close
close
orange

Southern Baptist Convention: Membership drops below 13 million

Vaseline

Despite the decline in membership, the country’s largest Protestant denomination saw an increase in baptisms and weekly church attendance.

The Southern Baptist Convention’s annual count reported 241,000 fewer members and 292 fewer churches in 2023, another annual decline for the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

Lifeway Research, a division of the SBC publishing arm, said Tuesday in its annual church profile that there were 46,906 Southern Baptist churches and 12.9 million members in 2023, up from 13.2 million in 2022.

The back-to-back losses in key measurements over years have contributed to several arguments within Southern Baptist circles for the best solution, most recently leading to six candidates for president of the Convention announcing their bids ahead of the SBC annual meeting in June in Indianapolis.

The SBC is far from alone in facing these kinds of downward trends within American Christianity, but concerns are compounded by unique financial challenges surrounding abuse reform, for example.

Opposition conservatives, seeking to pull the SBC further to the right, have responded to declining membership and finances by emphasizing evangelism and sometimes shifting focus from abuse reform.

Meanwhile, many mainstream conservatives are calling for greater support for abuse reform and initiatives to promote greater racial and ethnic diversity among Southern Baptist leadership, to avoid scaring off future generations of churchgoers.

“We are grappling with big issues like eradicating racism and ending sexual abuse,” Jeff Iorg, chairman of the SBC Executive Committee, said Tuesday in an opinion column accompanying the latest data. “We are an unruly, wayward, sinful bunch, and sometimes we act like it.”

Iorg recently took his position as the top employee of the convention’s administrative arm, which consists of approximately 20 employees and an 86-member board of elected representatives. Of all the SBC’s member bodies, called entities, the Executive Committee is perhaps most acutely feeling the pressure of converging declines in membership, churches and giving.

In February, members of the executive committee reported another annual decline in total receipts to the Cooperative Program, a church budget that receives revenue from donations to the church and benefits many of the SBC entities.

For the executive committee, that reduced donation was a factor in its recent decisions to lay off staff and approve a smaller budget for the 2024-2025 fiscal year. Meanwhile, the SBC’s two mission agencies – the International Mission Board and the North American Mission Board – have continued to receive steady funding from the Cooperative Program. An ongoing review of the task force is looking at a 2009-2010 initiative that ultimately changed the distribution formula for co-op program funding, and a report on the task force’s findings is expected May 13.

Last year’s SBC data: Southern Baptist Convention sees biggest drop in membership in one year: What you need to know about why

‘Do more than one thing at a time’

The SBC’s total membership has fallen by 3.3 million since its peak in 2006, when there were 16.3 million members.

Yet this year’s annual church profile also includes some growth, namely the number of baptisms and average weekly attendance.

“More than 4 million people gathered in Southern Baptist worship services each week (about four times more than the combined number of NFL attendees on any weekend in the fall),” Iorg said in an opinion column.

In the latest annual church profile, the highest-ranked states in total membership and number of churches are Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia.

The total number of baptisms increased for the third consecutive year, a sign of success last seen more than thirty years ago. Send Network, the church planting arm of the SBC, has shifted priorities in recent years to engage more urban and bilingual communities. The organization recently named a new vice president to lead the initiative focused on church planting in Spanish-speaking communities.

The latest data, while discouraging in some areas, shows that “the Southern Baptist Convention can actually do more than one thing at a time,” SBC President Bart Barber said in an opinion column accompanying the latest data release. “We have witnessed an increase in church attendance, while making consistent progress in strengthening our churches’ defenses against sexual abuse.”

Barber has served as the highest-ranking elected official in the convention since 2022 and will conclude his second and final term after chairing the upcoming SBC annual meeting in Indianapolis. The absence of an incumbent candidate running for re-election has led to the recent surge of six candidates running for president of the SBC.

A notable addition to the latest annual church profile were statistics on churches’ policies and practices to prevent and respond to sexual abuse. Some state Southern Baptist conventions received more responses than others, leading to drastically different numbers depending on the state. But on average:

  • 58% of churches require background checks for staff and volunteers who work with children and students.
  • 36% of churches indicate that their staff and volunteers are trained in reporting sexual abuse.
  • 16% of churches reported that staff and volunteers are trained in caring for abuse survivors.

Latest news on SBC abuse reform: New nonprofit to lead SBC abuse reform after delays in launch of abuser database

Liam Adams covers religion for The Tennessean. Reach him at [email protected] or on social media @liamsadams.

Related Posts