Last month, the 2025 Annual Report of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) finally dropped. Today, let’s explore the various stories hidden between the lines of it. There’s a lot of missing stuff, some new excuses, and enough rah-rah to keep a Super Bowl halftime show busy! Shall we dance?
(This post and its audio ‘cast first went live on Patreon on 11/13/2025. They’re both available now! ALSO: Watch party for the next Alpha Course video on 11/22/2025, 6pm PT on the Discord. It’s about 45 minutes long. Case-sensitive invite code for our server: 8pkasaySuD.)
SITUATION REPORT: The 2025 Annual Report of the SBC finally dropped!
(Note: All Annual Report metrics reflect the previous year’s performance. You can find all of these reports here.)
Last month, the SBC finally published their official 2025 Annual Report. (You can find the whole thing here.) It’s the usual blend of wild hope and hollow rah-rah that these reports have featured for years now.
But hidden within all that data, we can find interesting things happening behind the scenes. SBC leaders are freaking out about declining membership and dwindling donation numbers, and church openings can no longer keep up with church closures to produce net positive growth in their numbers. And even the budget of their top-ranked Executive Committee has been shrinking for years with no relief in sight.
In addition, the Annual Report contains reports from the major SBC entities (like their seminaries and missionary groups). It also reprints sermons preached and presentations given during the meeting itself, along with all of the votes taken and motions raised.
So there is a wealth of information in each of these reports. Every one of them represents the leaders’ overall plans, strategies, and messaging for the year ahead. Every one of them tells a slightly different story.
Let’s see what story this year’s report tells us!
Allez cuisine!
First: The 2025 Annual Report’s overall numbers
The metrics stuff in the 2025 Annual Report starts around p. 123 of the PDF.
This year, the report brings evangelicals a bit of good news. Baptisms are up a little from last year’s report, from 226k to 250k.That brings their all-important baptism ratio, a measure of how many existing members it “takes” to score one baptism, up to 1:51 from 1:57 last year. They like that second number to be as low as possible. So their baptism ratio looks a lot better than it has in previous years, at least on the face of things.
However, their overall membership continues to fall—from 12.9M in 2024’s report to 12.7M in this year’s. That’s a drop of nearly 260k. That’s a big part of why their baptism ratio looks so nice. Had they stayed at their 2020 report’s membership of 14.5M (for 2019), their baptism ratio would be 1:58! Losing 1.8M or so members helped them out a lot there.
Obviously, I don’t expect any SBC leaders to address why that baptism ratio looks so sparkly this year.
The SBC continues to bleed churches, as well. Their drop in numbers this year (-30) isn’t as bad as 2024’s report of -292, nor 2023’s report of -416! But they’re still dropping. They report that they opened 2,321 churches this year, a slight drop from last year’s report of 2,474 churches opened. This tells me that they can no longer shotgun churches every which where and hope it outweighs the number of churches closing and leaving.
Attendance is also lifting, with about 250k more people showing up for headcounts at Sunday services this year (for a total of 4.3M) than last year (4.1M). With their lowered membership numbers helping them out again, that takes last year’s percentage of members in attendance from 31% to 34%.
Weird budget changes of the SBC entities
The Cooperative Program is all-important because it funds all of the SBC’s denominational projects. Here’s a list of them—and their current budgets:
- International Mission Board (IMB): USD$96M
- North American Mission Board (NAMB): $43M
- Their SBC-branded seminaries: About $35M
- The Executive Committee (EC) itself and the SBC’s day-to-day operating expenses: $5.9M
- Its culture-warrior arm, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC): $3.1M
- Their historical library and archives: $458k
Cooperative Program giving is down as well, though not by as much as it has been lately. This year, they took in $446M, which is $8M less than the year before ($457M). This fund has been wobbling quite a bit since 2015, when they reported taking in $478M. They passed the $450M threshold with 2021’s report, and I don’t think they’ll see it get higher than that any time soon.
As a result of this lowered donation level, on p. 124 we can see that almost all SBC entities saw their budgets lowered—with a couple of intriguing exceptions and a fascinating hint of backrooms dealing.
Two seminaries got very small pay raises: Gateway Seminary (a raise of about $100k) and Midwestern Seminary (a raise of about $400k). We’ve been following Gateway for a bit now; its enrollment has risen, and they recently sold off a campus. So they’re in a much better financial situation this year than in previous ones. Midwestern may be in a similar situation.
In addition, the EC didn’t give themselves any kind of pay cut. They actually raised their own operating budget by $30k over last year. (Hey, nobody expected different. Right?)
But here’s where it gets very interesting: Southern Seminary got cut $5k. Their total budget is over $10M/year, so $5k is nothing. It’s a symbolic cut—nothing more. Similarly, the library/archives department got cut about $1k. It’s a shame, since there’s so much that should be preserved by that department, but I guess the SBC isn’t quite as attached to their past reports and activities as I am.
And the still-missing numbers in the 2025 Annual Report
Starting with the 2023 Annual Report, we lost a very important metric: Total Receipts. That year, we only got Undesignated Receipts, and that’s all we’ve gotten ever since. Total receipts has vanished.
That’s interesting to me. Usually, when the SBC changes things like this, it’s because it’s become very bad news that the flocks won’t like. In other words, they stop telling us something when there’s loss after loss in it with no turnaround in sight.
Starting around 2010, we began seeing Total Receipts start wobbling. Some years, it lost money; others, it ricocheted back up again. Of course, usually the wobbling was less than 4% either way. Usually, it was tighter than that, 1-2%. But that’s still hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for a business bringing in more than $11Bn a year. I suspect the wobbling began to tilt mostly into the negatives, so the SBC stopped telling us what it is each year.
Undesignated Receipts is about the last refuge of hard numbers, in terms of money flow. And it’s been wobbling too. It’s even wobbling harder. In the 2025 Annual Report, it fell nearly 5%, from $10Bn to $9.5Bn—a drop of $469M!
I wonder how much longer we’ll get Undesignated Receipts in these reports?
Inflation, lost members, and a denomination so bloated it can’t effectively cut its own costs
Had the flocks even been able to keep up with inflation last year, that $10Bn last year would have been $10.3Bn. But they’re not even doing that.
More than that, when we divide the Undesignated Receipts by membership, a picture further emerges from the data.
- In the 2024 report, we have 12.9M members giving $10Bn
On average, members each gave about $775 in undesignated donations - In the 2025 report, we have 12.7M members giving $9.5Bn
This time, members gave an average of $753
In fact, this entire $700+ range is way higher than the norm. For many years, the SBC has hovered around the $500-600/member mark. Around 2015 or 2016, suddenly there was this herculean push to increase giving. That push hit its peak last year, and it’s declining again. Chances are really good that average will gravitate around $600, as it did in the late 2010s, or maybe even drop lower.
So the SBC has fewer members with less to give. No wonder their annual take is shrinking!
The incredible shrinking churches revealed in the 2025 Annual Report
One more number sprang out at me as I was compiling the data in this year’s Annual Report. It’s a strange one, but I can’t ignore it: The average number of SBC members in these churches.
When I divide total membership by the number of churches, I get some interesting data:
- 1975-1993: 350-399
- 1994-2001: 398-380
- 2002-2011: 379-350
- 2012-2020: 349-300
As of this most recent Annual Report, it was 271. It’s been decreasing gradually and completely inexorably.
Here’s where things get a little tricky. In a report from October 2025, Lifeway revealed that 41% of SBC churches contain fewer than 50 people in attendance. (So they likely have about 150 people enrolled as members, since SBC church attendance tends to be about 30% of the SBC’s total membership.) These small churches, according to Lifeway, are the most likely to be declining in membership. But the percentage of these smallest churches grew between 2019-2024, from 39% to 41%. Meanwhile, those biggest churches tend to be the ones growing.
Only 4% of SBC churches have more than 500 people attending. Taking 4% of their current roster of about 47k churches, that gives us about 1800 churches, so they claim at least 938k members attending, or 22% of the total attending membership of 4.3M last year.
Put another way, 22% of SBC members belong to one of those top 4% churches. The rest of the membership spreads itself increasingly thinly across the remaining small, doomed little bitty churches.
The church situation looks really bad, too
Worse, in April Lifeway revealed that some 90% of Protestant pastors express confidence in the survival of their churches. That confidence is very obviously misplaced.
Thom Rainer, former leader of Lifeway, has been claiming that 15k churches in America might close before this year is out. At the same time, the National Council of Churches thinks 100k churches will close “during the next several years.” It’s hard to say how many churches operate in America, but 15k or 100k should be a noticeable chunk of them.
For some years now, the SBC’s strategy to avoid a net negative number of churches year-over-year has apparently been to shotgun them everywhere and hope they outweigh the ones closing or leaving. A couple of years ago, that strategy began to fail: the SBC simply couldn’t open more churches than it was losing. So in the 2023 Annual Report, it reported a net loss of 416 churches—the third time there’s been any kind of net loss since the 1947 Annual Report (on p. 345 of their PDF). In the two reports since then, the SBC has recorded net negative church numbers.
Going forward, I’m keeping an eye on this situation with church numbers—because I know that smaller churches are at far greater risk of failing and closing.
And the fly in the Vaseline of all of these reports
It’s extremely important to remember that many SBC churches don’t report anything at all to the mother ship. Every year, the SBC’s leaders ask church leaders to fill out an Annual Church Profile (ACP). Then, they use ACP reports to compile the denomination’s metrics every year. But the reports are completely voluntary. Each church decides which questions they will answer—and which they’ll leave blank.
Obviously, churches with good news to report will want to share that information. A failing church will likely not answer any questions at all. As the SBC’s decline has sharpened, its reporting rates have also fallen. In their April report (relink), Lifeway tells us that only 69% of churches answered even one question on the ACP. But in 2019, when things weren’t quite this bad, 75% did.
I’m not sure if they’re ever going to tell us how many churches answered all of the questions. That might not even be possible for some churches. Some of these sub-groups of churches, often called state conventions, create their own questions for the ACP, and many leave some of the mother ship’s questions out of it. This lack of consistency only further confounds the data the SBC could share (even if they wanted to—which they 100% obviously do not).
In the same report, the SBC also admits what most observers likely already thought: church membership rolls are likely inflated because church leaders don’t like removing people’s names from the list. Without accurate information, how is anyone supposed to figure what’s going on?
….Or is that maybe the point here?
The message between the lines of all these numbers in the 2025 Annual Report
What I’m seeing in these numerical tea leaves is a smaller but slightly more devoted userbase. But they’re tapping out financially. If the SBC’s flocks were pizza dough, they’d be stretched so thin they’d be see-through.
I’m also seeing a desperate attempt to buff up really awful numbers to make the flocks think things are way better than they really are. But they are not better. They are not good at all. In fact, they are absolutely awful.
I’ve also got my suspicions that the SBC’s ongoing increase in baptisms comes from people getting re-baptized when they switch evangelical churches—it’s a very common way to publicize the new affiliation and start off nice and fresh. Extremely young children also often get baptized as a way to please their parents; if these children are still Christian by their teens, they often opt to repeat the ritual. So as more small churches fold, their members filter out to larger, healthier churches—and then, of course, get dunked to say “howdy” to their new church family.
Illusory improvements, incomplete data, and trends buried in the data. You know, folks, I’m not sure Southern Baptists trust Jesus quite as much as they say they do!
NEXT UP: What Southern Baptist leaders desperately hope the flocks will hear in this year’s report. See you soon! <3
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