ha, that’s funny. As a former SBCer (shame), this sounds like them. They will never admit defeat, never give up, because they’ve set themselves in a position that to do either of those is to admit they have been wrong at some point in time. Nope, better to die out and look like a martyr for a cause in their history books:)

best hat tip ever.

I thought it was a decent article, I dont’ think they are really blaming it on not enough childrens, more that there are reasons why it happened, and that’s a big one. It’s not like they said, ‘hey, noobs, have more kids or else we’re gonna decline even further!’

From the inside, one reason for the decline in baptisms is that there is a strong push away from toddler baptism. Baptizing 4 year olds increases you baptism rate because you get to baptize the majority of them twice. So I think that may actually be a good thing.

But I love how they note the drop in mainline denomination membership, and the rise in non-denominational church membership in the same paragraph. Couldn’t that be a correlation? Hello…..

Anyway, interesting article.

-Alan

another article on the decline in SBC:
http://www.tonycartledge.com/2008/04/stetzer-calls-it-straight.html

Ed Stetzer has a commentary on this at his blog. He said essentially that its time the SBC wake up and realize they are in decline.

“All Southern Baptists should recommit to a life of loving people and ministering to people without strings attached so people will be more open to hearing the Gospel message.”

Wait, isn’t that a string attached to the end of that sentence?

you said it david. not me. and thanks for the link jonathan. i saw that too.

I’m a longtime religion journalist,who has just written a new book called “The Fall of the Evangelical Nation.” (Take a look at this month’s Mother Jones, if you want to know about it.)

My first clue that birthrates were falling among Southern Baptists, just as they have among every group that rises in income and education, was when prominent Southern Baptist leaders began preaching that God really, really wants women to bear lots of children.

Some of them are now saying that in fact, God doesn’t like birth control at all. God feels that women would have better lives and be closer to His will if they just trusted in Him to give them as many children as He wants them to have.

Since children who can’t yet read are among the SBC’s most fertile mission fields and converting an adult who hasn’t been raised in some kind of church is nigh unto impossible, it might be true that Southern Baptist women need to get busy in the bedroom.

[...] Josh Brown points out a story suggesting that Southern Baptist membership is declining because Baptists aren’t having enough kids. They used to have “bring-a-friend-to-church” Sundays… [...]

[...] Brown had made mention, a few months ago, that the SBC is in serious decline, and made the point of poor mode/method as [...]