Here’s a graph of the growth in Southern Baptist membership over the last 50 years. Pretty impressive when you compare it to the decline of the mainline Protestants.
It’s not all good news if you look at the percentages instead of the absolute numbers. It would be even worse if you factored in population increases since 1950.
Ed Stetzer explains why here and provides some solutions here.
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[...] Steve Addison has two graphs up which are quite revealing. The first shows the growth of SBC membership over time, but note the slowing in growth from 1995 to 2005. This means Baptists are still growing but not as fast as before. Look at the second chart carefully: its not charting declines in membership but declines in annual growth rates. This means that Baptists are still growing, but not as fast as the overall population of the USA, and so while they are gaining members they are losing their “share” of the population. Ed Stetzer has more. Tags: baptists, denomination, membership [...]
[...] Congregational size is inversely related to converting new members, activating the existing membership, and maintaining high membership standards. Small churches are more effective in generating commitment and conformity within a movement.Formal theological training is a secularizing force and feeds the trend towards religious bureaucracy and religious doubt.A fully paid professional clergy is a financial hinderance to the survival of small churches and new church starts.For all of the above reasons, it was the upstart Methodists and Baptists that captured the US frontier, not the resource rich and highly educated Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and Congregationalists.Long ago the Methodists surrendered to the temptation of respectability. Will the Southern Baptists follow suit? Are the Southern Baptists headed south? [...]