The President of the Southern Baptist Convention,Frank Page,
tells Southern Baptists that half of their churches will die in the next twenty years!
"If we don't start paying attention to the realities … by the year 2030, we will be proud to have 20,000 rather than 44,000 Southern Baptist churches." That's a quote from outgoing Southern Baptist Convention President Frank Page recently. According to a report in the Tennessean.com, Page believes the 16.2 million-member convention faces the same challenges that bedeviled other Protestant denominations — lower birthrates, aging demographics and a culture increasingly hostile to Christianity.
Michael Spencer comments at
internetmonk.com For those of us who work for SBC funded entities, this is a bit ‘o sobering news and if a person has both feet on the ground and his/her head in the real world, they would immediately take the news seriously.
And thousands of SBC churches do take that sort of things seriously. They are starting new churches that don’t resemble a refuge for southern white people who think churches ought to be museums of their tribe. They are daring to do things differently, or not at all, or like the other guy who is reaching his community.
Good for them. But for the ten thousand or so churches that are going to expire in the next twenty years, it’s a sad matter, and I hate to see it. I’ve preached and ministered in many of those churches. They have good people in them who love Jesus. They just have no idea at all what it means to be a missional church, so the clock is ticking, and no revival, change of pastor or new carpet is going to make a difference.
The President of the Southern Baptist Convention,Frank Page, tells Southern Baptists that half of their churches will die in the next twenty years!
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