The Southern Baptist Church in Decline?

Crunchy Con has a story up at Southern Baptist decline. Let me also suggest you go to the links of former Southern Southern Baptist now Catholic "Freddie" at Southern Appeal.

Rod says in part:
I would like to believe that the losses in Southern Baptist ranks come from younger people wanting a more stable Christian tradition, and thus lighting out for the PCA Presbyterians, the Catholics, the Orthodox and so forth. I've known and do know former Southern Baptists who have made or are in the process of making that leap. But I also know Southern Baptists who long ago left the Baptist church, though not formally, to start attending nondenominational "Bible churches." As far as I can tell, these Bible churches are not theologically or culturally more liberal than the SBC churches they left behind; rather, the Bible churches appealed more to these particular believers based on the quality of the preaching and the programs offered by specific churches. In other words, the SBC lost these members not for reasons traditionalist Christians would find comforting, but rather the opposite.

I slightly agree with him. Though we can detect movement to the PCA, Catholics , and Orthodox from the SBC it is still small.

A irony here. As the usual suspects rant against the Catholic Church as to the immigration controversy most of the SBC growth as occurred because of immigration from South of the border. A point that is never brought out

That being said I have a few observations as a former Southern Baptist.

One would have to do a study but I suspect that various Pentecostal sects are making a huge effect on the SBC. This in a way is long overdue as the Pentecostal faith and theology becomes more mainstream in the South and indeed the nation.

There is friction here and we saw that in the Huckabee campaign for President. I talked about this in my post Mike Huckabee's big Mistake? As the blogger I link, who worked on faith issues and outreach for Bush noted:
Rightly sensing that Charismatics and Pentecostals were the key to Iowa, Huckabee, a Southern Baptist, told Pentecostal congregations, “My church was more like yours than a typical Southern Baptist.” It was music to their ears but as most evangelicals know, Pentecostals will vote for a Southern Baptist but not the other way around. Huckabee was courting disaster and he needed hundreds of surrogate evangelical and Southern Baptist leaders of influence out there to help keep the herd of cats together.Nowhere did all of this matter more than in the northern counties of South Carolina, where Baptists and Pentecostals have had a long history. For years Baptists had suffered under the influence of the Pentecostal PTL Empire, headquartered a few miles across the State border, and they resented PTL for defining so much about their own faith and culture. Inroads in those counties by Thompson were deadly to the Huckabee effort.

PTL is just apart of it. The growing Pentecostal influence can be felt all over deep south where Southern Baptist doctrine and ethos reigned. Many Southern Baptist were not at all thrilled seeing their Southern Baptist Preacher announce all the place he was more "Bapti-costal". I understood why he was doing it but there was a price to be paid. The above political episode just illustrates the real tension that many Southern Baptist feel.

Now I am not that all these folks are going to the UPC Churches. But many are going to offshoots. For several years I have mentioned that the Southern Baptist Church needed in a worse to dedicate a whole year teaching on the Trinity. As I mentioned before I have heard some Southern Baptist say the darnedest things as to the Trinity that were very Pentecostal like. To put it bluntly in my part of the woods if no one feels it is important to preach against the serious errors of what is basically the old heresy of Arianism and Modalism then that has results

Second the Southern Baptist Church like all of us lives in a more secular world. In fact a more mobile world to boot where it's members are more likely to move several times in their career.