Updated Monday, May 05, 2008

Denominations crawl at 55 mph

By Norman Jameson

BR Editor

Are denominations becoming as irrelevant as the 55 mile per hour speed limit?

I lived in New Mexico in 1974 when Congress and President Nixon imposed the nationwide 55 mph speed limit to save fuel in response to the 1973 oil crisis.

Imagine driving from Santa Fe to Albuquerque at 55 miles per hour. That stretch is an unchanging landscape with no tree or scrub bush skimming by your window to mark progress. The road stretches ahead straight and gray. Sand blankets both sides, dull and flat under bright sun and you receive no sensory perception that you are moving. You feel you are standing still.

A lawyer friend in seminary said the 55 mph speed limit made willful lawbreakers of us all because we saw 55 as an irrelevant number. The law might say, "Drive no faster than 55," but the population never believed 55 mph was a meaningful, valid, important boundary.

Consequently we ignored it, became willing lawbreakers and eased outside the restraints of other laws we considered irrelevant.

Members of a free society will subject themselves only to rules they consider relevant. On April 20 thousands of students in Boulder, Colo., gathered for their annual marijuana group smoke. Policeman stood patiently nearby. Rulers, of course, cannot abide the notion that anyone would consider their rules irrelevant.

Until the 55 mph rule, states set their own speed limits. In Kansas, it was 80; in other western states 75. They acquiesced to 55 mph to keep federal road dollars, but their hearts weren't in it.

Rules can govern actions, but they cannot win hearts.

Each generation tests the rules, ignoring irrelevant ones and establishing new. Leaders who try to force obedience to irrelevant rules simply push people to other venues where they can flourish without the burden of mandates they deem irrelevant.

For nearly two centuries churches that formed the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina (BSC) ministered cooperatively through institutions. The BSC has shed financial obligation and governing responsibility for most of those entities. We no longer directly relate to seven universities, a quality retirement home system, the best hospital in the southeast, and a still growing and vital woman's missions organization.

Now evangelism and missions are the two pillars of identity on which the Convention is hanging its hat-and its future. These are fine, worthy pillars and strong.

But what if North Carolina Baptists who related to the institutional identity aren't that excited about cooperating around missions and evangelism because they see those as local church issues? Or they find missions and evangelism resources they like better elsewhere? Or they think the Convention is imposing rules they think are irrelevant?

They will simply do what you did when the speed limit was 55. Ignore it. The Convention, or the association, or the national Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) will be irrelevant - the worst curse you could cast upon a ministry.

Regrettably, there is evidence that Baptists the nation over are not singing the "missions and evangelism" refrain. LifeWay statisticians reported in April that baptisms fell in the SBC for the third straight year, to the lowest level since 1987, continuing a trend that says baptisms and the evangelistic outreach they result from are just not that important to Baptists.

North Carolina statistics follow the same track. The number of baptisms reported is 23,114 for 2007, down more than 1,000 from the previous year and 2,143 from 2005. Of course, the number of churches reporting their statistics also is declining, so comparing numbers one year to the next is dicey. The trend, however, is clear.

With drops also in membership and total churches, even SBC President Frank Page expressed alarm in a telephone conference call May 1. Unless trends are reversed, he said, the SBC is a rapidly dying denomination that in 20 years could number just half of its current 44,000 churches.

Page also is quoted in the Nashville Tennessean saying that Baptists have an image problem that gets in the way of evangelism.

While the culture is "sometimes averse to a conversation about a faith in Christ," he said the fault could be ours "because we have not always presented a winsome Christian life that would engender trust."

Is that why a renewed emphasis on missions and evangelism is not the obvious antidote to a declining denomination? People do not believe our message because we ignore the simple statement of Jesus in John 13:35: "By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another."

Membership in SBC churches, 16.3 million, fell a quarter percentage point last year, the second drop in the last decade.

We're not alone. Twenty of the top 25 denominations declined in 2006, according to the Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches.

Bobby Welch as SBC president spent himself for two years traveling the nation promoting baptisms and the numbers declined. Something is not clicking. Or the Baptists to whom the message is being delivered consider the pep talk irrelevant.

Giving is a strong indicator of commitment and the BSC is struggling to match last year's gifts. Gifts are a million dollars behind the ambitious budget.

In North Carolina, 800 churches that claimed membership in the Convention annually contribute nothing to the common cause; the lowest number of participants in 20 years attended last year's annual meeting that changed the face of the Convention; only 75 percent of churches fill out a simple statistical report that would help the Convention in its ministry.

What does all this say? It could well indicate that denominational life is simply becoming as irrelevant to this generation as 55 mph was to the previous.