Southern Baptist Convention membership declines, but number of churches increases

The Southern Baptist Convention has seen a further decline in its membership, the ninth year that the numbers have reportedly gone south.

"God help us all! In a world that is desperate for the message of Christ, we continue to be less diligent in sharing the Good News," Frank S. Page, SBC Executive Committee president and CEO, has been quoted by the Baptist Press as saying. "May God forgive us and give us a new passion to reach this world for Christ."

The Annual Church Profile, compiled by LifeWay Christian Resources and released on Tuesday, reveals that the Christian denomination's membership totals to 15,294,764. This is 204,409 members less than in 2014, which was 15,499,173 million.

The number of churches affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention, on the other hand, went up by 294, marking the 17th year that the number increased.

Baptism, for the first time since 1947, went under 300,000. The latest report had recorded 295,212 baptisms, which is 10,089 short of the previous year's number of 305,301.

Their average weekly attendance, meanwhile, was 5,577,088 in 2015, having dropped by around 97,000 from the previous year's 5,674,469 people. Attendance in Sunday School, Bible Studies, and Small Groups also went down from 3,723,679 to 3,605,303 people.

Ronnie Floyd, president of the Southern Baptist Convention and senior pastor of Cross Church in northwest Arkansas, however said that statistics do not always tell the whole story. In an article he wrote on Baptist Press, he said that more than 8,661 churches did not report their profiles.

Floyd also said that the number of churches is growing. From 51,094 congregations in 2014, including churches and mission churches, there are now 51,441 congregations. Moreover, their "present giving through the national Cooperative Program is increasing," the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering for International Missions was the largest in its 127-year history, and the Annie Armstrong Easter Offering for North American Missions, he said, is encouraging.

"Therefore, from my perspective, we need to be very careful in making comparisons because any comparison is not from all of our churches," he wrote. "Yet, the facts are the facts. And since we have, in recent years, had thousands of non-reporting churches, to some degree there is room for comparison."

Meanwhile, Mark Chaves, a professor of sociology at Duke University, said that the decline in church membership started to be felt by Protestant and Roman Catholic churches even back in the '60s and '70s, but the more significant decline had become more noticeable in conservative Protestant churches in the past decade.

"There's just a national trend of declining religious involvement, and conservative churches are not immune to it, as they thought they were for a while," he said, as quoted by the Associated Press.