SBC membership drops to its lowest number in 50 years. But baptisms are on the rise.

Membership is 12.7M, but weekly attendance is 4.3M (which would presumably include non-member visitors). What this tells me is that much of the SBC numbers are of individuals who do not attend regularly. This might not be too surprising as a lot of SBC members are also quite old. The fact that weekly attendance is up should be celebrated over an absolute number of membership.

That makes sense to me.

Maybe they should launch a campaign to encourage SBC churches to purge their membership rolls of inactive members. That might result in a one time dramatic drop in total members but a steadier count for some years after.

Or it might not have an impact at all.

Our pastor was a Capitol Hill Baptist Church intern, and one of the first things he did when he arrived at our church for revitalization (a few years before I arrived) was lead the church to scrub the membership rolls of people who hadn't attended in years.

Nowadays, our weekly attendance is more than our membership count, because we have fairly robust standards for membership, and will pursue church discipline for non-attendance (shut-ins excepted).

But praise God, the church is at a very spiritually healthy point right now with quite a few prospective members in the membership pipeline and a lot of members involved in personal discipleship with one another and evangelism.

One of the things that I've heard and seen a lot is that in certain contexts, church membership is as much a cultural thing as it is spiritual. I remember, for example, being stunned at how many of my neighbors were members of my childhood church, though I'd rarely seen any of them at church. To whatever degree this might be true in the SBC, it would be good to let many non-attending members know that if they really don't have much going at "their" church, they ought to consider whether they really ought to remain members.

If this isn't done, the risk is that you get all kinds of unaccountable people saying they're members, all while doing things that insult the name of Christ.

This is absolutely the case, Bert. We occasionally but regularly clarify to the congregation on a Sunday morning what it means to be a member, that they've gone through the membership issue with the elders, been recommended to the congregation, voted on by the congregation, and taken membership vows. When we take communion, although we don't practice closed communion, we do have the members stand and recite the covenant together. So...we make a pretty sharp distinction. But some non-members still think of our church as "their" church...some of them who attend only very sporadically. It's not for lack of trying to be clear.

Our church began as an American Baptist Church in 1905. They left the ABC, not sure when, "because they stopped believing the Bible" (per a former elder who grew up in the church), and joined the SBC. But I think there was some residual cultural Christianity left over.

It was brought to the elders' attention a few years ago that a lady who had been disciplined and removed from membership for non-attendance was still sending regular monetary offerings. We actually investigated and communicated to her that she was not OK, that we didn't want her giving money under the impression that everything was OK, etc.

Before someone becomes a member now, they go through a membership class, interview with the elders to explain the gospel (objective presentation) and their testimony (subjective application of the gospel). We did delay one lady's membership within the last year because her explanation of the gospel was so poor. We have a wide range of educational backgrounds and we thought she was regenerate but still wanted better clarity. We asked her to study a book with our pastor a while longer, got a clearer written explanation of the gospel, and then recommended her. But also, she has very clear evidence of faith in her life, and it's been encouraging to watch her growth. We don't want to hold someone back just because they have a hard time articulating things.

We have an annual meeting in the Spring. In the annual report all members and inactve members are listed in one alphabetical list. Inactives number over 100 and members about 225.

Last year I emailed the pastors and the deacons about what their plan was to clean up the deadwood on the roll. The pastor said it was the deacons' responsibility. The deacons did nothing about it. Oh well

The SBC is especially prone to this because of the age of members and the culture around it.

This is best captured in one of Jerry Clower's comedy routines

https://youtu.be/cz6yonkwB6A?si=ZWI7INzK-ayibo23

Last year, I led our church to purge 50 people from our membership rolls who hadn't attended the church in several years. Several of those were adult children of current, active members. These adult children were added to the membership rolls as young children after their baptism. A couple of these parents raised objections because they felt keeping their adult children on the membership roll would encourage them to attend church. However, because the elders sent them a letter about their lack of attendance and the decision of the church to remove them from membership, the parents felt we were hindering their adult children from ever coming back to church.

The issue, of course, is conversion. Some of these individuals made professions of faith as young children, were baptized, and added into membership. However, they were never truly converted. But, their parents are hoping their church membership will draw them back to Christ.

Brothers, I would encourage you to stop admitting children into church membership. We now have in our bylaws an age requirement of 16 to be admitted into church membership, in addition to baptism, attending a new members class, and an elder interview.

We also have begun teaching about meaningful church membership and recite our church covenant at the beginning of every members meeting.