For years, conservatives within the Episcopal Church have lambasted its Relativist Humanist Secular Godless Pagan Liberal Leadership for its evil, sinful ways. Proof of this, they’ve said, has been the steady decline in TEC membership, in parallel with other “mainstream” Protestant groups. Only Vibrant, Godly, Bible-Centered, Conservative types, like themselves, could hold the line. Look, they’d say, at the Southern Baptists. Sure, they don’t do all the bishops and rituals and that sort of decorator accent, but they’re going great guns, membershipwise. If only the Nassssty TEC Leaders would emulate the Southern Baptists, then everything would be blue skies and puppy dogs and unicorns (in a Godly Christian Way, of course).
Oops.
For most of four decades, Southern Baptists could boast of rising membership even as more moderate and liberal Protestant denominations lost members in droves. But with membership slightly down last year, and flat for the past five, Southern Baptists face a growing anxiety about their future as they gather for their annual meeting Tuesday in Indianapolis.
“We have peaked,” Southern Baptist statistician Ed Stetzer wrote in an online commentary on the latest statistics from 2007. “…For now, Southern Baptists are a denomination in decline.”
What worries Southern Baptist leaders even more than the membership numbers is a steady decline in the conversion ritual that gave their denomination its name — baptisms. Annual rates of baptisms have steadily declined not only in recent years, but also during the past 35 years. In 2007, Southern Baptist churches reported 345,941 baptisms. That’s down 12% from 2002 and 22% from 1972.
Now, of course, numbers aren’t the most important thing — morality and virtue and being right with God are not determined by a majority vote, to put it crassly. But it’s nice to have a counter to the conservatives in my own denomination that the only way to demonstrate righteousness — their purported righteousness, in particular — is with increasing attendance, “like all those successful Southern Baptists.”
(It also makes me wonder if there isn’t a certain counter-reaction here, a rejection of the SBC and other conservative evangelical denominations and their entanglement in politics — especially the politics of the current administration. The problem with hitching your star to someone is that if their popularity declines, yours might, too.)
(via Les)