The Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the United States and a one-time conservative network of autonomous churches, has suffered a record decline in membership, attendance, and baptisms after fixating heavily on “social justice.”
Question: What if honored SBC leaders are not only incapable of fixing the denomination’s decline, but they were in fact responsible for it?
SBC leaders like JD Greear, Ronnie Floyd, Albert Mohler, and Daniel Akin have become fully “woke” over the course of the last few years, jumping headlong upon a cultural bandwagon adopting vain philosophies like Cultural Marxism, Critical Race Theory, and Intersectionality. Leading their embrace of the Popularity Gospel are Southern Baptist seminary presidents and especially Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) president, Russell Moore. In particular, Moore – a communitarian and Democrat – has driven the denomination’s institutions to the hard left.
When listening to their reasoning for embracing born-again wokeness, SBC leaders point to the “browning of America” and changing demographics that predict the unsustainability of a mostly-white denomination. In response, SBC leaders have embraced left-of-center talking points and adopted social positions deemed to be more favorable to the political left and racial minorities. However, it’s apparently not working as they supposed.
The figures for the annual church profile (ACP) were just released and they show a loss of 287,655 church members. There were 10,694 fewer baptisms and 47,558 fewer church attendees.
Oh, and they lost 170 million in revenue.
These figures demonstrate a record decline. Southern Baptists are dropping like flies. What could possibly be the reason?
SBC leaders will probably take a page from the Democrat playbook, considering they’re being run like a banana republic by Dr. Russell Moore who has been a lifelong Democrat. Simply put, the woke SBC leaders systematically destroying the SBC will presume they’re not trying hard enough to appeal to people with the right melanin count.
In reality, the SBC decline is due to the woke direction of those very same SBC leaders. People in the pew are tired of their virtue-signaling pragmatism and are finding their home in more conservative or fundamentalist churches.
Additionally, SBC institutions have replaced the Gospel with social religion and have convinced countless pastors (through the seminaries and by influence in media) to embrace a Social Justice religion that actual Christians consider a repugnant departure from the Christian faith.
Instead of focusing on baptisms, salvations and actual Gospel stuff, SBC leaders are focusing on promoting #BlackLivesMatter propaganda, victimology, economic disparity, and the usual Social Justice canards. It turns out, you reap what you sow and by-and-large, Southern Baptists have stopped sowing the Gospel altogether.
They’re really good at virtue-signaling on Twitter, however. Unfortunately, that doesn’t grow a church.
