Alarmed by a drop in membership and baptisms, members of the Southern Baptist Convention are set to consider at their annual meeting, which starts Tuesday, a 10-year initiative to reverse the decline.
The number of people baptized in Southern Baptist churches fell for the third straight year last year to the lowest level in 20 years, and membership in the nation's largest Protestant denomination decreased by close to 40,000 to 16.27 million last year. Leaders of the convention say the numbers could represent a turning point for the organization.
For thirty years, we have been hearing over and over again how the more conservative denominations have been gaining ground as mainstream denominations - the United Methodists, the Presbyterians, the UCC, the Episcopalians - were losing them. At the time, I remember reading an article that showed that some of the reports used misleading information (imagine that!) to show the difference; in particular, I remember how graphs were used, although it had to be pointed out the graphs used different scales of measurement, and were therefore incomparable. Yet, we have heard over and over again that the mainstream churches are dying, or even dead.
Now, the Southern Baptists are facing a numbers crunch as well.
"There is a challenge before us to not stagnate," said Jeff Ginn, executive director of Southern Baptist Conservatives of Virginia, which is part of the convention but is bucking the trend and has seen an increase in baptisms. "Many of the mainline denominations are facing that challenge. It's been slower to come to us, but I think it is on our doorstep. We don't want to go into decline."
My favorite part of the article follows immediately from this passage quoted above, as it demonstrates that the mainstream denominations aren't the only ones flailing about trying to find a way to change things.
But some are doubtful about the initiative, which includes strategies to reach out to younger demographics, such as college students and families with young children, with programs and worship services geared more to their interests and tastes.
It also encourages Southern Baptists to become more proactive about sharing their religious beliefs with non-Baptist friends and co-workers. Skeptics say Southern Baptists have launched similar plans before, with little success.
"There is just not a lot of enthusiasm for programmatic solutions from the churches and specifically from pastors," said Greg Warner, executive editor of the Associated Baptist Press, an independent media outlet. "What they say is, 'It's not a program that we need; it's a renewal of commitment or renewed commitment [to the Baptist faith], and you can't package that in a program.' "
For a generation, the United Methodist Church has tried, and failed, to come up with The Solution to its membership decline. The most vocal one has been an attempt to become more conservative, aping the worst aspects of fundamentalism, which is ill-suited to the far more open theological and pastoral history of the denomination. Like every other attempt, it, too, has failed.
Now, before some concluding remarks, I thought I'd put up a laugh-out-loud (LOL) quote from the article that shows how purblind some people, ignorant of the fundie takeover the of Southern Baptist Convention, can be:
In recent years, young conservative ministers and seminary students, who helped elect Page, have used blogs to rush into the debate on the denomination's future, raising questions about its tight leadership structure, the status of women and its ban on alcohol for fear that the church is becoming too fundamentalist.(italics added)
It was twenty years ago that the fundies cemented their hold on power in the denomination. When I was at Wesley, back in the early 1990's, we had a transfer student come from Southern Theological Seminary in Louisville, KY, because the fundies were taking over, including demanding theological conformity, itself a heresy once upon a time in Baptist circles.
My own sense of what is happening is the further secularization of the United States has finally leaked down to the fundamentalist denominations. There will always be a religious element in American society, far larger than in Europe, where churches are empty. Relatively speaking, however, I believe that the general trend toward smaller church membership, attendance, and presence in the larger society, is something that has less to do with programmatic decisions than it does with larger social and cultural forces. Whether I think this is a good or bad thing is irrelevant; it is what it is, and all churches are going to have to deal with it at some point, in a way that is far more realistic than trying to come up with The Solution that rescues the denomination from oblivion, relative or otherwise.
