Baptists see task force priming growth

— For decades, while America’s mainline Protestant denominations lost millions of members, the Southern Baptist Convention grew and grew.

The nation’s largest evangelical body grew by about 1 million people every five years between 1962 and 1977, going from 10 million to 13 million during that span.

But it took another six years to top 14 million members, seven years beyond that to reach 15 million and nine more years to hit 16 million.

Since 2001, the growth has stalled.

Baptisms have dropped. Some years, membership has dipped. Giving has started to decrease.

The stagnation has led to soul searching among Southern Baptists from coast to coast.

And it helped spark the Great Commission Resurgence Task Force, which called for sweeping changes to Southern Baptist missions efforts.

The recommendations were adopted June 15 at the denomination’s annual meeting in Orlando.

Ed Stetzer, director of Southern Baptist affiliated LifeWay Research, sounded the alarm in April 2008, when he wrote: “For now, Southern Baptists are a denomination in decline.”

Stetzer repeats his warning in the chapter he wrote for a new book - The Great Commission Resurgence: Fulfilling God’s Mandate in Our Time.

The problem, Stetzer suggests, is that the Southern Baptist Convention is looking less and less like 21st-century America.

Southern Baptists are older, whiter and less urban than the rest of the country - and they’re not having as many children as they used to.

“America has changed, but Southern Baptists have not kept up with this change,” Stetzer writes in the new book. “I am not speaking here of spiritual, moral, or even religious change in America ... I am referring to the great demographic changes that have occurred in the United States over the past quarter century that are not reflected in our Southern Baptist churches. As America has changed demographically, Southern Baptists have not.”

The task force, which was chaired by Northwest Arkansas megapastor Ronnie Floyd, shared Stetzer’s concerns. Among other things, it called for a greater focus on church planting in metropolitan areas and a bigger emphasis on reaching the nation’s immigrants.

Thousands of Baptist delegates, called “messengers,” overwhelmingly endorsed the task force’s proposals last month in Orlando.

Floyd, pastor of First Baptist Church of Springdale and the Church at Pinnacle Hills in Rogers, said the vote showed “a spirit of unity and love” and a commitment to reaching the lost - in the United States and around the world - with the Gospel.

“We just thank all of Southern Baptists for believing in the Great Commission,” Floyd said shortly after the vote.

The Great Commission, found in Matthew 28, declares:“Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.”

Stetzer says Baptists are responding and taking steps to address the problem.

“We’re not used to being the ones declining. We’re used to being the ones growing,” he said. “I think this has caught Southern Baptists’ attention so I think that’s a good thing.”

It isn’t just birthrates that are dropping. Conversion rates have also fallen. “It takes more Southern Baptists to see a convert than it did in the past, so I would say we’re less evangelistically engaged and less evangelistically effective,” Stetzer said. “In some ways we’ve lost the home court advantage in American culture.”

Doubt has also crept into the churches. A 2007 survey of 35,000 Americans by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that most Americans - and most self-described evangelicals - don’t believe Christianity provides the only path to God. The survey had a margin of error of plus or minus 0.6percent.

According to the survey, only 36 percent of evangelicals agreed with the statement “my religion is the one true faith leading to eternal life.”

While LifeWay Research’s statistics suggest the number of evangelical “universalists” is somewhat lower, Stetzer says: “I think the reality is there are many people who sit in evangelical pews who do not believe evangelical beliefs.”

Despite the dispiriting statistics, “For me as I look at the future, I’m not discouraged,” Stetzer said. “Part of it is, I’ve read the end of the Book.”

The New Testament portrays, at the end of days, a triumphant Christ and “a glorious church.”

Some Southern Baptist leaders are hopeful that the 2010 annual meeting has laid the groundwork for a statistical revival in years ahead.

“I believe that we’re jumping up and down on the end of a diving board that will launch us into the best years we’ve ever had,” former Southern Baptist President Bobby Welch said while attending the Orlando meeting.

Another former president, Frank Page, stresses that the numbers aren’t all negative.

“For example, if one is looking carefully, you would find that our worship attendance has increased the last two years in a row. Membership is important, but it is not as important as the live, warm bodies in the pew. For the last two years we have more people coming to church than we did in the past. That is not insignificant to me. Baptisms increased 2.2 percent this past year. That is not insignificant in a time when we all are talking about decline, decline, decline.”

Religion, Pages 12 on 07/03/2010

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