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Baptists…

Posted on Wednesday 24 December 2008


Times are tough, even in the salvation market. After decades of growth, the nation’s largest group of Protestants, the Southern Baptist Convention, is reporting losses (in church membership and recorded baptisms) for the third year in a row. Baptisms are at a 20-year low, a figure liable to put an eternity-conscious church into a severe depression.

Cutbacks at Southern Baptist seminaries and agencies are even hitting the denomination’s bold, new marketing strategy designed to spread the gospel (and increase the flock) to every soul in North America by 2020. The campaign, called "God’s Plan for Sharing" (Yes, GPS), includes a new image media campaign, "We Are Southern Baptists."

But some SBC leaders are concerned that the strategy will fail. The 2009 budget includes zero funding for GPS. "You can’t have a vision that doesn’t have a funded budget," John Avant, former vice president of evangelization at the mission board, told Bob Smietana of The Tennessean…

No doubt there are market forces behind the SBC’s declining statistics.
  • The product is less appealing. Southern Baptists still profess the belief in Christ is the only path to salvation. But a new Pew Forum analysis shows that a majority of all American Christians (52%) think at least some non-Christian faiths can lead to eternal life…
  • The brand is less appealing. After 30 years of theo-political warfare within the denomination and the culture, which has included the merciless purging of evangelical moderates and even conservatives from all Southern Baptist school and agencies, not to mention strong public support for the Republican Party and Administration, the words "Southern Baptist" carry more negatives than positives…
  • The market is changing. Nearly all predominantly white Christian denominations (Methodist, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Episcopal) in America are seeing a slow but steady decline in membership, a decline that reflects changing U.S. demographics. "This is not about orthodoxy or unorthodoxy or failed methods," Baptist historian Bill Leonard, dean of the Wake Forest School of Divinity in North Carolina, told Peter Smith of the (Louisville) Courier-Journal. "This is about demographics and sociology"…
Bringing up a criticism that’s not mentioned in this analysis from the Washington Post, I’d like to weigh in on this question, even though I am a non-Christian by their standards. The Southern Baptist Church has moved so far away from the teachings of Christ that even its loyal members are beginning to notice. It was always the repository of "fire and brimstone" side of Christianity – focused on sin and salvation. But over the recent years, it has drifted further and further into becoming a Church of Hate, a Church dominated by its own politics and American politics, a Church that wants to foist its archaic and idiosyncratic morals on the rest of us. Christ taught "Love thy neighbor as thy self," "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone," and he threw the "money changers" out of the Temple. The fundamentalists took over the Baptist Church, threw out the "Liberals," and drove the Church into the kind of dogmatic quagmire that the original protestants "protested" in the first place long ago – a reliance on rigid "laws" and dogma, the very thing Christ rebelled against himself. The Religious Right has removed the messages of Christ from many Christian Churches in America – but particularly the Southern Baptists. So I would add another "marketing force" to this analysis:
  • The Baptist Church isn’t very ‘Christian’…
It’s a shame. Christ really had a good message…

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