Back in the early 1980s, the Southern Baptist Convention was enduring the crucial years of its civil war over — here’s the term headline writers hated — “biblical inerrancy.”

I was at the Charlotte News and then the Charlotte Observer back then, in a city in which one of the major roads was named after Billy Graham. The SBC spectrum in Charlotte ranged from hard-core conservatives to “moderates” who were basically liberal mainline Protestants with better preaching.

During that time, a moderate church welcomed the the late Rev. Gardner C. Taylor of Brooklyn to its pulpit for a series of sermons (“moderates” don’t have “revivals”). Taylor would make just about anyone’s list — Top 100 or even Top 10 — of that era’s most celebrated preachers. In 1980, Time magazine hailed him as the “the dean of the nation’s black preachers.” That’s saying something.

During one sermon, Taylor briefly addressed the SBC wars and added, with a slight smile, that he always thought that the main book in the Bible that Southern Baptist leaders “considered inerrant was the Book of Numbers.”

Southern Baptists have always loved their numbers (I grew up in Texas, the son of a Southern Baptist pastor) and, for decades, those statistics made their leaders smile.

Things are a bit more complex, right now, as seen in this RNS headline: “Southern Baptists lost nearly half a million members in 2022.” That story, and some other related online materials, provided the hook for this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in).

Before we get to that solid news piece, by religion-beat veteran Bob Smietana (a scribe in Nashville for years), let’s grab some context from a new Substack post by chart-master Ryan Burge, a GetReligion contributor (and former Southern Baptist), with this headline: “The 2022 Data on the Southern Baptist Convention is Out.”

Check out these numbers from the past 80 years, a period in which the SBC’s rise “is just unmatched.” This is long, but essential:

— 6 million to 7 million between 1946 and 1950.

— 7 million to 8 million between 1950 and 1954.

— 8 million to 9 million between 1954 and 1958.

— 9 million to 10 million between 1954 and 1962.

— 10 million to 11 million between 1962 and 1967.

— 11 million to 12 million between 1967 and 1972.

— 12 million to 13 million between 1972 and 1977.

— 13 million to 14 million between 1977 and 1982.

Notice the pattern? Every five years or so, another million people were added to Southern Baptist membership rolls across the United States.

But then: It took eight years to get to 15 million. Eleven years to add another million. So, nearly two decades to add two million.

The high-water mark was 2006, when the SBC reported 16.3 million members.

— It was below 16 million by 2011.

— It was below 15 million by 2018.

— It was below 14 million by 2021.

The current membership stands at 13,196,979. That’s basically the same number as 1978.

Hold that thought, because we will come back to Burge for another crucial set of contrasting numbers.

Meanwhile, here is some crucial summary material from Smietana at RNS:

Membership in the Southern Baptist Convention was down by nearly half a million in 2022, according to a recently released denomination report. Nashville-based Lifeway Research reported Tuesday (May 9) that the SBC had 13.2 million members in 2022, down from 13.68 million in 2021. That loss of 457,371 members is the largest in more than a century, according to the Annual Church Profile compiled by Lifeway.

Once a denomination of 16.3 million, the SBC has declined by 1.5 million members since 2018, and by more than 3 million members since 2006. The COVID-19 pandemic played a role in the downturn, as did the reality that as older members die off, there are fewer young people to replace them.

In some ways, SBC statistics are starting to look rather “suburban,” in a demographic sense of that word, and, at times, surprisingly mainline Protestant — especially when it comes to an aging flock. I would like to know if anyone has updated stats on marriage trends in SBC churches (and birth rates, as well).

Meanwhile, one thing Southern Baptists have always done is build churches, start new missions and lots of people in pews.

Thus, this is a crucial yin-yang paragraph in the RNS report:

The denomination also lost 416 churches and another 165 “church-type” missions, according to the report.

Even as membership dropped, attendance at worship services continues to recover from pandemic lows. Attendance was up 5% to 3.8 million in 2022, after falling from 4.4 million in 2020 to 3.6 million in 2021, due largely to COVID-19 disruptions.

As I explained in the podcast, I think all kinds of things are affecting these numbers — besides COVID-19 and the fact that denominations today tend to do a better job with stats in general, in the age of computers.

At the same time, as Burge has noted, the SBC Is clearly losing untold thousands of members to nondenominational evangelical churches — the fastest growing part of the American religion marketplace. Most of these, frankly, look and sound like Southern Baptist flocks all along the doctrinal and cultural spectrum.

It’s also true that the Southern Baptist Convention simply doesn’t have, for doctrinal reasons, a charismatic-Pentecostal wing. That’s another growing part of American (and global) religion and lots of SBCers are probably headed over there.

This brings us to the side effects of the claims that the current SBC leadership is somehow “woke” and veering left. In part, this is almost certainly — trigger warning: my opinion — linked to the Donald Trump era in ways that have more to do with style, culture and online warfare than outright politics.

But Trump the man and Trump the politician caused major tensions in mainstream evangelicalism, especially among donors, and the SBC got caught in that crossfire. Also, debates about how to deal with sexual abuse in churches have created fire and heat. The coronavirus pandemic divided many Baptists, along with everybody else. Debates about the ordination of women are back on the front burner, for now.

If I was a reporter seeking a window into nuts-and-bolts SBC life, I would try to get some stats on whether the number of marriages is rising or falling (almost certainly the latter). Are Southern Baptists sliding into American suburban patterns when it comes to birth rate, as well?

Then there are arguments about CRT — Critical Race Theory. Some SBC leaders have attacked CRT — period. Others have said that parts of CRT, a term that’s hard to define, are valid and that other parts are, for theological reasons, unsound. For others, anyone attacking CRT at all is flirting with racism.

Over the past two decades, as SBC growth slowed and then slid into decline, Black SBC congregations grew in number, size and clout. Latino missions have grown, too.

Journalists need to know that. If the “woke” wars have, in any way, discouraged work in Black SBC churches, l then that’s part of this stark statistical landscape.

In conclusion, let me return to an important part of the aforementioned Burge post — focusing on baptism statistics. Read this carefully:

The Southern Baptist annual baptism numbers were really strongly back around 2010. In fact, they baptized more than 300,000 people annually from 2009 through 2014. That’s really good! That’s ~2% of all the members of Southern Baptist churches being baptized each year.

A good example is 2012: lost 106K members, but baptized 315K. Lots of people heading for the exits, but also a lot more joining churches. Good signs.

However, all those indicators have turned the wrong direction now. Obviously COVID had a deleterious impact on baptisms—they dropped to just 123,000 in 2020, and they have rebounded a bit. Yet in 2022 they were just 180,000—about half the rate that was reported in 2009.

In 2012, there were 3 baptisms for every member lost.

In 2022, there were 2.7 members lost for every baptism.

That math just ain’t mathing.

No denomination can sustain losses like the SBC is experiencing and not be fundamentally changed.

The official Baptist Press report on these numbers included some other interesting baptism numbers, with a few state-by-state information bytes that might surprise outsiders.

As more people gathered in person (for worship), they witnessed more baptisms. In 2022, Southern Baptist congregations baptized 180,177 people, a 16% increase over 2021. …

States with the most baptisms in Southern Baptist congregations in 2022 were Florida (22,015), Texas (20,540), Tennessee (15,975), Georgia (15,021) and North Carolina (11,325).

OK, that isn’t surprising. Tell us something that we didn’t know?

In 2022, Southern Baptist congregations averaged one baptism for every 73 members. Several state conventions had a much lower ratio of baptisms to members, including seven who baptized at least one person for every 25 members: Montana (1:14), Iowa (1:15), Pennsylvania-South Jersey (1:15), Dakota (1:16), New England (1:17), Michigan (1:21), New York (1:23), New Mexico (1:25) and Puerto Rico (1:25) conventions.

Baptism trends — which often show trends in growth and evangelism — are actually better outside the Bible Belt?

Stay tuned.

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FIRST IMAGE: Public domain art featured with “What We Miss When We Skip the Book of Numbers“ post at the Knowable Word website.