Baptisms have dropped to a 20-year low in the Southern Baptist Convention, and membership and giving are down, too. The declines are causing hand-wringing in the nation’s largest Protestant body — and setting the stage for intense debates when SBC leaders gather on June 23-24 in Louisville, Ky., for their annual convention. What will they do?
Apart from the cutbacks that the downturn is causing at Southern Baptist seminaries and agencies, the real drama centers on the impression that Southern Baptists are no longer successful at winning converts, which is their principal reason for being. Some SBC leaders have drafted a manifesto, the Great Commission Resurgence, that they hope will breathe new life into the convention. Yet others are expressing opposition ahead of the convention.
Morris Chapman, president of the SBC executive committee, is opposed to one of 10 articles in the revival plan: article IX, which calls for streamlining the denomination’s bureaucratic agencies. In a rare show of disunity, he publicly aired his disagreements with the plan’s authors, SBC President Johnny Hunt and Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary President Daniel Akin. Others fear that the plan, if adopted, may end up merging two of the denomination’s most important institutions, the North American Mission Board and the International Mission Board.
Recent reports, such as this one in The Tennessean, show that the convention is sharply reducing the number of missionaries it will be sending across the globe.
About 3,500 Southern Baptists have already signed onto the manifesto. Look for its authors to push for a motion forming a committee that would report to the convention on ways to implement the plan at next year’s meeting in Orlando, Fla.
BACKGROUND
The issue is important because the Southern Baptist Convention has 16 million members and a cultural prominence and political influence few other denominations can match. But the issue of growth or decline also hits home with a community whose theological ethos is summed up in the Great Commission to win souls for Christ.
The convention will also vote on a resolution congratulating Barack Obama on his election as the nation’s first African-American president and calling on Southern Baptists to pray for him and seek God’s blessings on his administration. The motion stands in contrast to widely publicized comments by the Rev. Wiley Drake, pastor of First Southern Baptist Church in Buena Park, Calif., and former second vice president of the convention, who told Fox News Radio he regularly prays for Obama’s death.
Passage of a resolution celebrating Obama’s historic election would not indicate that Southern Baptists are tilting to the Democrats after decades of support for Republican candidates by both SBC leaders and rank-and-file. The convention will likely pass at least one resolution critical of Obama’s views on abortion and possibly one on gay civil unions.
RESOURCES
The Baptist Press is the news agency of the SBC, and it has a number of stories and resources related to the upcoming convention and debates.
The Associated Baptist Press is an independent Baptist news agency that also covers the SBC.
Towers Online, the news service of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has a primer about the SBC and its annual meeting.
The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life has a graphic (above) showing that one in six Americans are Baptists. The graphic breaks that figure down by the various Baptist denominations.
Read a June 11, 2009, story about the disputes over the revival resolution in the Western Recorder, the chief Baptist periodical in Kentucky.
Read a June 10, 2009, Religion News Service story, “Southern Baptists look for cures to stagnation” (posted at the Pew Forum), and a sidebar on the request to have the SBC honor Obama’s election.
Read a Dec. 18, 2008, story from The Tennessean (posted by USA Today) on the SBC difficulties.
Read a Dec. 22, 2008, post by David Waters, editor of the “On Faith” site of The Washington Post, crunching the numbers and analyzing the SBC downturn.
Read a June 12, 2008, blog post at Christianity Today about the previous SBC convention, and the disputes over numbers and membership rolls. Ted Olsen lists several statistics chronicling the downturn.
