COMMENTARY | Posted by Meredith Flynn
LifeWay Christian Resources recently released the Annual Church Profile, a statistical picture of the health of Southern Baptist churches and denomination as a whole. There was some good news: slight increases in baptisms, total number of churches, and giving. But also some bad news: a nearly 1% decline in total membership (from 16,136,044 million last year to 15,978,112 this year). It’s the fifth straight year total membership of SBC churches has dropped.
More concerning, said LifeWay Vice President Ed Stetzer, is the rate of decline. In a Baptist Press column June 13, Stetzer wrote total membership has declined 2% since 2007, including nearly one whole percentage point this year. “This trend points to a future of more and faster decline — and it is a 60-year trend.”
Rather than manage the decline like other denominations, Stetzer said, there are some steps Southern Baptist pastors and leaders can take to “fight for our future.” Four steps he suggests:
1. Rally around the things we agree on under the Baptist Faith & Message, and refuse to engage in battles over secondary issues that will only end in further division.
2. Raise up new leaders who represent a variety of ethnicities and generations.
3. Reach more people. “Southern Baptists love evangelism, as long as someone else is doing it,” Stetzer wrote. “But ‘someone else’ is not doing it either. Every year, it takes more Southern Baptists to reach one lost person, as the member to baptism ratio shows.”
4. Plant more churches by equipping and then supporting church planters.
Now it’s your turn: How can leaders, pastors and members of Southern Baptist churches help reverse the denomination’s trend of decline?
iB2 News 
I agree that there needs to be a consideration to “Raise up new leaders who represent a variety of ethnicities and generations.” But in reality, how many local churches consider a person of another race to be on staff. Then if does happen, do they expect them to be “secondary staff?” (Or a token person-we all know what that means.)
We still have too much racism even among “Christians.”
The change is needed and only men of vision and deeper understanding of God’s Word will look beyond what our culture does.
In today’s multidiverse world with global outreach through technology, sadly the church is losing its relevance to the next generation. As one person said in our associational meeting, we just have churches filled with “Mr. White head and Miss Clairol. ”
We must change our approach, if it takes Facebook, Twitter whatever the medium, we should reach…everyone.
Thank you for fighting for the future—we can change! Podemos cambiar el sistema de racismo. ¡Adelante con valor mis hermanos en Cristo!
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We are asking the wrong question. So long as we focus on building up the SBC rather than building the Kingdom, I don’t believe we can expect God’s blessing. The SBC doesn’t have to grow or even exist for God to be building his Kingdom. Let’s concern ourselves entirely with the Kingdom and stop naval gazing.
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Step one: stop the silly bickering over denominational name change, sinner’s prayers, and the centuries old debate over Calvinism vs Arminianism (we’re not going to solve it). It has been said that Southern Baptists are known more for what we’re against than for what we’re for. Raise up leaders who follow Scripture first and are willing to leave tradition aside if it does not square with the clear counsel of Scripture. God promises to bless His word; He does not promise to bless our opinions!
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