Less dramatically but just as surely as their parent organization, enrollment in Southern Baptist seminaries shows a decline.
As a group, seminary enrollment as measured by FTE has declined 2.4% over the past three years. Gateway has declined the most, 16.4% but then they went through the relocation. Southeastern is close behind, declining 15.8%.
This makes sense. After all, overall acceptance of the Christian narrative is in decline. What is more, any ambitious young man with brains who sees that SBC churches are up, but overall membership is down, will figure-out pretty quickly that SBC churches are cannibalizing each other.
Better to go to Oral Roberts University and plunder Pentecostals after graduation.
This means, too, that fewer young women are being raised to be a preacher’s wife, meaning it’s going to be more difficult to raise their children to be preachers and preacher’s wives. Once established, the odds of reversing this trend are very small. This is, I am certain, the reason that such as Albert the Pious are such big champions of early childbirth, though the rest of the universe is trending toward older childbirth.