Much Less With Much More

I just did a little research about the state of the church in America. Some of what I discovered broke my heart. For instance, there are communities in the north eastern part of the United States where as high as 66% of the population are classified as post Christian. In fact 8:10 of such cities are the north east. The other two are in the Pacific Northwest.

While I am not ashamed of my heritage in the Southern Baptist Convention, which dates back to my salvation in 1984, nor do I boast about it. There are more than 47,000 churches in the convention. That is up about 2,900 more congregations than a decade ago. That should be reason to celebrate.

While we have 2,900 more churches, baptisms have declined eight of the past ten years. In fact, baptisms have dropped over 26% since 2007. That is alarming. While we have significantly more churches, we are reaching significantly lower amounts of people through all our evangelism emphasis. To take this a little bit further, the ration would be one baptism per 59 churches. Disheartening.

Multiple books and articles have been written to reveal the reasons why this occurs. Studies and surveys have been done to gather insightful information to reverse this trend. Still the steady decline in baptisms continue.

I've read numerous books on this topic and the subject of church growth. I have a few shelves lined with such books. In the early days of my ministry those things consumed me. Not so much these days. I really only concern myself with the numbers of how many are getting saved and how many are following in baptism. That informs me if we are keeping the Great Commission. [Matt 28:19-20].

I believe the Lord has shown me one of the major reasons why churches are losing ground. I plan to share that with our church this weekend. It will require change. It will require some adjustments. We will see if the congregation and other congregations are willing to alter their present courses, if they are ineffective in the area of evangelism. Time will tell.