(RNS) — Southern Baptists have long been known as a large branch of evangelical Christianity and a dominant force in the Southern states.
But an analysis of recent statistics supplied by congregations across the country revealed New England is the sole region where Southern Baptists gained congregants overall from 2018 to 2023.
“Churches in Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont grew by 10%,” a Lifeway Research analysis released Tuesday (March 11) said, based on data from the Southern Baptist Convention’s 2023 Annual Church Profile. “Every other region saw declines in overall church membership.”
Just 2% of Southern Baptist churches are in the Northeast region, compared with 78% located in the South.
The SBC annual report is often used to indicate the statistical state of the national denomination, which decreased to 12.9 million members according to the most recent profile in May 2024, marking the lowest numbers since the late 1970s for a denomination that reached its peak at 16.3 million in 2006. But analyzing SBC’s results over time can give a wider view of where the growth and decline of Southern Baptists is occurring within the U.S., as the Lifeway analysis over five years demonstrates.
“The growth in New England is driven by numerous years of church planting in the region and faithful reporting of continued growth in many of those churches,” Scott McConnell, executive director of Lifeway Research, told RNS via email.
(Graphic courtesy of Lifeway Research)
Two Southern regions — one comprising Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi and Tennessee, and the other including Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas — saw the smallest drop in church membership in the five-year period at 8%.
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“The rapid population growth in Texas is definitely driving the growth in the West South Central region of the U.S.,” McConnell said.
The five-year regional comparisons included only churches that reported non-zero data in both 2018 and 2023 for total membership, an executive summary noted. While 69% of Southern Baptist churches nationwide contributed to the 2023 Annual Church Profile, McConnell said 99% of SBC churches in New England contributed to that statistical census.
“The membership growth (in the Northeast) is not enough to cover losses in southern states, but it is still noteworthy,” McConnell added.
Outside of the South and New England, 11% of Southern Baptist churches are in the Midwest and 9% are in the West.
“Southern Baptists have the most churches in the South, and those older churches have lost many members over the last two decades,” McConnell said. “Newer churches tend to reach more new people through baptism, though older churches still may have many baptisms as they reach the next generation of their existing families.”
The region with the largest drop in church membership was the Pacific region, with a decline of 18%.
Lifeway Research is an evangelical research firm that is part of Lifeway Christian Resources, an entity of the Southern Baptist Convention that conducts the Annual Church Profile in cooperation with local associations and state conventions affiliated with the SBC.
Lifeway Research provided the caveat that Delaware, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, North Dakota, Wisconsin, Maine, Utah, Nebraska and South Dakota each had fewer than 30 churches to consider in calculations and, as such, their analysis needs “to be considered with caution.”
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