Just posted this news over on the Lead about the Southern Baptist Convention:

“New statistics released by LifeWay Christian Resources listed total SBC membership in 2007 as 16,266,920, a 0.24 percent decrease from the 16,306,246 reported in 2006. Baptisms, long used as a marker of Baptist vitality, dropped more than 5 percent to their lowest level since 1987.”

The article goes on to have an SBC official characterize the SBC as a denomination in decline.

Read the rest here.

So much for biblically based faith automatically giving people a growing church… Must be a bit more complicated than that.