The 2011 Annual Meeting for the Southern Baptist Convention officially begins next Tuesday morning, June 14, 2011. Membership in SBC churches has decreased for five years in a row, dropping 500,000 members since 2005. Attendance at this year's Southern Baptist Convention will be the lowest in nearly five decades, struggling to reach 5,000 in attendance. What has happened to the SBC?There may be as many postulated reasons for the precipitous decline in the SBC as potential messengers in Phoenix next week. From my own personal experiences with the inner workings with the SBC I offer five reasons why the SBC is perilously close to becoming purely irrelevant. It is possible for changes to occur to prevent the SBC from her imminent and ultimate demise, but it will require immediate and effective leadership, something not yet demonstrated at any level of the SBC. The five reasons for decline are:
(1). The demonization of disagreement.
When we conservative evangelicals spend more time defining why other people are theologically wrong rather than powerfully living out the gospel of Jesus Christ, we construct our own platform for decline. The fanatical attempts to demonize other evangelicals who express a desire to cooperate with the Southern Baptist Convention in church planting and missions--a demonization due to perceived disagreements over secondary issues--guarantees the demise of the SBC.
(Continued in the link below)
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