Here's the math:
Average Baptisms: 350,000
Estimated Adult Baptisms: 150,000
Adults Re-baptized: 50% (adults) or 75,000
Adults transfer from a non-immersing denomination: 40% (adults) or 60,000
New adult converts: 10% or 15,000
SBC churches: 45,000
A friend of mine points out:
"I’m assuming that the majority of our baptisms are children of members and under the age of 18. So let’s say that adult baptisms are running about 150K per year. If only 10% of the adult are first time professions, then only 15,000 adults are being reached by 45,000 churches and our missionaries. Now granted, some of the rebaptism and baptisms from other faiths like Catholicism may be their first genuine conversions, but the counterargument would be how many of the baptisms are legitimate given some of our shallow evangelism techniques."
Here's the initial excerpt...
“Statistics compiled by the North American Mission Board…reveal that as many as half of all adults baptized in Southern Baptist churches are rebaptisms of persons already baptized by Southern Baptist pastors. Another 40 percent of adults baptized are Christians from other denominations who have never been immersed. Only ten percent of all adults baptized in Southern Baptist churches are making first-time professions of faith”
In her new book, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation, Christine Wicker takes both Southern Baptists and evangelicals to task for their faulty reporting of their actual membership totals. She notes, for example, that: Only 7 percent of members who’ve been in a Southern Baptist church five years of less are true converts, meaning sinners who weren’t raised in the church but came through a profession of faith in Jesus. If you took out the Southern Baptists who married unbelievers and brought them to faith, hardly anybody would be left."
1 comment:
Funny, had a conversation with my dad about this very thing.....numbers (i.e. baptisms, members etc.) are the functional saviors of the SBC and have been for a long time....does the name Jon Rushing mean anything to you? Look back at the past presidents of the SBC....they are typically the pastors of the bigger churches doing the higher number of baptisms...remember when R. G. Lee started to make his push to the SBC throne...well if memory serves, and I think it does, it was around the same time as the number fluffing of the afore mentioned John Rushing...the fact is that the upper echelon of the SBC has always been focused on these numbers...it's been the perch upon which they sit looking down at all the sinners....this group that has seized power of the convention has done damage to what was a proud and Godly denomination and I, for one, am not sure that the SBC as we know it today can shake the image that they have created for it.
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