It is often said that numbers don’t lie. However, the numbers can be misleading especially if Baptists are doing the counting. Now we all are fully aware of the notorious church membership rolls with people on them who have not been in a church in years. However, if we look at the figures of the latest annual church profile report I think we can get a pretty good look at the state of our Baptist churches.
The first thing we should do when looking at these figures is to throw out the total membership number of just over 16 million. The number is flawed and virtually worthless. A more accurate figure can be found looking at the primary worship attendance figures. According to the church profile this number is a little more than 6 million. Now it is true that we have people who regularly attend our worship services who are not members but I think it is safe to say that the 10 million members who are not attending the primary worship service are members in record keeping only and might as well be considered non-members (and most likely lost).
Now then, let’s assume that the 6 million attending worship is a more accurate figure of membership. We can they figure in, based on Barna research that nearly 2/3of those regularly attending worship services are in fact not saved. If we subtract that 2/3 from the 6 million we surprisingly come up with just over 2 million people. This just happens to be the number of people reported to be involved in discipleship training.
So what are we then left with? Well, the real core of the Southern Baptist Convention is just over 2 million. We have 4 million who are regularly attending worship services but most likely either need to be saved or at the very least need to get involved in discipleship training. Fortunately, they are already inside and simply need to be moved to get more involved. That leaves 10 million on our rolls that really should simply be considered part of the larger world population that is simply lost. We can either view this as a 10 million-member loss and be disheartened or we can realize that this is the truth of our convention and get to work at getting a real membership total of 16 million and beyond.
Another issue to look at is that of baptisms. If we assume that the 2 million involved in discipleship training are those people who are primarily responsible for the work that allowed for the 387,947 baptisms last year. That brings the ratio number of baptisms to membership to 1 baptism per 5 to 6 members. This number is much more encouraging than the 1 to 42 ratio when based on the membership number of 16 million. This suggest that if we could get the 4 million others who are already attending our worship services into discipleship training chances are very likely that we could easily see the magical number of 1 million baptisms in a year.
I believe that the thing we should take away from this look at the numbers is the importance of discipleship training. The next questions we need to answer then are:
1) What exactly constitutes discipleship training?
2) How do we best do discipleship training?
3) How can we get those current 4 million not involved in discipleship training involved and how do we get new baptized members involved?
Well, I don’t have all the answers to those questions but hopefully we can work together to get them answered. God bless you all and remember to live today knowing that it is in His Kingdom that you live.
