Baptist Press: Southern Baptist evangelism statistics are grim, but they could be far worse.
That's the finding of a major new study by a leading church growth expert who argues empirical evidence demonstrates the Southern Baptist Convention is in an “evangelistic crisis†despite the conservative resurgence, whose leaders cited greater soul-winning results as a key priority in their desired reform of the nation's largest non-Catholic denomination.
While other studies previously demonstrated the SBC has suffered with sluggish evangelism results for the last half century, the analysis by Thom S. Rainer of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary for the first time sought to answer the question: What would have happened if conservatives had failed to win their battle for control of the SBC?
Rainer's study, to be published in the forthcoming issue of The Southern Baptist Journal of Theology, found the SBC would have fared “much worse†had the reformation failed. If the partner churches' baptism statistics of the alternative, denomination-like Cooperative Baptist Fellowship were representative of all SBC churches, total baptisms would have plummeted and baptism ratios would have soared, he theorizes.
