The Great Evangelical Decline
[Quote:]
What Baptist leaders have known for years is finally public: The Southern Baptist Convention is a denomination in decline. Half of the SBC’s 43,000 churches will have shut their doors by 2030 if current trends continue.
And unless God provides a miracle, the trends will continue. The denomination’s growth rate has been declining since the 1950s. The conservative/fundamentalist takeover 30 years ago was supposed to turn the trend around; it didn’t make a bit of difference.
[..]
As the true picture of evangelicals’ problems has developed, panicked leaders are splitting into camps. Some say that the church is lax, soft, sold out. That what’s needed is an even bigger dose of the medicine that the SBC fundamentalist takeover delivered. More authority, more strict interpretations of the Bible, more sermons about sin and suffering and sacrifice, more rigor about who is and who isn’t getting to go to heaven.
Expect them to get way more batshitinsane…