baptisms

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Podcast: Yes, churches in Africa are 'growing,' but what what does 'growing' mean?

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Podcast: Yes, churches in Africa are 'growing,' but what what does 'growing' mean?

I realize that I have used this Anglican-wars anecdote before on this website. But, hey, GetReligion is closing its doors in a few weeks and this will almost certainly be my last chance to use it here.

To be honest, this parable from the Rt. Rev. C. FitzSimons Allison of South Carolina — an evangelical Anglican scholar who is now in his mid-90s — was the perfect way to summarize the issues covered during this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (CLICK HERE to tune that in).

Host Todd Wilken and I were discussing two important news reports about the escalating Catholic doctrinal wars about same-sex blessings, and this pulled us back to some themes from our top stories of 2023 podcast. One of the new stories was from The New York Times (“Blessing of Same-Sex Couples Rankles Africa’s Catholics”) and the other from the Associated Press (“How to deal with same-sex unions? It’s a question fracturing major Christian denominations”).

Like I said, these were must-read reports, but there were “ghosts” in them worth exploring. This brings us to the aforementioned Allison anecdote from several decades ago:

Needless to say, [Allison] has witnessed more than his share of Anglican debates about the future of the Anglican Communion, a communion in which national churches are in rapid decline in rich, powerful lands like the United States, Canada and England, but exploding with growth in the Global South.

During one global meeting, Allison watched a symbolic collision between these two worlds. Bishops from North America and their allies were talking about moving forward, making doctrinal changes in order to embrace the cultural revolutions in their lands. They were sure that Anglicans needed to evolve, or die.

Finally, a frustrated African bishop asked three questions: “Where are your children? Where are your converts? Where are your priests?”

The big question: What does it mean when journalists say that a church or religious movement is “growing”?

Usually, this is a reference to mere membership statistics. But notice that this is not how that African bishop defined church life in his growing corner of the Anglican world.


Please respect our Commenting Policy
, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Podcast: What's going on with Southern Baptist decline? Count the news hooks ...

, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Podcast: What's going on with Southern Baptist decline? Count the news hooks ...

Back in the early 1980s, the Southern Baptist Convention was enduring the crucial years of its civil war over — here’s the term headline writers hated — “biblical inerrancy.”

I was at the Charlotte News and then the Charlotte Observer back then, in a city in which one of the major roads was named after Billy Graham. The SBC spectrum in Charlotte ranged from hard-core conservatives to “moderates” who were basically liberal mainline Protestants with better preaching.

During that time, a moderate church welcomed the the late Rev. Gardner C. Taylor of Brooklyn to its pulpit for a series of sermons (“moderates” don’t have “revivals”). Taylor would make just about anyone’s list — Top 100 or even Top 10 — of that era’s most celebrated preachers. In 1980, Time magazine hailed him as the “the dean of the nation’s black preachers.” That’s saying something.

During one sermon, Taylor briefly addressed the SBC wars and added, with a slight smile, that he always thought that the primary book in the Bible that Southern Baptists “considered inerrant was the Book of Numbers.”

Southern Baptists have always loved their statistics (I grew up in Texas, the son of a Southern Baptist pastor) and, for decades, those statistics made their leaders smile.

Things are a bit more complex, right now, as seen in this RNS headline: “Southern Baptists lost nearly half a million members in 2022.” That story, and some other related online materials, provided the hook for this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in).

Before we get to that solid news piece, by religion-beat veteran Bob Smietana (a scribe in Nashville for years), let’s grab some context from a new Substack post by chart-master Ryan Burge, a GetReligion contributor (and former Southern Baptist), with this headline: “The 2022 Data on the Southern Baptist Convention is Out.”

Check out these numbers from the past 80 years, a period in which the SBC’s rise “is just unmatched.”


Please respect our Commenting Policy
, , , , , , , , ,

And this just in: The Episcopal Church gets more sobering news from the book of numbers

, , , , , , , , ,
And this just in: The Episcopal Church gets more sobering news from the book of numbers

My very first experience with The Episcopal Church (TEC) was on a youth group mission trip to Huntsville, Ala. We were with a group called World Changers, which was an evangelical organization that helped organize free labor from young people for individuals who did not have the ability to pay for home repairs. Some groups were tasked with painting, others were focused on cleaning up yard debris, while my group put a new roof on a house in the Alabama heat.

For reasons I can’t fully recall, our youth group was going to be in Alabama on a Sunday morning and the organizers at World Changers had decided that the teenagers from First Baptist of Salem, Ill., would visit the local Episcopal congregation.

I have to admit — I had absolutely no idea what was going on. I was raised in a very low-church fashion in a Southern Baptist Church. No vestments, no stoles, no creeds, and no communion each Sunday. I remember sitting in the pews and thinking how different it was, and coming to the realization that I didn’t know about any faith tradition outside my own.

I have a lot of affinity for Episcopalians. In fact, my American Baptist Church has latched on to many aspects of the liturgy followed in TEC. We say the creed each Sunday, we read the lectionary, we recite the Lord’s Prayer and we sing the Doxology and the Gloria Patria. I like the rituals that can be found in TEC.

What I also enjoy is that the Episcopalians are really good at data collection.

There’s no denomination that compares to how meticulous they are in collecting annual statistics and making them publicly available. That makes it very easy for me to write a post about what’s going on with Episcopalians. I wrote one such post last year entitled, “The Death of the Episcopal Church is Near.” It has easily become the most popular article on this website over the past 12 months.

I now have data from 2020 and my conclusion hasn’t changed. The Episcopal Church is in serious trouble.

Some of it may be pandemic related, but some of it is clearly not. The end is coming fairly rapidly for the TEC as it exists today. Let me explain.


Please respect our Commenting Policy
, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

New podcast: Baptisms are in the headlines, at the moment, for better and for worse

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
New podcast: Baptisms are in the headlines, at the moment, for better and for worse

Believe it or not, baptism is in the news.

In this case, we have some good news and some bad news.

What do you want to hear first, the good news or the bad news? In this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in) we went with the good news first.

When I say “good news,” I am referring to a New York Times story that is kind of fun and contains tons of good information. However, this is a story that takes a trend in some of those giant, modernized evangelical megachurches and tries to turn it into a Big Idea piece. Hold that thought.

The headline: “Horse Troughs, Hot Tubs and Hashtags: Baptism Is Getting Wild.” Here is a big block of the thesis material:

Performing the age-old Christian ritual in a more informal style “conveys this isn’t your grandmother’s church,” said Drake Osborn, pastor of teaching and liturgy at Grace Church in Waco, Texas. His congregation moved into a former bowling alley in 2016 but never considered installing a built-in baptistery. Instead, Grace Church uses a foam model bought online for about $2,500.

The shift has taken place as many pre-21st-century symbols of church life have fallen out of fashion in evangelical culture, especially among churches that are expanding or building new facilities. Sanctuaries are now “worship centers,” and steeples and stained glass are out. Natural light is often eschewed in favor of a black-box theater aesthetic optimized for flashy audiovisual experiences and online streaming.

It is not just the architecture that is changing. Contemporary evangelical baptisms are often raucous affairs. Instead of subdued hymns and murmurs, think roaring modern worship music, fist pumps, tears and boisterous cheering. There are photographers, selfie stations and hashtags for social media. One church in Texas calls its regular mass baptism event a “plunge party.”

Well now. It may be true that “evangelical baptisms” are getting a little bit “raucous,” but that’s a rather strange statement to make in light of baptism traditions down the years in Black evangelical and Pentecostal churches.


Please respect our Commenting Policy
, , , , , , , , , ,

These stark numbers are headline worthy: Death of the Episcopal Church is approaching

, , , , , , , , , ,
These stark numbers are headline worthy: Death of the Episcopal Church is approaching

Last November, I wrote a post for Religion in Public with the title, “The Data is Clear — Episcopalians are in Trouble.” In it, I used survey data to paint a portrait of a denomination that was on the brink of collapse.

One of the most troubling things about the future of the Episcopal Church is that the average member is incredibly old. The median age of an Episcopalian in 2019 was sixty-nine years old. With life expectancy around 80, we can easily expect at least a third of the current membership of the denomination to be gone in the next fifteen or twenty years. That’s problematic when membership has already been plummeting for decades.

But, I came across some data in the last few weeks that I just had to look at in more depth.

Before I get into the graphs I have to give some serious kudos to the data team that works for the denomination. I have looked at the websites of all kinds of Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian and Catholic traditions over the last few years. The Episcopalians blow them all out of the water in terms of accessibility and ease of use.

Don’t believe me? Well, they have an interactive dashboard of all their churches in the United States. You can sort based on a map, church size, or amount of offering. It’s incredible and can be accessed at this link.

Let’s get down to it, though. How many people actually attend an Episcopal church on an average Sunday? I grabbed a PDF of their membership reports from here and did some quick analysis of the national trends.

In 2009, 725,000 people attended an Episcopal church on an average weekend. According to their own data, the Episcopal Church has about 1.8 million baptized members. (The denomination’s membership peaked at 3.4 million in the 1960s.) Thus, about 40% of current members attend on a regular basis. That’s been declining steadily over the last decade. A typical year sees attendance dip by 25,000-35,000 people. That represents a 2-3% year-over-year decline.

By 2019, the weekly attendance was 547,000. In percentage terms, the Episcopalians have seen their attendance drop by a quarter in just the last decade.

But, that doesn’t tell the whole story about the future of the Episcopalians.


Please respect our Commenting Policy
, , , , , , , , , , , ,

Maybe there's a story here: Lutherans on left, right share some common decline issues

, , , , , , , , , , , ,
Maybe there's a story here: Lutherans on left, right share some common decline issues

If you hang out in the world of organized religion for several decades -- either as a participant, a reporter-outsider or both -- then you reach a point where there is something refreshing about reading an honest report by a faith-based group that's trying to address a real problem.

It's so easy to ignore problems, year after year, until you look up one day and your pews contain a dozen or so people over the age of 70. The next thing you know, you're trying to see how many nonprofits can lease space in your building so that you can keep the heat on and the doors open.

Sound familiar? Plot lines linked to declining numbers and aging sheep have been getting more and more prominent in recent decades, especially among the oldline Protestant churches on both sides of the Atlantic. That's an old story. We talked about that story in this week's "Crossroads" podcast (click here to tune that in), but only because it was linked to something more complex and, I think, more interesting.

You see, many churches on the doctrinal right are facing some -- repeat "some" -- of the same issues as those on the left. Yes, there is some truth to the claims that American Catholics have been able to hold things together because of rising numbers in Hispanic parishes (while also importing some priests from the Global South). Southern Baptists have drifted into a slight decline, facing numbers that are not as staggering as those seen in the "Seven Sisters" on the Protestant left, but they are bad (especially when it comes to baptisms). The old-guard SBC knows that continued growth among African-American and Latino churches is crucial.

So this brings me to a report that I bumped into last year published (.pdf here) by the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod in its Journal of Lutheran Mission. What's it about? It's about the 40 years or so of decline in membership in the churches of this conservative synod, a decline that is quite similar to that seen on the left.

Want to see some candor? Check out these bullet points from the introduction to the Journal package:

* ... (A)ll denominations gain the overwhelming majority of their membership from natural growth: from children of adult members raised in the faith. Thus, the retention of baptized and confirmed youth is a key area on which to focus.
* The LCMS’s persistent, long-term decline manifests itself both in a massive decrease in child baptisms (down 70 percent since their peak in the late 1950s) and a smaller but still significant decrease in adult converts (down 47 percent since their peak, again in the late 1950s).


Please respect our Commenting Policy
, , , ,

A baby baptized in the Stanley Cup: What kind of person does that? And why?

, , , ,

I don't know if Peter Smith, the all-star religion writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, is a hockey fan.

If he is — and even if he is not — I'd like to request his help on a story.

Here's what I'm curious about: A Pittsburgh Penguins player had his son baptized in the Stanley Cup.

The Stanley Cup — for those not familiar with it — is the championship trophy awarded annually to the team that wins the National Hockey League playoffs. Traditionally, each player on the winning team get a private day with the cup. 

The Sporting News notes that the Cup "has held lots of babies, but it has rarely hosted a baptism."

USA Today points out:

The Cup has been partaking in a wide variety of activities this summer. It visited a children’s hospital, enjoyed some spaghetti, briefly went to college, practiced water safety and has spent a lot of time on the golf course.

And oh, there was a pedobaptism!

From a Post-Gazette sports writer, the brief story that sparked my interest:

Josh Archibald is taking the spiritual experience of winning the Stanley Cup to a new level. 
The Penguins winger had his son, Brecken, baptized in the NHL’s championship trophy during his day with it Wednesday in Brainerd, Minn. The Hockey Hall of Fame’s Philip Pritchard captured the moment on Twitter. 

Alrighty! You definitely grabbed my attention.


Please respect our Commenting Policy
, , , , , , ,

Elephant in the cathedral: Why are so many Anglican holy places empty and, thus, low on funds?

, , , , , , ,

Anyone who has followed religion news from England knows that church attendance has been a huge story for some time now and the sobering headlines are only going to increase as the side effects -- demographics is destiny, and all of that -- become more obvious.

Yes, the statistical rise of Islam is part of this story, but only one part of complex drama. As in America, the rise of "Nones" -- the religiously unaffiliated -- is a trend that is changing how the English view their nation. That's part of the urban vs. rural divide at the heart of Brexit. It's kind of like America's red vs. blue zip-code battle.

Then there is another obvious question: Is the Church of England still the church of England? Note this headline from last year, care of The Guardian: "Church of England weekly attendance falls below 1m for first time." Here are some of the details:

The number of people attending Church of England services each week has for the first time dropped below 1 million -- accounting for less than 2% of the population -- with Sunday attendances falling to 760,000.
The statistics ... reflect the C of E’s steady decline over recent decades in the face of growing secularism and religious diversity, and the ageing profile of its worshippers. Numbers attending church services have fallen by 12% in the past decade, to less than half the levels of the 1960s.

The story included two other numbers that would catch the eye of careful reporters: "The church conducted 130,000 baptisms in the year, down 12% since 2004; 50,000 marriages, down 19%. ..."

I bring this up because of a sad, but interesting, Religion News Service piece about another side effect of these numbers. There is no way that this rather dull headline captures the emotions many Brits will feel about this topic: "Endangered Anglican cathedrals prompt Church of England review."

The bottom line: How does one keep the doors of cathedrals open (even for tourists) when the faithful rarely kneel at the altars or bring children into the pews?


Please respect our Commenting Policy
, , , , , , , , , , , ,

News in the 2015 Southern Baptist statistics: Baptisms, babies and crucial ethnic churches

, , , , , , , , , , , ,

As you would expect, reading the Religious News Service story about the continuing decline in Southern Baptist Convention membership statistics is rather different than reading the Baptist Press feature on the same trends.

This is exactly as it should be, since one is a secular wire service and the other is a denominational press office. However, it's interesting to note that neither of these stories buried the bad-news lede and both included interesting secondary issues that could point toward important news angles in the future.

Truth is, the slow decline of the SBC is several news stories rolled up into one.

Let's look at the very short RNS story first, starting with the hard-news lede:

(RNS) The Southern Baptist Convention is the largest Protestant denomination in the country, but it continues to lose members and baptize fewer people each year.
The latest statistics, compiled by LifeWay Christian Resources from church reports, show membership has dropped by more than 204,000, down 1.3 percent to 15.3 million members in 2015. It’s the ninth year in a row there has been a membership decline. Baptisms, which have declined eight of the last 10 years, totaled 295,212, a 3.3 percent drop, researchers said Tuesday (June 7).

So what is happening here? For starters the RNS report notes that another doctrinally conservative denomination -- the charismatic Assemblies of God -- experienced some growth in 2015.

This raises questions about the "Why?" element in this news story.


Please respect our Commenting Policy