Our Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) Summer officially kicks off with the 2025 SBC metrics dropping at last! Today, let’s take a first look at the figures they shared—and talk about what those figures mean.
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SITUATION REPORT: The 2025 SBC metrics just dropped!
(When I talk about “2023’s report” and the like, you can find all the SBC Annual Reports here. They contain metrics for the previous year. In today’s story, the 2025 metrics will eventually wend their way into the 2026 Annual Report. I expect to see that report a few months after the 2026 Annual Meeting this summer.)
The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) is one of the very few American denominations that releases performance metrics every year. Sure, they spin-doctor anything off-kilter and sometimes just decide to change how they report particularly bad news, but at least there’s something consistent year over year. That means that we can track their performance on a number of bases—and from there, we can get a feel for the future of the unholy rutting of politics and religion that is modern evangelicalism.
And this year, it does not look fantastic. At all. Here’s the report from Lifeway, their research and publishing arm, and here’s the relevant graph from their downloads site:
At first glance, we see a lot of negative changes across the board—except for baptisms, which rose a bit from last year. Also, weekly-attendance headcounts and extra involvement both saw a slight uptick. I even see a tiny lift in the number of “additional campuses.” (These are “multisite congregations.” They worship in separate locations, but they’re still the same church.)
Total members fell by almost 400k last year, which is just disastrous. It’s why their baptism ratio looks so nice this year. (They want that second number to be as small as possible. 1:51 used to be “the sky is falling” territory, before they hit 1:60 with 2019’s report.) They also lost 268 churches, which isn’t their very worst loss—that’d be the 2023 report, with -416. But it’s still bad for a denomination that never had a net loss of churches till that year.
These figures paint a very distinct picture of a polarizing denomination in decline. We’ll talk about them a bit today, and I’ll show you what the numbers really mean.
First, that membership drop in the SBC 2025 metrics drop
No doubt the big story for most SBC-watchers is that disastrous 390k membership drop. Membership now sits at 12.3M. Now, this isn’t the worst drop. That’d be 2023’s report, with that 457k drop. But it’s still a decline that’s been going strong since the 2008 report (so, in 2007), and it’s still an even bigger chunk of the existing membership number.
That “chunk” is what we should focus on.
I maintain a large database of SBC metrics. One thing I track is the percentage of membership decline. As I mentioned, this one began in the 2008 Annual Report. It reported a drop of 39k members, which worked out to .24% of total membership. And that tiny percentage carried on like that till the 2015 report, when they began jumping into the 1-2% drops. In turn, that kind of drop continued until 2020’s report (for 2019, the last pre-pandemic report), which told of a 3% drop.
Now, this drop isn’t always consistent in size. Sometimes, the drop eases back to the <2% range, as it did in 2024’s report. But last year’s metrics show a 3% drop again.
If the 3% drops continue, I fully expect to see the SBC’s membership fall to 11M next year—or pretty close to it. And just to keep an eye on the history of this denomination, they haven’t been at this level of membership since the early 1970s. (We’ll circle back to that long-gone era in a moment.)
Baptisms looking pretty good in the SBC 2025 metrics drop
While membership rolls keep hemorrhaging, something interesting is going on with baptisms.
In the 2020 report (so, 2019 metrics), we see the ongoing baptism slump for the denomination as well. That year, their baptism ratio reached its peak of 1:61, which had to have denominational leaders having kittens from stress.
The SBC’s baptism ratio is their ride-or-die metric. For their entire modern history, it’s the one thing they’ve valued above all. It’s likely how the big-name leaders in the denomination knew they were in decline decades before it began showing up in membership drops.
Essentially, this ratio is the number of baptisms compared to total membership. A low baptism ratio (like 1:30) means it takes the effort and resources of about 30 SBC members to get one baptism. So a higher baptism ratio (like 1:50) means they’re spending much more to get each baptism. That means they’re less effective at evangelism, and all the SBC officially really cares about is evangelism.
The pandemic, of course, made their 2020 numbers look absolutely disastrous. They hit a baptism ratio of 1:114 (123k baptisms, 14M members). But nobody expected that number to stay that bad. Indeed, post-pandemic, they’ve consistently built up their number of baptisms from that dismal 123k number. And as they did, the ratio rose: 1:88 in 2022’s report, then 1:73 in 2023’s, etc., till we reach 2025.
Last year, the SBC wrangled 263k baptisms out of 12.3M members, for a baptism ratio of jussssst under 1:47. (It’s 1:46.9, officially.) They’re finally out of the 1:50s, though I doubt they’ll stay out for too long.
However, my shoulder devil compels me to add this: That new ratio only looks this good because of the membership drop. If they still had the 16M members they did at their all-time peak in the late 2000s, that number of baptisms would put them at 1:60. (And for comparison’s sake, in the 2000s, their baptism ratio hovered in the 1:35-1:43ish range. In the 2006 report, they scored 371k baptisms.)
The church closures that hide a whole other (and darker) story in the SBC 2025 metrics drop
This year’s drop in membership also speaks to huge numbers of churches closing. A lot of those members are vanishing because their entire church left the SBC’s rolls.
For years now, I’ve covered church closures in America. The SBC is not immune to the market forces that are forcing thousands of churches a year to close for good. But for a long time, it sure seemed to be. Though occasionally they saw small net negative numbers in church numbers, they did not start consistently showing declines in the overall number till the 2023 report. And from there, it’s been solid negatives.
Negative numbers can represent churches that leave the denomination. But they usually represent churches that have closed. The last solid figures we have for the SBC’s church numbers comes from a 2025 report about member churches in 2022-2023 (their table is here). There, we learned that about 1100 congregations left the SBC in that time frame. Of them, 77% (900 congregations) closed. Of the rest, 22% (260 congregations) either left or got kicked out by the mother ship. (VERY rarely, the mother ship “disfellowships” a congregation for egregious misbehavior.) So it’s safe to say that the SBC loses a lot more churches to closure than simple removal from the rolls.
This year, they had 46,608 churches. Last year, they had 46,876 churches. That’s a drop of 268, or .57%. That may not sound like much, but remember it’s a net closures figure. The SBC likes to shotgun church starts everywhere. Indeed, in April, the SBC’s official news site reported that the SBC “planted” 792 churches, while another 127 churches joined the denomination. That’s a total of 919 churches starting up or joining.
At this point, I had to double-check my math.
So even after all those churches opening, the SBC’s net closures were still that bad. They had to have almost 1200 churches close or leave to get that kind of net drop. On the plus side, if the 2022-2023 research holds solid, that means only a couple hundred left because they were sick of the SBC’s shit.
It’s the small victories that matter most, right?
What the gains in involvement/attendance mean in these 2025 metrics
Some of the SBC’s small victories came in the form of members’ greater involvement in their churches. In these 2025 metrics, we see upticks in attendance and extra involvement.
Attendance is simple: Churches take headcounts of everyone in the pews. This headcount goes into their Annual Church Profile (ACP), which the mother ship uses to compile the past year’s metrics. However, the ACP’s instructions make clear that they’re okay with “ball-park estimates” and “averages.” Nobody’s double-checking these numbers, or ever has. And even with all that leeway, the best churches can do is about 36% of their members (or 4.4M individual SBC-lings) parked in pews on Sunday.
The same goes for the extra involvement. I use that term to mean participation in church activities that aren’t Sunday morning services or volunteering: Sunday School, small groups, and Bible studies. The SBC used to offer stats for Sunday School attendance by itself. Then, from 2012-2015, they just flat didn’t report on it. In 2016, the stat began appearing in reports again—combined as it is nowadays (and already declining, which is what I suspect explains the absence of the stat in earlier years; SBC leaders vastly prefer to leave out stats that are tanking hard).
In 2025, 2.6M SBC members participated in those extra activities. That’s actually 83k more than participated last year, and a solid 21% of members involved to boot. Their participation has been creeping up steadily for years now, though it’s nowhere near the 50%+ they had before their decline began in earnest in 2006.
What the SBC 2025 metrics drop really means
With all of these numbers in mind, here’s what the metrics drop shows us about today’s SBC compared to the SBC of decades past.
In the 1974 report, the SBC stood at 12.3M members and took in USD$1.1B in total receipts. They also had 34k churches, 7.1M attending Sunday School, and enjoyed a baptism ratio of 1:29. (<— Incredible!)
In contrast, in 2025 with that same number of members, they took in $9.6B in undesignated receipts (they stopped reporting total receipts as of the 2023 report—and gee, I wonder why!). They had 46k churches, 2.6M attending extra activities, and had a baptism ratio of 1:47.
So they are taking in truly ridiculous amounts of money and have plenty of members, but the denomination is seeing worse and worse returns on their evangelism efforts, and as good as the participation levels look it’s still nowhere near what it was last time they stood at 12.3M members.
What I’m seeing in all these metrics is a denomination that’s steadily shrinking with no way imaginable to recover. But the SBC-lings remaining in the denomination are slowly finding their footing again. They’re doubling down on their affiliation. They’re attending a tiny bit more, participating in more extra activities, and even giving more money per individual than in recent years past.
Alas, the glory days are gone.
But don’t count on SBC leaders to care. Their mother ship is still a money generating machine. All they need to do is keep the flocks thinking that rejuvenation is just around the corner, and that they’re still on the winning team.
NEXT UP: The incredible cope around these metrics. Yes, it’s already begun! See you soon! <3
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