Southern Baptist Math

Tom Ascol, at Founder's Ministries Blog is doing some number crunching on the SBC. I am no math whiz - failed Algebra twice, but this math is simple addition and subtraction with a little bit of fractions thrown in. What is he discovering? Statistics taken from the SBC Annual Church Profile list that there is a total SBC membership of 16,287,494. Out of the 16 + million people there is just over 6 million who attend Sunday morning services. Here is the math: 6 million people amount to about 37% of 16 million. So within the SBC there is only a 37% attendance rate of those who are listed as members. Here are some of Ascol's conclusions:

What this means is that the typical Southern Baptist church baptizes lots of people who simply do not hang around long enough even to become regular Sunday morning attenders. Jesus talked about the change that must take place in a person's life before he can enter into or even see the kingdom of God. He spoke of that change in terms of birth. The analogy of birth tells us much about the nature of the change. A birth is followed by a life, except in those tragic cases of stillbirths. But under normal circumstances when there is a birth, we can expect there to be signs of life--eating, crying, breathing, growth and development. Where such signs of life are nonexistent, you can be sure that something has gone horribly wrong.

Are SBC churches producing millions of spiritual stillbirths? It certainly appears so. Ascol is right, it is time we rethink evangelism. Southern Baptists need to ease off the baptism calculators and start thinking more seriously - more theologically - about missions and evangelism.