Southern Baptist Decline Continues

David Walters:

Times are tough, even in the salvation market. After decades of growth, the nation's largest group of Protestants, the Southern Baptist Convention, is reporting losses (in church membership and recorded baptisms) for the third year in a row. Baptisms are at a 20-year low, a figure liable to put an eternity-conscious church into a severe depression.

Cutbacks at Southern Baptist seminaries and agencies are even hitting the denomination's bold, new marketing strategy designed to spread the gospel (and increase the flock) to every soul in North America by 2020. The campaign, called "God's Plan for Sharing" (Yes, GPS), includes a new image media campaign, "We Are Southern Baptists."

What does it all mean for the Southern Baptist future?

Nothing has really changed for years, as the Tennessean reported in Southern Baptist growth plan teeters.

News of Southern Baptist decline is old now, and denial has become more difficult as successive programs to end it have been rolled out, and have failed.

While the money lasts, it is probably easier to let internal divisions go unhealed, and roll out another in a time-honored series of big solutions.

Mike Glenn, pastor of Brentwood Baptist Church in Nasheville, told the Tennessean about GPS:

Sometimes when things aren't working, rather than being honest, we just work the old thing harder. … Once, there was a time when these big, national campaigns would work. But those days are over. They mean well and they'll peddle this thing as hard as they can peddle it, but it's for the 1950s and 1960s, and that world is gone.