By Dr. Chuck Kelley The year 2000 marked a profound turning point for the Southern Baptist Convention. The beginning of a new century brought a new and unexpected problem to Southern Baptists: prolonged decline. Not noticed at the time, the official SBC statistics from the 2000 church year proved to be a harbinger of things to come. It started with baptisms. Because Jesus identified baptisms as a marker for making disciples in the Great Commission (Matthew 28:18-20), the number of baptisms recorded by its churches has always been an important measure of progress for Southern Baptists. For much of SBC history, the proportional growth in the total number of baptisms consistently exceeded growth in the total number of SBC churches. As the number of churches grew, so did the number of baptisms by those churches. However, in the 2000 church year those trend lines crossed. The number of churches continued climbing, but the number of baptisms by those churches began dropping. That year proved to be a sea change, not an anomaly. A new phenomenon in the Southern Baptist story began to unfold. The graph above was prepared by Dr. Bill Day of the Leavell Center for Evangelism and Church Health at New Orleans … [Read more...]

NEW ORLEANS (LBM) -- Jamie Dew, president of the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, has penned a joint statement with J.D. Greear, outgoing president of the Southern Baptist Convention and pastor of The Summit in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, expressing grief over the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Steve Horn, executive director of the Louisiana Baptist Convention, signed onto the statement with all of his fellow state convention executive directors, as well as the officers and entity heads of the SBC.   Statement on the death of George Floyd As a convention of churches committed to the equality and dignity of all people, Southern Baptists grieve the death of George Floyd, who was killed May 25, 2020, in Minneapolis, Minn. While all must grieve, we understand that in the hearts of our fellow citizens of color, incidents like these connect to a long history of unequal justice in our country, going back to the grievous Jim Crow and slavery eras. The images and information we have available to us in this case are horrific and remind us that there is much more work to be done to ensure that there is not even a hint of racial inequity in the distribution of justice in our country. We grieve to see … [Read more...]

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