Like Bernie Sanders, the Southern Baptists just can’t understand that the game is over.
Assembling in St. Louis for their annual meeting next week, they will be confronted with some grim realities:
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Membership declined by more than 200,000-people in 2015.
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Weekly attendance is down by almost 100,000-people.
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Small-group participation is down by almost 120,000-people.
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Baptisms declined more than 10,000 below the 2014 level.
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The number of SBC-affiliated churches is up almost 300. Since overall attendance is down, the growth in the number of churches can come only from cannibalizing existing churches; they’re eating their own.
The only happy news they’ll hear is that donations for missions increased in 2015, almost certainly a transient event associated with the revelation that the International Missions Board has lost tens of millions of dollars over the past decade and thousands of missionaries would have to be recalled.
If those numbers aren’t bad enough, there looms a fight over a resolution which condemns display of the Confederate battle flag. I thought it would pass without controversy, but apparently it is a commonplace for Southern Baptists to wish to have it draped over Uncle Cletus’ coffin. Confederate flags are routinely displayed in church-affiliated cemeteries, too. Since few young people want anything to do with the SBC, and the older generation is still mad at Lyndon Baines Johnson for the civil rights legislation of the 60s and holds fond memories of good times throwing rocks at the freedom marchers, the resolution cuts both culturally and generationally.
There are still many Southern Baptist churches which won’t conduct interracial marriages.
So the SBC will soon come face-to-face with the exact dilemma I pointed toward here:
He [Albert Mohler] operates within an infrastructure of religious tradition which has long been the primary engine of southern racism and, however desperately its leadership wishes to change that because it is indispensable to the denomination’s very survival, the laity who pay his salary and once threw rocks at the freedom marchers aren’t going to be good sports about being told they were and are wildly, morally, wrong.
He has a further problem: The Southern Baptists, often with unseemly aggressiveness, claim to be the keepers and guardians of Eternal Truth — which cannot lightly be updated.
There is the matter, too, of Albert the Pious and Russell Moore going around denying that Trump supporters are r-e-e-e-a-l evangelicals. Most of the attendees in St. Louis are going to vote for Trump, because he hates the same people they do, and they don’t care for the idea of the pointy-headed seminary boys who are supported by their donations looking down their noses and sneering at them as C-team Christians.
It’s going to be a fun couple of days.