By KAREN L. WILLOUGHBY, Managing Editor
ALEXANDRIA – Baptisms are down in Southern Baptist churches across Louisiana. And, baptisms are up.
Wayne Jenkins and Keith Manuel, director and associate, respectively, on the Louisiana Baptist Convention’s Evangelism/Church Growth team, recently conducted a study on baptisms in the state’s nearly 1,600 churches over the last 10 years.
“The difficulty in looking at these numbers is that in 2001, LifeWay [Christian Resources] changed their reporting method, which caused our numbers to drop by 1,000,” Jenkins said. “After [Hurricanes] Katrina and Rita, we were down by another thousand or so immediately, and we never have picked that completely back up. That’s the down side.
“The good side is that the last two years we’ve been up over the previous year, so we’re moving in the right direction,” Jenkins continued. “We don’t know about this year yet; we’re still getting stats in, but we’ve heard some good reports from churches.”
Baptisms increased overall by 1.5 percent in the 2008 church year, and by 6 percent in the 2009 church year.
“I think we’ve turned the corner; our pastors are doing a good job,” the evangelism/church growth director said. “We’ve got to do a better job in Sunday school and small groups.”
LBC’s evangelism/church growth team receives funds from the Cooperative Program to assist churches. This includes one-on-one consultations, training in churches, associations and regions, and the annual evangelism conference this year set for Jan. 24-25 at Broadmoor Baptist Church in Shreveport.
Southern Baptists continue to baptize about 10 percent of their Sunday school attendance, as they have for years and years, Jenkins said.
“However, Sunday school enrollment is down all across the nation,” Jenkins said. “With enrollment down, attendance is down, and with attendance down, baptisms are down.”
The tie between Sunday school and baptisms makes perfect sense, Jenkins said. One of the main purposes of Sunday school/small groups is to study the Word of God. God speaks to people through that Word. They become convicted about the senselessness of their life without God, repent of their wrongs, ask Jesus to take over, and are baptized.
Worship is important too, Jenkins continued. Unless invited to a Sunday school class, most people who go to church for the first time attend a worship service. However, “We also found [in the study] that big worship crowds alone are not the way to build a church,” Jenkins said. “The small group ministry is where the work is done. If you want to reach more people, baptize more people, you’ve got to have more people enrolled.
“We found out [in the study] that the 10 percent rule holds,” the evangelism/church growth director said. “It didn’t matter if it was a small-member church or a large-member church.
Both small-member and large-member churches are necessary to reach people across the state with the gospel message of God’s love, Jenkins said.
“It’s a matter of working together,” the evangelism director said. “If you divide our membership into churches of 500 or more resident members, and 499 and fewer, you’ll have a few more thousand people in the 500-and-up category, but that’s 170 churches. On the other side, you’ll have about 1,400 churches with about the same total membership.
In Louisiana, in 2009, about 198,000 resident members total were enrolled in churches with 500 or more resident members; about 186,000 in churches with fewer than 500 resident members, according to the Jenkins/Manuel study.
“The small-member churches baptize more than the large-member churches,” Jenkins continued. “It’s like a shopping mall. You need both the big stores, and all the little ones. … Everybody’s got to be evangelistic.”
Arthur Flake’s formula for growing Sunday schools still holds true, Jenkins said. Flake became head of the Sunday School Department of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1920 and in time came up with a five-step process:
• Know the possibilities;
• Enlarge the organization;
• Enlist and train workers;
• Provide space; and
• Go get ‘em!
“These are principles that are timeless,” Jenkins said. “Flake didn’t develop these ‘laws.’ He discovered, ‘Hey, this works!’ You know you’ve got to know your possibilities, you’ve got to enlarge your organization – if you don’t enlarge, you lose.
“I had a Sunday school class in a bus one time,” Jenkins continued. “You put adults in a bus, or in a crowded room, and they’re the ones who start talking about needing to build. … Then you’ve got to go after the people. … Not until churches sit down, look at their field, systematically plan, and use what God has given them will they ever make a maximum impact.”
Some churches don’t know why they exist, the evangelism/church growth director said.
“We’re here to carry out the Great Commission; that’s what we’re supposed to do,” Jenkins said. “Next we have to ask, ‘What have we been doing?’ Then, ‘If we were going to start this church in this location today, what kind of church would we be?’”
Many churches across Louisiana have a different group of people living around the church than lived around it when the church was first organized, the evangelism/church growth director said.
Jenkins has seven additional questions he asks churches, when they ask for his help in identifying their next forward-motion steps.
“We’re all in this together,” Jenkins said. “The churches, associations and state convention, working together to win the state for Christ.” Sometimes a church will come up with an idea/project/event that has transferrable principles. Sometimes the association, or the state convention does, he said.
“It’s our job to make churches aware that ‘Here’s something you might want to consider,’” Jenkins said. He views the LBC evangelism/church growth team as having both pro-active and re-active elements.
When a church or association approaches him with a question – “Do you have any …” or “What have you heard about …” or “Has anyone had any success with …” – that’s re-active, Jenkins explained. Plans for next spring’s regional “High Impact Training,” in advance of the 2012 “Reaching Across Louisiana” (with high-impact events) as part of the God’s Plan for Sharing emphasis, is proactive.
“Our job is to assist local churches in becoming strong evangelistic churches,” Jenkins said. “We try to scratch where they itch.”