From Diana Butler Bass on Beliefnet:
Three news stories in recent days point to significant change in the landscape of North American religion. For decades now, the conventional wisdom about church growth has been that only conservative churches–those that take the Bible literally and embrace conservative politics–could grow. But it appears that conventional wisdom is being seriously questioned. Take a look at these stories:
1. The Southern Baptist Convention–the largest and most conservative Protestant denomination in the USA–records a continued decline in baptisms and an increasingly aging membership. The oft-reported number of 18 million members has declined in the last decade to just over 16 million. And, according to journalist Christine Wicker (see her book, The Fall of Evangelical Nation), the internal number of active members may well be around 5 million people.
2. The Anglican Church of North America, the umbrella group for conservative Episcopalians who have left their denomination over women’s ordination and full inclusion of gay and lesbian persons, has long claimed over 100,000 members. Recently, they admitted that only 69,000 persons in 650 churches in the USA and Canada have joined their association. There are 2.2 million Episcopalians in the United States and approximately 1 million in Canada. Thus, the conservative group–the one that has garnered so much media attention in recent years is a very small percentage of the entire North American Anglican membership–some 2% of the total. And with their rigid opposition to women’s ordination, it is hard to imagine that this group will find much appeal with young North Americans.
3. President Jimmy Carter last week publicly explained why he renounced his life-long affiliation with the Southern Baptists in an opinion piece appearing in The Age. He denounced the Convention’s leaders statement that women are inferior to men (created “second”) and responsible for original sin as inherently discriminatory and that Southern Baptist views on gender were contrary to both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the teachings of Jesus.
Be sure to read the entire article here.
