drop in 2020, Southern Baptist churches rebounded all the way to 180,177 baptisms. And even that’s awful. They haven’t seen that small of a number since around 1920, when churches dunked 173,595 people.

(Info about specific years’ performance comes from Annual Reports on the official SBC site. The reports contain info about the previous year. So the 2023 Annual Report contains info about 2022, and so on and so forth. If I give a date like 2018 for a figure, it can be found in the next year’s report, so in this case 2019.)

This is Southern Baptist info we don’t normally get

Years ago, I ran across a report released around 2014 by the Pastors’ Task Force on SBC Evangelistic Impact & Declining Baptisms. It’s an analysis of the 2012 ACP. It is an absolutely eye-opening document, too. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in evangelical-watching.

And I recommend it for one important reason:

It reveals that Southern Baptist leaders have access to a wealth of information about baptisms that they don’t generally make available to the public. One of the most important metrics they reveal is the age of the people getting baptized. I’ve never seen this exact information provided anywhere else.

In the 2012 ACP report, as the Task Force revealed, 25% of Southern Baptist churches had zero baptisms. 60% of respondents didn’t baptize anyone between 12-17, while 80% reported “0-1 young adult baptisms (age 18-29 bracket).” Worse, the Task Force revealed this damning bit of trivia: “The only consistently growing age group in baptisms is age five and under.”

This new analysis of the 2022 ACP makes a good chaser for it, because it, too, reveals a lot of information that doesn’t usually appear anywhere else. For instance, it mentions that about 43% of Southern Baptist churches had no baptisms at all in 2022, while 34% had 1-5. That’s a lot more coming up empty than did in 2012.

Of note, in 2012, churches baptized about 315k people and counted 15.8M members. In 2022, they recorded 180,177 baptisms and 13.2M members.

I’m extremely interested in knowing how the ages broke out in those 2022 stats. If the mother ship had that info in 2012-2014, then it does now.

And they’re not talkin’, which makes me strongly suspect that most of the reported baptisms are the under-18 children of existing adult members and returning members who want to make a public demonstration of their re-affiliation.

(Related: You must be born again and again and again; Gaming a broken system with baptisms.)

And stuff most people could probably guess about Southern Baptist churches generally

As one might guess, Southern churches saw more baptisms, as did urban churches and new churches (less than 20 years old). Rural areas have a lot fewer potential new recruits living nearby, and well, Southern Baptist churches always did do well in the American South. It’s in the name!

New churches, as well, saw a lot more baptisms than old ones did. A church established more than a century ago is probably pretty stuck in its ways and traditional. It’s had time to attract and then alienate all the people in the area. But a lot of evangelicals’ ears perk up when they notice a brand-new church in their vicinity. They think it’ll be different than the ones they’ve tried. They’re willing to visit and check it out.

Churchless believers, those Christians who believe but have left church culture and membership behind, seem particularly open to trying brand-new churches. Often, they’ve been burned hard by other churches, but many say they want to find a good church to join.

Alas, new Southern Baptist churches often have trouble surviving past about five years. The people they attract might leave, taking their wallets with them, or the church’s leaders might turn out not to know how to lead volunteer groups very well.

As a May 2023 article hints (article), the mother ship’s general strategy for about 15 years now has been to scattershot new churches everywhere imaginable in the frantic hopes that they outweigh the number of churches closing each year. Every one of those struggling churches needs a pastor, even if that pastor will also need a day job.

“I’m glad I’m retired,” said one former Southern Baptist pastor in 2022 (archive) of the entire situation with pastors’ overall short tenure.

Selling Southern Baptist church membership on the basis of real-world social benefits

I’ve noticed lately that Southern Baptists have been talking up the real-world social benefits of joining their churches. That’s a wise strategy, far better than the one they’ve been using:

1. Convince marks that the Bible is literally true and Jesus is literally a real god who does real stuff in the real world (and will send the disobedient to Hell)
2. Then, sell marks active, engaged SBC church membership as the only way to Jesus correctly

Pushing harder on real-world benefits will generate a lot more interest, as long as they can deliver on their promises.

And so we see in the 2022 ACP analysis that churches with very active, engaged members also tend to bag the most baptisms. The more people participate in small groups, in particular, the generally higher their baptism rate—but churches that claimed 100% participation tended to have way fewer baptisms on average (5.9) than those claiming 75-99% participation (7.2).

What’s really interesting about that figure is that churches claiming 25-49% participation got 6.4, and those claiming 0-24% participation got 5.5. So that 100% participation figure of 5.9 baptisms is definitely a strange one.

Also, very large churches with 500+ attending weekly worship services tended to be the only ones that increased their number of baptisms between 2017 (5.2) and 2022 (5.6). Most regions were doing well just to maintain their 2017 numbers.

The Southern Baptist baptism ratio still blows chunks

The number that Southern Baptist leaders consider their very most important is what they call their baptism ratio. That’s the ratio of baptized people per existing Southern Baptist members. It asks: How many Southern Baptists’ resources did it take to get one person baptized?

And it’s why Southern Baptist leaders have known about their decline for about 50 years. That number speaks to the effectiveness of Southern Baptist recruiting and retention. Until about 1974, their ratio hovered in the 1:20-1:29 range. They liked it there. But after 1974, it never dipped that low again.

(Note: The SBC’s Conservative Resurgence began in earnest in the 1970s. This takeover by ultraconservative schemers and hypocrites finally ended in the late 1990s with solid victory.)

In 1985, the baptism ratio hit 1:41 at last. Despite Southern Baptist churches doing everything they could think of to fight it back down into the 1:30s again, it hit 1:50 in 2012. I saw a lot of Southern Baptist panicking around that time. It didn’t do any good then, either, because in 2018, it reached 1:60. I heard nothing about it that time, though.

Then, the pandemic blasted that already-struggling baptism ratio to smithereens:

• 2019: 1:62
• 2020: 1:114
• 2021: 1:88

As of 2022, they’d clawed their way back up to 1:73.

Which leads to the most hilarious bit of Southern Baptist goalpost-shifting I’ve ever seen

That is just shockingly bad, by Southern Baptist standards. That gets evangelicals to wondering if maybe Jesus just doesn’t like the denomination or something.

So the analysts behind the 2022 ACP report have figured out a way to move the goalposts!

Now they’re going to give a ratio between baptisms per every 100 people attending worship services. And doing it that way, they get a baptism ratio of 1:20 for 2022!

However, that’s still a decline, as they tell us themselves:

Another way to examine baptisms and rates for churches is by considering the number per worship attendees. Unfortunately for Southern Baptists, that number is also in decline. With worship attendance also falling, that means baptisms are falling at a faster rate than attendance. [. . .]

Among Southern Baptist churches that reported attendance in 2022, for every 100 people attending a worship service in a Southern Baptist church, five people were baptized on average. In other words, it took 20 Southern Baptists to reach one person. While that is the best number in the past four years, it’s still a decline from 2017 (5.9 per 100) and part of an overall negative trend.

2022 ACP Analysis, Lifeway Research

Man alive, I really and truly don’t know how Southern Baptist leaders are going to deal with this in the next few years. Sooner or later, someone’s going to remember that the Conservative Resurgence was supposed to fix the decline. That’s how its architects and leaders sold it to the flocks. But it seems to have done the exact opposite.

Worse, pushing hard on the supposed real-world social benefits of joining Southern Baptist churches won’t work unless the people in those churches live up to the hype. And most of them just don’t, which we know because they’re falling apart across the board.

That simple truth may explain the relative success of the largest churches in the denomination: Plenty of stuff to do, plus a much higher chance of finding someone nice to make friends with. But if there’s another group that offers those same benefits for less hassle, watch out!

To grow, Baptists need to up their affability game in ways they have never had to do for their entire existence as a denomination. I just don’t think they’re up for the challenge. And I strongly suspect their leaders would agree with me there.