Well put down your shoe and read this Pastor Krushchev.
That great powerhouse of right wing Christianity, the State Church of the South, the Southern Baptist Church is in serious decline in terms of new members and retaining current members. Donations and funds are also declining.
Maybe if they weren't such self-righteous over-bearing schmucks people might resent them just a little less.
In other words, they're facing the same demographic factors as the Mainline (inc TEC).
ReplyDeleteIt's just that, for them, demographic decline is a THEOLOGICAL crisis!
"God is working [God's] purpose out, as year succeeds to year..."
Thankfully, JCF is right!
ReplyDeleteI agree with JCF. They're ageing, having fewer kids, moving to cities and have major cultural differences with the growing part of the population (Hispanics, Asians, etc.)
ReplyDeleteWhat I don't think many understand is that we live in a post-Christian culture where most people have their minds made up about the merits of belonging to organized religion. So more evangelism isn't going to fix their decline. People are evangelized and marketed for all kinds of causes all the time and by not most people, particularly younger people, have developed a thick skin. "Join us or you're going to hell" isn't going to work as well as it used to.
I agree. People in general, and kids in particular, have well-honed bullshit detectors these days. Evangelizing would be seen (rightly) as just another marketing campaign.
ReplyDeleteAlso, the dominance of evangelical Christianity and that very Calvinist version of the faith that they promote fits too well with the supremacist ideology that dominates Republican politics these days.