When it comes to its own decline, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) might be its own worst enemy. A throwaway comment on a recent post of theirs reveals exactly why it’s so hard to evaluate that decline, much less diagnose its cause, much less reverse it. Since their entire image is based upon winning through Jesus Power, it’s almost impossible to get the straight truth out of them about a loss.
Today, we’re going to try to ferret out the truth from the smoke-and-mirrors lightshow they’ve just presented to their flocks.
(This post first went live on Patreon on 3/18/2025. Its audio ‘cast lives there too and is available now! From introduction: Tennyson poem; repository of SBC Annual Reports.)
SITUATION REPORT: A not-so-complicated picture of Southern Baptist decline
Baptist Press is the SBC’s official website. Last week, Baptist Press released an analysis of their ongoing decline. They base this analysis on statistics from their 2023 Annual Church Profile (ACP) questionnaire. Southern Baptist pastors fill out these questionnaires on a voluntary basis each year about their church’s performance over the previous year. The questionnaire asks for information about church growth/decline, baptisms, various demographics, attendance, and more. The ACP reports inform each year’s Annual Report, which releases around the same time as the SBC’s Annual Meeting each summer.
Their deadline for this year passed last month, but it’s still a bit early to expect 2024 stats quite yet. (I’m expecting some trickles of information Any Day Now™.) So this analysis involves the most recent questionnaires they actually have.
It also involves a diagram that had me literally doubling over with laughter. It’s amazing, and we’ll be talking about it today as well.
In short, Southern Baptist churches are getting smaller and smaller. Still, baptisms are bouncing back a little from their pre-pandemic levels. And out of declines all around the country, the least likely region possible is the only one that is experiencing any growth at all.
Perhaps most telling, Southern Baptist leaders know exactly why they’re not getting better participation in the ACP than they are.
By the numbers: Southern Baptist decline
The report compares 2023’s numbers to 2018’s. In terms of size, more churches in 2023 have fewer than 50 people attending the main Sunday service. For 2018, 38% of reporting churches have fewer than 50 attendees. That percentage grew to 43% in 2023.
They saw a slight decrease in the number of churches reporting zero baptisms, too. In 2018, 28% of churches reported zero baptisms. That fell slightly to 26% in 2023.
For the past couple or three years, Southern Baptist leaders have developed a new ride-or-die metric regarding baptisms. It used to be the ratio of baptisms per total membership. It reflects how many resources must go into each baptism. Ideally, they want that ratio to be as low as possible to reflect more efficient recruiting. But that ratio has been worsening since around the 1970s. If we used that ratio to compare 2018 to 2023, we’d get 1:60 versus 1:57. Though the 2023 number is slightly better, it still stings to consider, I’m sure. Their leaders were predicting total catastrophe if that ratio got higher than 1:50, but they blew past it around 2013.
So now they’re using baptisms per 100 service attendees. That figure looks a lot nicer! Now they can report 8.5 baptisms per 100 attendees in 2023, versus 7.4 in 2018. Hooray Team Jesus!
The only region experiencing growth
Now, let me show you the funniest diagram I’ve seen lately out of Christians:
This diagram tracks decline percentages in various parts of the country. As you can see, the West Coast/Hawaii/Alaska area experienced the worst decline over five years, averaging an 18% drop in its number of affiliated churches. The combined area of Texas east to Louisiana averaged an 8% drop, which was the second best statistic in the report. When I saw the very best one, I burst out laughing.
Yes, only one part of the entire country saw a lift in its number of Southern Baptist churches: New England. Its SBC sub-convention, the Baptist Churches of New England (BCNE), reported a 10% increase in its number of churches since 2018.
Well, of course. If you only have a few churches in an area, any change to that number is going to look huge! Though I couldn’t dig up exactly how many churches were in those states, I can tell you that according to the BCNE’s own numbers, they had 292 churches in 2010, 358 churches in 2020, and 367 in 2023. A 10% gain isn’t much when those are the general numbers.
Meanwhile, Alabama—one of the largest SBC states—lost an estimated three hundred churches in those five years, going from about 3500 in 2018 to about 3200 in 2023. The state is swinging roughly 2016 numbers there for churches, but they’ve also lost about 210,000 members there since 2016. Meanwhile, New England had almost 24k members in 2010, 32k in 2020, and, um, still 32k in 2023.
I have no words. But here is one last tidbit about that map before we move onward: The North American Mission Board (NAMB) revealed in 2023 that they’ve planted “1,018 churches in the Northeast since 2010,” but they’re combining New England, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. They’re claiming in that source to average “44 churches per year,” which I find incredibly dishonest. In truth, the SBC has been planting scattershot churches everywhere it can in those sparser areas, then just hoping a few of them survive. From the BCNE report, I can see that a great many do not.
Every one of those failed churches contains at least one devastated, self-blaming pastor who’ll be out of work—and possibly other paid staffers who’ll need to find jobs too. I cannot imagine taking such an approach to church planting while knowing that if and when the new churches fail, they will drag at least one family down with them. I may not like evangelicalism or the SBC’s denominational leaders, but I don’t like seeing potentially lower-ranking people suffer for their leaders’ hubris.
Bigger Southern Baptist churches vs smaller ones
As of 2023, about 43% of SBC churches have fewer than 50 members. Another 27% belong to churches averaging 50-99 people. So 70% of churches in the denomination average fewer than 100 people.
Size has a big effect on a congregant’s level of church participation. In larger churches, individual people can easily get lost in the crowd. That’s actually part of their draw. Clever megapastors capitalize on their huge churches’ comfort level. There’s much less pressure on individuals to participate in ways that might feel really uncomfortable. In small churches, by contrast, the pastor needs all hands on deck.
So you can just about taste Southern Baptist leaders’ frustration with knowing that their churches keep getting smaller in both congregation and number every year.
One factor that strongly affects growth even in larger churches is the size of the population around the church. If the church sits in a rural area with low population density, it won’t grow very well. Churches need lots of people in the local area—the denser they’re packed, the better. In the Baptist Press report, rural churches averaged 4.4 baptisms against 8.5 for suburban ones and 15 for urban ones.
I can see why the guy we talked about last time, the Provo church planter, wanted to open for business in a city.
Newer Southern Baptist churches vs older ones
Another observation from this analysis involves greater growth from newer churches. Newer churches grow more reliably and faster than older ones, as a rule.
That makes sense. A brand-new church in an area is full of unknowns that may appeal to evangelicals in the area. Older ones have settled in their ways. Their members know the pecking order, and they know where they all belong in terms of cliques. For ambitious evangelicals, a newer church represents far more opportunities for leadership and advancement—and less competition, to boot.
But the unknowns go further than that. The older a church is, the more scandals and negative stories grow around its name. As well, older churches tend to have bigger-name pastors who all play a part in their local crony network, while newer churches tend to have newer, more idealistic, less crony-oriented pastors.
Almost exactly half of Southern Baptist churches began before the year 2000.
Focus on small group participation is backfiring in a uniquely Southern Baptist way
One of the details of this report wasn’t precisely spelled out, but it’s glaring nonetheless. It concerns small group participation.
Chances are, if you’re an outsider to evangelical culture or haven’t tangled with it in years, you haven’t heard that term. It’s not usually discussed much outside of church. So: A small group is a formal Bible study/discussion group within a church. Sunday School classes could be considered a sort of small group, but usually the term is reserved for adults. Pastors set up small groups around various themes (college age, parents, men, women, retirees, et cetera; I’ve even heard of addiction recovery-themed small groups) and appoint leaders for them. These leaders take on many pastoral duties within their group. Often, small groups’ leaders have some measure of temporal control over their mini-flocks.
Of course, small groups—like male-only pastors—aren’t specifically mentioned in the Bible. Some evangelicals admit it, while others don’t. Only through a lot of hand-waving can anyone support the idea with Bible verses. Despite this serious problem, small groups have become a tradition in evangelicalism—one that many pastors consider essential.
This past decade, evangelical leaders have been harping on the importance of small groups. They think that churches with high levels of small group participation have a better shot at growing rather than shrinking. So when the ACP questionnaires return with 9% of churches having fewer than 25% of congregants in small group, that worries Southern Baptist leaders—especially when considering that in 2018, only 6% of churches reported such low attendance in small group.
Of the rest, 19% of churches claim to have 75-100% small group attendance. About 41% of Southern Baptist churches report that 50-75% of their congregation attend small groups, and 22% of churches report 25-50% attendance.
But there’s one hilarious wrinkle in the stats.
About 9% of Southern Baptist churches have more people attending their small group meeting than attend the actual main church service. I wonder if they skip it because small groups usually meet together right after that church service. Even if small groups meet hours or days later, though, members still talk about the most recent sermon topic. So it may well be that these members think they don’t need a double dose of sermonizing.
If that isn’t one of the most uniquely Southern Baptist forms of passive protest, I don’t know what could be.
Southern Baptist churches reporting in—just way fewer of them
The Lifeway report derives from ACPs. But it’s not mandatory for Southern Baptist churches to fill these out. And about a third of SBC churches don’t. Of the ones who do send in an ACP, many also don’t answer all of its questions. All Lifeway will say is that about 69% of their churches report on at least one question on the ACP. That’s a big decline over 2013’s 80%.
Lifeway has given us some fine details here, too:
Around 7 in 10 Southern Baptist congregations (69%) reported at least one item for the ACP in 2023. When you remove those who only reported a financial item, however, only 61% of congregations reported any other statistics in 2023. In 2019, 75% provided at least one item, and 71% reported at least one non-financial number.
That makes sense. Only churches who report a certain percentage/level of giving to the denomination’s Cooperative Program are allowed to send anyone to the big Annual Meeting the next summer.
Even more hilariously, McConnell actually thinks that this underreporting might be hiding big successes for the denomination. I just can’t. Here’s what he said there:
“By any estimate, average worship attendance totals combined for all Southern Baptist congregations is still below pre-pandemic levels,” said Scott McConnell, executive director of Lifeway Research. “However, looking at the reported totals in 2019 and 2023 alone gives the erroneous impression that 23% of attendees have not returned. That is not the case.”
But I suspect the opposite is true. Very clearly, the pastors of the churches that aren’t sending in their ACPs know something he doesn’t.
Southern Baptist pastors know exactly why they can’t reveal the truth
For some respondents, maybe they don’t think the questions are applicable to their churches. But I have trouble imagining why that might be, especially when that Lifeway fine-details post also tells us that 98% of the New England churches reported at least one non-financial item on their ACPs. Meanwhile, only 22% of California churches did. From that United States map we saw earlier, those are the areas of, respectively, the best growth and worst decline in the entire SBC.
Scott McConnell, the executive director of Lifeway Research, had this to say about the churches that aren’t reporting each year:
Some fear this will be used to judge their church, but the reality is real value lies in what we learn from churches together.
Well, duh. Yes, of course a church’s ACP report reflects on both its congregation and its pastor. And pastors know this fact quite well. After all, their denomination glorifies and elevates the pastors of growing churches. They tend to ignore or blame the pastors of smaller and shrinking churches.
A big part of their responses comes from their false and extremely compartmentalized belief that churches that Jesus correctly will always grow, while churches that don’t will wither away. If an insufficiently-Jesusy church grows anyway, it’s because of demons or condoning too much sin. But that’s not why a growing, properly-Jesusing church is growing! Nope! To talk about the growth of ickie fake-Christian churches, here’s Voddie Baucham, a longtime SBC missionary and preacher—and even a recent candidate for the presidency of the denomination.
(As an example of that false belief, by the way, peep this funny Quora page where nobody can actually answer the actual question the asker asked. It’s a logical question: “Why doesn’t God cause false churches to fail leaving the real churches to stay?” But none of the respondents can look it right in the face because of their false beliefs about church growth. Some respondents answered only to issue threats of Hell to all the fakey-fake Christians in all those incorrectly-Jesusing churches.)
In conclusion, if Southern Baptist pastors can’t report successes, they will certainly not report failures. They know that whatever they have in terms of numbers will only make their denomination look worse—not better.
So yes, the SBC is still declining (and oh boy its leaders sure do not want the flocks to know how bad it is)
This report, of course, isn’t brand new. Southern Baptist sites were talking about elements of it last year. But this is one of the first times I’ve seen these elements combined and then shown to the flocks in an official way like this.
There is just so much spin and dishonesty here. The SBC is in serious decline, particularly in areas where it should be growing, like the Deep South. In its strongholds, the percentages of loss might look smaller, but they reflect a lot more churches closing and members leaving than in the areas where the SBC simply isn’t as strong—like Hawaii and New England. Growth in New England looks very impressive on a map, at least until one realizes that the number of churches and members there is nearly inconsequential to the greater SBC picture.
The mother ship’s response to these declines is to spin-doctor whatever they can and conveniently neglect to share the worst of it. And I can’t even blame them for doing it. In their dysfunctional-authoritarian world, failures mean a lot more to them than they do to normies. Failures mean weakness and vulnerability. More than that, failures mean their god doesn’t like them quite as much.
The flocks will grow restive at such sights. They will start wondering if maybe some other Christian group is Jesusing better than theirs. They certainly won’t want to give money or time to a group that is already failing. No, they want to join the winning team. That is the most Jesusy team, obviously.
It’s a messy picture, to be sure. But it’s a very human one. Nowhere do we get a bigger contradiction to Christian claims than in their approach to growth and their response to declines. Very obviously, no gods are involved with any of this stuff. The SBC wants to crack the code of church growth and engineer it like a recipe, which they’ll never be able to do within the world of their beliefs.
No. For that, they need to live and make their homes in reality.
And increasingly, that’s exactly what they’re doing.
NEXT UP: Speaking of the SBC, they recently made an about-face regarding their big sex abuse crisis. We’ll check it out next time. See you soon!
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