Southern Baptists will confront a pattern of declining membership, baptisms and attendance as members gather for their annual meeting Tuesday and Wednesday in St. Louis. It's a pattern leaders hope to turn around by establishing more churches.
From 2014-2015, the Southern Baptist Convention lost 204,409 members, a decrease of 1.3 percent, according to the recently released Annual Church Profile put together by LifeWay Christian Resources. With 15.3 million members, the Southern Baptist Convention remains the nation's largest Protestant denomination by far, but the yearslong decline has leaders searching for answers.
In a blog post Tuesday reacting to the dropping numbers, the Rev. Ronnie Floyd, Southern Baptist Convention president and senior pastor of the multicampus Cross Church in Northwest Arkansas, encouraged church members to increase evangelism and berated Southern Baptists for a lack of such efforts in recent years.
"We are losing our nation spiritually," Floyd said in the post.
Floyd also pointed out that the decrease in the number of baptisms, which the convention statistics showed to be 10,089, or about 3 percent less than 2014, might be misleading because 8,661 churches did not report their number of baptisms.
"The greatest need in America is the next great spiritual awakening," Floyd said in the post. "Anyone who denies this needs to adjust their spiritual glasses concerning the spiritual condition of our nation and the need in this hour."
Arkansas churches followed this pattern of decline.
In 2012, there were 513,174 Southern Baptists in Arkansas but the convention lost 8,442 members by 2013, dropping to 504,732. The most recent report shows that Arkansas has 488,322 Southern Baptists, about a 3 percent decrease from 2013.
Jimmie Sheffield, an executive administrator for the Arkansas Baptist State Convention, said Southern Baptist churches are losing members for reasons that are hard to pin down.
Less than half of Baptists (including Southern Baptists) surveyed in a 2014 study by the Pew Research Center were having children who would be potential new members for the churches. The study showed that 73 percent of the about 3,000 Baptists surveyed were not parents, but that people who were age 30-64 represented 61 percent of the group.
It's not just the Baptist population that is declining -- nationally, all groups of Christians are getting smaller.
The Pew study showed the overall Christian population in the United States dropped by almost 8 percentage points while the number of people who identified as agnostic, atheist or "nothing in particular" increased by 6.7 percentage points from 2007 to 2014 to roughly 22 percent of the population.
Adherents of non-Christian faiths, including Jews, Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus also grew, with a 1.2 percentage-point jump.
Another 2014 study showed that just over half of the Baptists surveyed attended church at least once a week, while 32 percent went a few times a year.
However, for some Arkansas churches like First Baptist Church of Mena, attendance has grown in the past year.
The Rev. Russell Threet, pastor of the church, said that during the eight months he has been leading the congregation, he has seen a small but steady increase in Sunday morning attendance.
The church usually has between 150 and 160 people filling the pews on Sundays, and the growth is a result of a compelling message, Threet said.
"We are just trying to do things the right way," he said. "We are preaching and teaching the truth and people respond to the truth."
The Annual Church Profile did contain some good news. The number of churches in the Southern Baptist Convention increased for the 17th consecutive year, this time by 294 for a total of 46,793 churches. Much of that increase is because of the convention's emphasis on church planting, or establishing churches.
The convention is working toward a North American Mission Board goal of starting 15,000 Southern Baptist churches by 2022.
The mission board is an organization supported by churches within the Southern Baptist Convention that does evangelism and starts churches in North America. The board provides area-specific training for people who want to establish churches in urban environments and cities or for people who want to revive a dying church.
The Arkansas Baptist State Convention also has training for pastors and works to start churches throughout the year, Sheffield said.
"We put a lot of effort and energy into church planting," Sheffield said.
Establishing a church can happen quickly or take as long as two years, he said.
The convention finds regions in Arkansas that have a need for a new church in a variety of ways -- sometimes an individual or a congregation goes to the convention asking for help getting a church established, sometimes the convention studies an area and discovers a need and other times a new church will sprout from what was a Bible study in someone's home, Sheffield said.
Arkansas Southern Baptists start an average of 27 churches per year, according to the state convention website.
"Church planting and starting is a major ministry of the Arkansas Baptist State Convention," Sheffield said.
SundayMonday on 06/12/2016