March 6, 2009 | By Paul F. South
NEW ORLEANS - Eighty-nine percent of Southern Baptist churches are not experiencing healthy growth, according to a 2004 study by researchers at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.
On March 3, NOBTS President Chuck Kelley cited the 2004 study in his message on SBC decline. Kelley said that Southern Baptists are become "the new Methodists" and are on the same path of decline as Methodism, due to a lack of evangelistic discipleship.
However, a soon-to-be-released update of the 2004 data shows that only 9.5 percent of SBC churches are expanding at a healthy pace.
The 2004 study, as well as the new data were completed by of Leavell Center for Evangelism and Church Health associate director Bill Day that showed 11 percent of SBC congregations were experiencing healthy church growth.
A1983 study showed that 70 percent of SBC churches were plateaued or declining. In his "new Methodists" address, Kelley noted that while the number of growing SBC congregations has remained unchanged since that 1983 study, the number of declining churches has increased and the number of plateaued churches has decreased.
While these changes are important, the 2004 study revealed even more disturbing information. Using the definition of a growing church (ten percent growth over five years), the study showed that 30.3 percent of churches were growing. However, that figure is misleading because Kelley noted many of these growing churches lacked what he called "minimum evangelistic standards" related to conversion.
"If we add the requirement of at least one baptism in the first and fifth year of the study to those 30.3 percent growing churches, only 23.5 percent would still qualify," Kelley said. "If we add an additional requirement that growing churches have a ratio of at least one baptism per 35 members, the percentage of churches drops to only 11.9 percent. By comparison, during the explosion of church growth in the 1940s and 50s, the ratio of church members to new baptisms per member was in the 20s," Kelley said.
He added that if an additional requirement of 25 percent of new members coming through conversion is used, the number of churches experiencing healthy growth would be only 11.9 percent.
There is an important lesson to be learned in the wake of these numbers, Kelley said. Southern Baptists must evangelize to bring in new members and disciple those converts to bring about spiritual maturity.
"Aggressive evangelism without aggressive discipleship will eventually undo itself," Kelley said. "The most crucial issue in SBC evangelism today is reinventing a process to bring our children, youth, and adults to spiritual maturity in an evangelistic way. Baptist believers must be taught how to be the distinctive presence of Christ in the culture."
In 1945, SBC churches baptized 257,000 people into their congregations. A decade later, SBC churches baptized a (then) record 417,000 people. Since then, the denomination has never seen a greater ten year increase in baptisms. In fact for the past several years, Day noted total baptisms have been declining. Only 345,941 were baptized in 2007.
-30-