Lifeway Research has revealed that the Southern Baptist Convention’s total membership dropped by 3% between 2024 and 2025, but that the convention saw significant increases in both weekly church attendance and baptisms.
While the convention saw a 3% drop in membership, to 12,331,954 members, Baptist Press notes:
On average, nearly 4.5 million people attend a Southern Baptist church each week, while more than 2.6 million participate in a small group Bible study or Sunday School class – both up more than 3 percent compared to 2024 and up for the fourth consecutive year.
Meanwhile, the number of baptisms increased by nearly 5 percent to well over a quarter of a million, marking five consecutive years of growth and surpassing pre-COVID levels.
Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary professor Thomas Kidd notes on X:
A few thoughts on SBC membership stats: I definitely believe the SBC was in slow decline from about 2010 to 2020, because both overall “membership” and “worship attendance” were declining during that period.
“Worship attendance” is a far more meaningful statistic because, while it does not exactly track with membership, it definitely gives you a more accurate picture of what is happening Sunday-to-Sunday.
“Membership” declines due to three major factors: actual declining membership, church disaffiliation and closures, and “cleanup” of membership records, a practice which has become more common in SBC churches in the past two decades.
COVID, circa 2020 to 2022, threw a big ole wrench into all church stats, because almost everybody everywhere stopped attending for a while but no one knew how much it would affect either weekly attendance or membership.
But once you get to 2022, you start seeing some return to “normalcy” in how you count what’s happening in churches/denominations. If baptisms, weekly attendance, and small group attendance are all growing, then a declining “membership” is less significant or predictive.
I also simply don’t believe that the SBC was ever at 16.3 million members. Basically, we’re looking at a denomination that was in slow decline for about 10 years, then got scrambled during COVID, and now shows signs of incremental growth.
Most encouraging, growing numbers of baptisms year over year! Don’t listen to the doomsayers.
