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Chuck Kelley on the state of the SBC (Background)
By Dr. Chuck Kelley The year 2000 marked a profound turning point for the Southern Baptist Convention. The beginning of a new century brought a new and unexpected problem to Southern Baptists: prolonged decline. Not noticed at the time, the official SBC statistics from the 2000 church year proved to be a harbinger of things to come. It started with baptisms. Because Jesus identified baptisms as a marker for making disciples in the Great Commission (Matthew 28:18-20), the number of baptisms recorded by its churches has always been an important measure of progress for Southern Baptists. For much of SBC history, the proportional growth in the total number of baptisms consistently exceeded growth in the total number of SBC churches. As the number of churches grew, so did the number of baptisms by those churches. However, in the 2000 church year those trend lines crossed. The number of churches continued climbing, but the number of baptisms by those churches began dropping. That year proved to be a sea change, not an anomaly. A new phenomenon in the Southern Baptist story began to unfold. The graph above was prepared by Dr. Bill Day of the Leavell Center for Evangelism and Church Health at New Orleans … [Read more...]
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