“If a sheep has strayed let us seek it; to disown it in a hurry is not the Master’s method. Ours is to be the labor and the care, for we are overseers of the flock of Christ to the end that all may be presented faultless before God. One month’s absence from the house of God is, in some cases, a deadly sign of a profession renounced, while in others a long absence is an affliction to be sympathised with, and not a crime to be capitally punished.”
~C. H. Spurgeon
The season turning to spring means many things. For me, it means the Mets begin another season of toying with my emotions, the air becomes ever fuller of allergens for me to battle, and the temperature rises, leading me to complain about how insufferably hot it is. Another significant item that inevitably arrives is Southern Baptists everywhere gearing up for the SBC Annual Meeting that occurs every June.
With that comes the SBC Book of Reports, a bulbous book full of, uh, reports. One of the most important numerical figures among the sea of numerical figures is found typically on page seven or eight. That is, the number of “members” of SBC churches and the number of “in-person average weekly attendance.”[1] Last year’s read thusly (this year’s has not been published as of this writing): 12,982,090 total members, 4,050,668 average attendance.
That’s right, there is a nearly nine million person discrepancy between attenders and members. That means there are at least eight million people on church membership rolls in the Southern Baptist Convention that are not regular attenders.[2]
What I am about to say I mean in the nicest way possible, and although I am oft given to hyperbole, I do not believe I am being hyperbolic when I say this: The 9 million person discrepancy is a disaster, and it makes me question whether we believe in one of the principals of Baptist distinctives: regenerate church membership.
What is regenerate church membership? Simply put, it is the concept that members of the local church should be Christian (regenerated by the Holy Spirit). Of course, regeneration is an internal work that God, but Baptist have always believed that the internal work manifests itself in external fruit. This idea, then, is that members of local churches should be people who the church has good reason to believe are Christians striving to obey the Lord. That, since Baptists hold to congregationalism, every vote the church takes is a spiritual matter, and only those who have the indwelling Holy Spirit (i.e., genuine believers) can make such determinations.
Commenting many years ago (because this has been a perennial problem) President of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, R. Albert Mohler Jr. said, “Put bluntly, the total membership numbers as compared to attendance calls into question whether we really believe in regenerate church membership. Members who do not act like members should not be counted as members.”[3]
What I intend to show in this series of posts on this topic is this: bloated membership rolls are both pastorally disastrous for local church and it calls into question how much we believe in regenerate church membership, a core, historic Baptist distinctive.
In 1905, D. Freeman said of Baptists, “This principle of a regenerated Church membership, more than anything else, marks our distinctiveness in the Christian world today.”[4] Justice Anderson similarly said, “The cardinal principle of Baptist ecclesiology, and logically, the point of departure for church polity, is the insistence on a regenerate membership in the local congregation.”
Adds Hammett: “To put it simply, regenerate church membership is meaningful church membership, involving only those with a genuine commitment to Christ and the congregation of Christ’s people. This ideal of regenerate membership has been central to Baptist ecclesiology.”
So what happened? According to the aforementioned Book of Reports, there are 46,906 churches in the SBC. How many of those have what I’ll call “bloated membership rolls” where the number of members on any given Sunday is perhaps hundreds of people less than the membership roll? Therefore, how many of us have “Baptist” proudly on our church signs while forsaking the Baptist distinctive of regenerate church membership? And where are all those people? Are they OK? Are they walking faithfully with Christ? (Perhaps not since they are effectively disobeying Hebrews 10:25). Are they in ongoing, unrepentant sin? Have they renounced the faith? Are they apostate? Are they living in a different country? Are they homebound and in need of care? Are they abusing drugs or alcohol and need help to come out of their spiral? On and on we can go.
Apart from the dread many pastors feel every time a business meeting comes up because non-attenders who are still on the membership roll might show up and disrupt proceedings, having a large swathe of people who the church has declared “This person, as far as we can tell, is a Christian” is disastrous for soul care. It’s disastrous for our witness. It’s disastrous for the missing person’s soul. It means we, somewhere along the way, dropped the ball.
This initial post I simply want to present what the problem is to give you some food for thought. In the next post we will consider from Scripture why this matters, but before I close this first post, let me tell you what I think our membership rolls are declaring, and you can judge if this is important or not…
A membership roll is not simply a collection of names on a computer somewhere in the church office. The membership roll is a declaration. It is declaring that “every person on this list is, based on available evidence, a Christian.” It declares to heaven, to the people on the list, to the community, to the world, that everyone on the list is faithfully pursuing obedience to the King of Glory. So, if every church with a bloated membership roll doesn’t know where possibly hundreds of people are, or what they are doing, we are, in a word, lying.
This matters. What we declare matters. And it is common places for Baptist churches to allow image-bearers they had individually covenanted with slip through the cracks. Those swollen numbers might look good on an Annual Church Profile, but they are deceptive. Worse, it blurs the definition of “church” itself.
Let’s talk about it next time…
Christ is All
[1] Book of Reports of the Southern Baptist Convention 2024. https://www.baptistpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/2024-Book-of-Reports-Digital.pdf
[2] I say eight million because I am making the generous assumption that one million people on SBC church membership rolls are physically unable to attend because of some kind of physical hinderance. The number “one million,” I made up, and I think is generous.
[3] R. Albert Mohler Jr., “The Future of the Southern Baptist Convention: The Numbers Don’tAdd Up,” May 31, 2019, https://albertmohler.com/2019/05/31/the-future-of-the-southern-baptist-convention-the-numbers-dont-add-up.
[4] Quoted by John S. Hammett in Biblical Foundations for Baptist Churches: A Contemporary Ecclesiology (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Academics, 2019), 92.
The Bearded Ecclesiologian 