Accelerating Southern Baptist Decline

The Nashville Tennessean pads out the story of Southern Baptist Decline, finally reaching this beating heart:

Bill Leonard, a Baptist historian at Wake Forest University, believes that conservatives underestimated the power of demographics. Much of the mainline decline is due to lower birthrates in those denominations. For years Southern Baptist churches grew because their people had more children than mainliners.

When that changed, fewer Baptist babies meant fewer Baptists, Leonard said.

The decline in children among Baptists is seen in Sunday school attendance.

In 1971, there were 1,434,892 children ages 6 to 11 in Southern Baptist Sunday schools. By 2007, the last year for which statistics are available, that number had dropped by about 455,000 to 979,429. At the same time, the U.S. population grew by 46 percent.

"Biblical inerrancy can't hold off demographic realities forever," Leonard said.

Leonard gives undue credit to the conservative "resurgence," or "takeover" if you prefer the more honest term term.

Neither the Tennessean nor other close looks at well-vetted numbers suggests that the conservatives held anything off. They in fact made a bad demographic situation worse, at every step.

Roger Finke, a sociologist of religion at Penn State University, told the Tennessean that "growing religious groups often share two characteristics. They have a set core of beliefs as a denomination but allow innovative practices in their local congregations."

The conservatives are innovation-hostile:

Finke believes that the conservative resurgence stifled innovation.

"They preserved a more conservative theology," he said, "but they ended up placing controls on local congregations."

The Rev. Rick White of the People's Church in Franklin saw the disapproval of innovation firsthand.

White supported the conservative resurgence, and was part of the conservative takeover of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville. In the 1990s, though, White began to experiment with church growth techniques from seeker-sensitive churches like Willow Creek Community Church outside Chicago and the purpose-driven Saddleback Church in California.

That put White on the outs with conservative leaders. The Rev. Paige Patterson, an architect of the resurgence, once referred to churches like Willow Creek as "Satan-sensitive churches."

. . .

White said that many former resurgence backers eventually dropped out.

"This is not what we signed up for," White said.

Neither the demographics nor the conservative inflexibility is changing.

Whether written on the wall, or elsewhere, the story told by competent, unbiased analysis is the same. Down the now well-established path lies accelerating decline. Unaltered, it may be a denominational suicide pact.