Southern Baptist Convention lost over 1,200 congregations from 2021-2022

by Karen Faulkner, Worthy News Correspondent

(Worthy News) – The world’s largest Baptist denomination, the US Southern Baptist Convention, lost a record 1,200 congregations in 2022, a new study by Lifeway Research shows. The data for 2022 is the latest available; a report for 2023 will be published soon, Lifeway said.

Lifeway’s analysis of the 2022 Annual Church Profile of the Southern Baptist Convention shows that 1,253 congregations that had been members of the Convention in 2021 had disaffiliated in 2022.

The study shows that 2% of the 50,423 congregations that were members of the SBC in 2021 had disbanded or closed by the time the data for 2022 was available. A further 0.5% had left or were disaffiliated from the SBC by the same time period.

The number of congregations that disbanded, closed and left or disaffiliated from the SBC from 2021 to 2022 is significantly higher than the previous two years when 1,003 and 1,002 congregations stopped being members of the SBC.

“The primary reason congregations are no longer considered active Southern Baptist congregations is that they cease to exist,” Lifeway Research said. Around 4 in 5 of the missing congregations (79%) disbanded/closed, leaving Southern Baptists with 984 fewer congregations. Within that group, 813 (83%) closed.”

“Another 136 (14%) merged into another Southern Baptist congregation,” Lifeway continued. “Fewer became part of a non-Southern Baptist church (17 or 2%), never got started (8 or 1%) or are now a campus of another church (10 or 1%).”

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