Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
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Southern Baptist membership falls below 13 million nationally
The Southern Baptist Convention lost 241,032 members last year, falling to 12,982,090, according to statistics released this week. Since peaking at 16.3 million early in the century, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination has lost more than 3.3 million members, dropping 17 straight years.
Ryan Burge, a political scientist, statistician and assistant professor at Eastern Illinois University, says Southern Baptists are struggling numerically but are hardly alone.
“Every major denomination is in the same boat. It’s not good,” he said.
Even with the decline, the number of Southern Baptists is still higher than the combined membership of the United Methodist Church, Episcopal Church, Presbyterian Church (USA), Disciples of Christ and Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
After losing roughly 436,000 members in 2020, 409,000 in 2021 and 457,000 in 2022, the rate of Southern Baptist decline at least slowed last year, he noted.
But it’s still the sixth biggest drop in more than 140 years, he said.
“If this would have been the report in 2010, people would call it ‘apocalyptic,’ ‘as bad as it gets.’ But when you go from losing 425,000, to only losing 225,000, it seems better,” he said.
Last year’s membership decline was 1.82%. In-person weekly worship attendance increased by 6.47%, rising from 3,804,490 to 4,050,668, an increase of 246,178.
In 2019, prior to the covid-19 pandemic, average weekly attendance was 5,250,230.
Burge said Southern Baptists are recovering from pandemic-induced attendance declines.
Only 31% of all Southern Baptists attended church on a typical Sunday in 2023, he said. That’s down from 39% in 2010, he added.
People looking for good news in the data can point to baptisms. Nationwide, Southern Baptist congregations reported 226,919 baptisms in 2023, a 25.94% increase over the previous year’s tally and just below the pre-covid total of 235,748 in 2019.
In Arkansas, membership declined last year from 391,092 to 372,576, a loss of 18,516. Attendance rose from 103,927 to 107,673, while the number of baptisms increased from 6,233 to 7,439.
Arkansas’ Southern Baptist membership now exceeds California’s, which saw its membership decline by 63,691.
The Southern Baptist Convention, formed in 1845 in Augusta, Ga., by supporters of slavery, now has congregations in all 50 states but remains strongest south of the MasonDixon line.
Texas, with 2,461,681 members, has the most Southern Baptists, followed by Georgia (1,142,325), North Carolina (989,872), Tennessee (849,306), Florida (768,437) and Alabama (753,653).
The figures were compiled and released by Lifeway Christian Resources (formerly known as the The Sunday School Board of the Southern Baptist Convention).
The statistics were released weeks before the convention will gather for its annual meeting in Indianapolis. Bart Barber, pastor of First Baptist Church in Farmersville, Texas, and a Lake City native, will be stepping down after two years as convention president.
Delegates, known as messengers, will elect Barber’s successor and consider a constitutional amendment barring churches that allow women to serve as “any kind of pastor or elder.”
Messengers are also expected to discuss how the convention should respond to sexual abuse moving forward.
In addition to membership and attendance numbers, church leaders this week also released sexual abuse prevention statistics. Of all Southern Baptist congregations responding, 58% said they “require background checks for all those working with children and students”; 36% said their “staff and those who work with children and students [had] all been trained in reporting sexual abuse cases”; and 16% said their staff and those working with children and students had been trained in “caring for survivors of sexual abuse.”
Twenty-eight of the nation’s 41 state conventions were included in the survey. Arkansas was among 13 states that weren’t included.