Writer / Observer / Builder — Presence, clarity, and living without a script
Author: Richard L. Fricks
Writer. Observer. Builder. I write from a life shaped by attention, simplicity, and living without a script—through reflective essays, long-form inquiry, and fiction rooted in ordinary lives. I live in rural Alabama, where writing, walking, and building small, intentional spaces are part of the same practice.
Biking is something else I both love and hate. It takes a lot of effort but does provide good exercise and most days over an hour to listen to a good book or podcast. I especially like having ridden.
Here’s my bike, a Rockhopper by Specialized. I purchased it November 2021 from Venture Out in Guntersville; Mike is top notch! So is the bike, and the ‘old’ man seat I salvaged from an old Walmart bike.
Here’s what I’m listening to: The Dictionary of Lost Words, by Pip Williams
Amazon abstract:
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK • “Delightful . . . [a] captivating and slyly subversive fictional paean to the real women whose work on the Oxford English Dictionary went largely unheralded.”—The New York Times Book Review
“A marvelous fiction about the power of language to elevate or repress.”—Geraldine Brooks, New York Times bestselling author of People of the Book
Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the Scriptorium, an Oxford garden shed in which her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Young Esme’s place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word bondmaid flutters beneath the table. She rescues the slip and, learning that the word means “slave girl,” begins to collect other words that have been discarded or neglected by the dictionary men.
As she grows up, Esme realizes that words and meanings relating to women’s and common folks’ experiences often go unrecorded. And so she begins in earnest to search out words for her own dictionary: the Dictionary of Lost Words. To do so she must leave the sheltered world of the university and venture out to meet the people whose words will fill those pages.
Set during the height of the women’s suffrage movement and with the Great War looming, The Dictionary of Lost Words reveals a lost narrative, hidden between the lines of a history written by men. Inspired by actual events, author Pip Williams has delved into the archives of the Oxford English Dictionary to tell this highly original story. The Dictionary of Lost Words is a delightful, lyrical, and deeply thought-provoking celebration of words and the power of language to shape the world.
I encourage you to read these articles (and watch the videos) to gain understanding and perspective concerning the historical federal case of United States of America vs. Donald J. Trump.
“I can conceive of no better service… than boldly exposing the weakness, liabilities and infinite corruptions of democracy.”
BY MARIA POPOVA
“Progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and reimagined if it is to survive,” Zadie Smith wrote in her spectacular essay on optimism and despair. The illusion of permanent progress inflicts a particularly damning strain of despair as we witness the disillusioning undoing of triumphs of democracy and justice generations in the making — despair preventable only by taking a wider view of history in order to remember that democracy advances in fits and starts, in leaps and backward steps, but advances nonetheless, on timelines exceeding any individual lifetime. Amid our current atmosphere of presentism bias and extreme narrowing of perspective, it is not merely difficult but downright countercultural to resist the ahistorical panic by taking such a telescopic view — lucid optimism that may be our most unassailable form of resistance to the corruptions and malfunctions of democracy.
I can conceive of no better service in the United States, henceforth, by democrats of thorough and heart-felt faith, than boldly exposing the weakness, liabilities and infinite corruptions of democracy.
Having lived and saved lives through the Civil War, having seen the swell of “vast crops of poor, desperate, dissatisfied, nomadic, miserably-waged populations,” having witnessed the corrosion of idealism and the collapse of democratic values into corruption and complacency, Whitman still faces a dispiriting landscape with a defiant and irrepressible optimism — our mightiest and most countercultural act of courage, then and now and always:
Though I think I fully comprehend the absence of moral tone in our current politics and business, and the almost entire futility of absolute and simple honor as a counterpoise against the enormous greed for worldly wealth, with the trickeries of gaining it, all through society in our day, I still do not share the depression and despair on the subject which I find possessing many good people.
Zooming out of the narrow focus of his cultural moment — as we would be well advised to do with ours — Whitman takes a telescopic perspective of time, progress, and social change, and considers what it really takes to win the future:
The advent of America, the history of the past century, has been the first general aperture and opening-up to the average human commonalty, on the broadest scale, of the eligibilities to wealth and worldly success and eminence, and has been fully taken advantage of; and the example has spread hence, in ripples, to all nations. To these eligibilities — to this limitless aperture, the race has tended, en-masse, roaring and rushing and crude, and fiercely, turbidly hastening — and we have seen the first stages, and are now in the midst of the result of it all, so far. But there will certainly ensue other stages, and entirely different ones. In nothing is there more evolution than the American mind. Soon, it will be fully realized that ostensible wealth and money-making, show, luxury, &c., imperatively necessitate something beyond — namely, the sane, eternal moral and spiritual-esthetic attributes, elements… Soon, it will be understood clearly, that the State cannot flourish, (nay, cannot exist,) without those elements. They will gradually enter into the chyle of sociology and literature. They will finally make the blood and brawn of the best American individualities of both sexes.
American Democracy, in its myriad personalities, in factories, work-shops, stores, offices — through the dense streets and houses of cities, and all their manifold sophisticated life — must either be fibred, vitalized, by regular contact with out-door light and air and growths, farm-scenes, animals, fields, trees, birds, sun-warmth and free skies, or it will morbidly dwindle and pale. We cannot have grand races of mechanics, work people, and commonalty, (the only specific purpose of America,) on any less terms. I conceive of no flourishing and heroic elements of Democracy in the United States, or of Democracy maintaining itself at all, without the Nature-element forming a main part — to be its health-element and beauty-element — to really underlie the whole politics, sanity, religion and art of the New World.
Over the past couple of years, the SBC’s newest schism has centered around the question of women pastors.
After decades of decline, the hardline ultraconservative faction has swung into action to cast out one megachurch for appointing three women pastors.
Though hundreds of SBC churches have women pastors, suddenly it’s a big deal. They’re ignoring all of the denomination’s problems to focus on this one extremely secondary issue—the hill they will die upon.
Reading Time: 10 MINUTES
The argument over women pastors is heating up for the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). They’ve been in decline for many decades now, by their own reckoning, with a protracted and uninterrupted drop in membership for the last 15 years or so. And yet their current strategy involves attacking anyone who’s even sympathetic to the notion of women pastors. To outsiders, this newest strategy might not make a whole lot of sense. But to Southern Baptist leaders, it’s the hands-down most important question of their day.
The absolute state of the SBC
When I said the SBC has been in decline for decades, I referred to what they call their baptism ratio. This is the number of baptisms they score compared to their overall membership: 1 person baptized per however many existing members. It’s a measure of their recruitment effectiveness more than anything else, a marker of how well their resources function to draw in new SBC-lings.
Many years ago, SBC leaders decided that recruitment is their ride-or-die mission. That makes their baptism ratio their ride-or-die statistic.
They’ve kept track of this ratio for a long time through their Annual Reports. From the late 1800s to the 1970s, sometimes it’d dip as low as 1:20, or it might rise as high as 1:31. But after 1975, it never dipped below 1:30 again. In 1986, it reached the 40s for the first time. By 2002, it stayed in the 40s for good.
After hovering in the 40s for a while, the 2013 report reveals it hitting 1:50 for the first time. By 2019, they’d dipped to 1:60, and would never see the 50s again. And the pandemic walloped them clear to 1:114. They’ve only slightly recovered from that drop by rising back up to 1:88. They might recover a bit more this year, but I doubt they’ll ever see the 60s again.
Membership has also struggled mightily. After reporting 16M members in the 2002 report and swelling to 16.3M by 2007, that figure, too, began to drop: 15M by 2012, 14M by 2019, and finally 13M in 2022, its most recent report. The last time they had 13M members was in 1983.
Focusing on anything but their decline
As you can tell from the numbers, the SBC’s decline has been accelerating in recent years. Various scandals and crises, like the 2019 “Abuse of Faith” crisis detailing the pervasiveness of sex abuse and cover-ups in pastoral ranks, have shattered the flocks’ confidence in their leaders. The SBC has also proven singularly incapable of responding well to Americans’ growing secularization.
One might think that a denomination that is in a decline this marked might be concentrating on retention, at least. But no.
They’re arguing about women pastors.
As in, pastors who are women. Specifically as in, SBC pastors who are women. And the SBC church leaders that have hired them, or might one day potentially hire them, or are even halfway sympathetic to the idea of some other SBC church potentially hiring them one day.
The SBC’s long and difficult relationship with women pastors
Back in the 1980s and 1990s, the SBC underwent a schism that its victors now call the Conservative Resurgence. By planting ultraconservative allies in key positions throughout the denomination, and capturing its presidency for a set period of time, a small cabal of plotters drove out every church and church leader who was even vaguely non-conservative. Then, they set about progress-proofing the SBC for what they hoped would be all time.
And the entire official reason why they did all that, why they drove away literally thousands of member churches, literally why they went to all this trouble and planning and scheming, was to prevent women from becoming SBC pastors.
In the heyday of women’s rights advances, a number of women were making tracks toward pastor jobs in SBC churches. This development deeply alarmed the schemers.
Here is how Al Mohler, one of the earliest cronies and lickspittles of the takeover, put it:
Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., recalled in a seminary chapel sermon the reaction when the Southern Baptist Convention in 1984 for the first time adopted a resolution declaring the office of pastor is restricted to men qualified by Scripture.
“That incited one of the most incredible denominational controversies — in the midst of that great controversy of the ’70s and the ’80s and the ’90s — that one could imagine.”Baptist News Global, 2010
It’s not an exaggeration to say that women pastors became the singular doctrinal crisis that drove the takeover of the SBC. The winners might claim it was over literalism and inerrancy, sure. But it was literalism and inerrancy in the service of barring women from pastorships.
So yes, it’s sort of like the role slavery played in the American Civil War.
Surprisingly, this came from PragerU’s YouTube channel, but it’s from a West Point professor and colonel. You can find the transcript of this video at their site.
In the case of women pastors during the Conservative Resurgence, those ultraconservative schemers won that fight.
Preventing women pastors is the NUMBER ONE PRIORITY for these guys
By the year 2000, the deed was done—at which point SBC leaders brought forth the Baptist Faith and Message 2000, or BFM2k. It’s like their Constitution. Here is what Article VI says about how a church ought to be structured:
Its scriptural officers are pastors and deacons. While both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.BFM2k, Article VI
For the past 20ish years, SBC-lings have considered this dictate to be as binding as the Bible itself. (Well, at least the parts that aren’t too uncomfortable to follow literally, like all those strange-seeming dietary laws.) In short, SBC churches aren’t allowed to have women pastors—and the BFM2k wrote that rule in stone.
But then, something happened along the way to the Annual Meeting a few years ago:
Abuse of Faith became a lightning rod of controversy and change
That’s the name that secular journalists gave the SBC’s sex-abuse crisis. Back in 2019, those journalists uncovered and publicly revealed decades of sex abuse and cover-ups in the SBC’s (male) pastoral ranks. This abuse and its cover-ups infested the entire denomination, and it reached all the way up to the SBC’s highest ranks.
As outraged SBC-lings wrestled with this crisis, new calls for women pastors rang out. Perhaps more and more SBC-lings had begun to notice that when demographic groups are disenfranchised from power, they become powerless—and then they become prey for the powerful. After all, the same thing had happened with Black people under “separate but equal” laws. (That’s why our government abolished the entire legal fiction of separate-but-equal. And here, it’s worth noting that the SBC has another long and very troubled history with racism.)
Or maybe SBC-lings just saw women pastors as part of an overarching move toward progress.
Whatever the case, more and more ultraconservative SBC-lings and leaders became alarmed over the new inroads SBC women were making toward positions of power.
It was like the Conservative Resurgence hadn’t even happened!
Leaping into action to solve the biggest problem in the whole entire dadgum dang ol’ world
It’s interesting to me to note that the SBC’s top leaders have fought like three cats in a pillowcase over how to handle Abuse of Faith.
One faction, which I’ve dubbed the Old Guard, wants to do basically nothing about it: let churches handle it however they see fit, but they insist that it’s not the denomination’s responsibility at all. (That worked great for decades, right? At least for the most powerful men in the SBC.) The other faction, which I call the Pretend Progressives, want to tackle it in only slightly more meaningful ways.
The Old Guard viciously attacks their enemy faction for focusing on abuse rather than recruitment. Meanwhile, the Pretend Progressives seem focused on fixing the problem without doing anything too invasive or extensive. As well, both factions are deeply concerned about recruitment levels and tanking retention rates. But each has its own strategy for dealing with those: the Old Guard wants everyone to just Jesus harder, while the Pretend Progressives introduce endless cringey evangelism campaigns that quickly fizzle and fade away.
At least, that’s how things have been going for several years.
But now, women pastors have overtaken the sex-abuse crisis as the factions’ main argument.
Anatomy of a new schism
It’s like watching a particularly-bad reboot of an old movie franchise. Women pastors have become the new argument, the new political football, the new scapegoat for everything that each faction views as wrong with the SBC today.
Last year, at the SBC’s 2021 Annual Meeting, each faction presented a number of initiatives for the denomination to work on during the next year. One of these involved tackling the question of the growing numbers of women pastors in the SBC. This was a solidly Old Guard initiative. But both factions’ leaders officially oppose women pastors. (In the 2021 President’s Address in the Annual Report on page 115, J.D. Greear—a solid Pretend Progressive—states that the SBC’s rules are “crystal clear” regarding no women pastors.)
On page 169 of the 2021 Annual Report, we see an initiative from 2019 that requested the addition of “and function” to Article VI. Its proposer wanted it to read:
While men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office and function of pastor is limited to men as qualified by scripture.2021 Annual Report, p. 169
That “and function” is very important right now. SBC ultraconservatives do not want women as pastors. But in addition, they also don’t want women doing anything that even smells like pastoral work.
So during the 2022 Annual Meeting, the question arose again. This time, the initiative’s proposer asked for even more sweeping language in the BFM2k:
“That Article III, Section 1, of the SBC Constitution be amended to add ‘(6) Does not affirm, appoint, or employ a woman as a pastor of any kind.’”2022 Annual Report, p. 57
And that bit about “affirm[ing]” isn’t accidental, either.
Ultraconservatives don’t just want to attack churches that hire women pastors. They want to destroy anyone who even thinks that idea is fine by Jesus.
Right now, that means Saddleback Church.
Why Saddleback Church is at the center of the maelstrom over women pastors
Rick Warren is the former head pastor of Saddleback Church. He wrote the popular Purpose-Driven Life series.
Saddleback Church itself is a megachurch. Like most of its breed, it is so large that its leaders employ a large flotilla of sub-pastors.
Now, Saddleback Church isn’t the first SBC church to do this. Not by a longshot. The SBC, and in particular Al Mohler, likes to pretend otherwise, but Saddleback isn’t alone here at all. As a hardline Old Guard site pointed out in 2020, the SBC contains hundreds of churches that are pastored by women.
Of course, that’s hundreds of churches out of 47,614 churches (as of 2021). But as those hardliners point out, they tend to be the biggest churches in the SBC:
One writer gave us a list of a whole bunch of churches with pastors without the Y chromosome, but we likewise did a big expose on this too last year, when we discovered that 10% of the biggest churches in the Southern Baptist Convention have women pastors on staff, and another 15% have women functioning in the role of pastor, just without the title. 47 of them based on 466 churches. Add another 35,000 churches to the list, and it doesn’t take much to know we have a problem.Pulpit & Pen
THE HORROR!
They went on to name some of those “biggest churches,” too. (Part of me wonders if their flocks even know they attend an SBC-branded church. Some SBC churches seem to try very hard to obscure that connection.)
But the biggest, best-recognized name in the list is arguably Saddleback. And so Saddleback has become the newest scapegoat in this newest schism.
The retaliation against Saddleback has already begun
Dysfunctional authoritarians, like those we find at the rotted heart of evangelicalism, tend to retaliate brutally hard against dissenters and heretics. However, in modern evangelicalism there are simply so many of those that the tribe has to focus its efforts on those who stand out from the rest. By being such a high-prominence, well-known megachurch, Saddleback has lifted itself into prime position as a perfect retaliation target.
So in the 2021 Annual Report (p. 74), we find someone requesting that the SBC “break fellowship” with Saddleback.” (In Christianese, “break fellowship” means kicking out and ostracizing someone until they mend their ways.) The requester specifically names, as his reason for this request, the ordination of those three women pastors.
In 2022’s Annual Report (p. 60-61), the SBC’s leaders render their verdict. Or rather, their non-verdict:
The Credentials Committee reports. . . that it is unable to form an opinion regarding the relationship of Saddleback Church to the Southern Baptist Convention, until clarity is provided regarding the use of the title “pastor” for staff positions with different responsibility and authority than that of the lead pastor.2022 Annual Report, page 61
Then, they punted to the future. They asked their fellow SBC leaders to appoint yet-another-committee this year to study the all-important question of exactly what the words “office of pastor” mean, then report back at the 2023 Annual Meeting. Then, they can figure out how to handle women pastors. Only then can they decide upon Saddleback’s fate.
Women pastors, and the problems nobody has been able to solve
The attacks on Saddleback are already just incredible in their animosity, as are the arguments around women pastors. I cannot imagine how that’s going to heat up over the coming months.
Rick Warren himself has pronounced the issue “secondary.” He’s right—at least in the grand scheme of things, and for the SBC itself. But in another way, this issue is not only primary but possibly the most important argument in the entire denomination’s recent history.
Here’s why:
Nobody in the entire SBC has ever managed to figure out any way to end their hemorrhage of members, much less to reverse their decline. Nor has anybody in the SBC ever come up with any reliable method of recruitment that actually works, much less any method that their increasingly confrontation-averse flocks are actually willing to do. Every proposal evangelicals have ever put into action on the evangelism front has failed, often hilariously. And cracking down harder on authoritarianism to improve retention has led only to new abuse scandals.
Adding to those woes, now they’ve got this huge sex-abuse crisis that’s now three years old, almost four. It began in February 2019. In those almost-four-years, the SBC has barely managed to fully identify the problem. Addressing it meaningfully might take another four!
For most of those almost-four-years, the Old Guard have simply denied they have any duty to handle the problem, while the Pretend Progressives have either dragged their feet or introduced ridiculous busy-work like Caring Well as a substitute for meaningful action.
In situations like this one, I can easily imagine the sheer relief the leaders of both factions felt when the topic of women pastors crossed their paths.
Clearly, the best way to handle unsolvable problems is to find something else to argue about
In a lot of ways, this fight must feel like a welcome distraction from all those other problems that neither faction can adequately address.
It is also a shorthand, dogwhistle-loaded battle that each faction’s leaders are using to highlight their own imagined superiority over their enemies.
The Old Guard’s leaders sneer: THEY want to “reinterpret the BFM 2000” just like “classic liberal[s]” always do. Stop letting these liberalism-infected elites mangle TRUE CHRISTIANITY™!
Yes yes, but would that be the Great Plan, or the Ineffable Plan? (From Good Omens.)
And while the factions wrangle over this question, gaining followers and votes and swaying decisions as best they can, the actual real problems of the SBC—retention, recruitment, and that still-almost-entirely-unaddressed abuse crisis—continue to fester.
I’m absolutely positive that both factions’ leaders hope that by the time any of those three problems become completely unavoidable dealbreakers, they’ll be long retired and living out their sunset years in luxury.
But in the meanwhile, they have a football in play that is clearly acceptable to both factions. The battle over women pastors is, unlike all three of those other problems, a winnable battle.
Whoever wins this fight will control the SBC for the foreseeable future, just as the people who won the last fight won the Conservative Resurgence. It is a proxy fight masking the real priorities of those who fight the battle for ownership over what is still the biggest Protestant denomination in America.
Biking is something else I both love and hate. It takes a lot of effort but does provide good exercise and most days over an hour to listen to a good book or podcast. I especially like having ridden.
Here’s my bike, a Rockhopper by Specialized. I purchased it November 2021 from Venture Out in Guntersville; Mike is top notch! So is the bike, and the ‘old’ man seat I salvaged from an old Walmart bike.
Here’s what I’m listening to: The Dictionary of Lost Words, by Pip Williams
Amazon abstract:
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK • “Delightful . . . [a] captivating and slyly subversive fictional paean to the real women whose work on the Oxford English Dictionary went largely unheralded.”—The New York Times Book Review
“A marvelous fiction about the power of language to elevate or repress.”—Geraldine Brooks, New York Times bestselling author of People of the Book
Esme is born into a world of words. Motherless and irrepressibly curious, she spends her childhood in the Scriptorium, an Oxford garden shed in which her father and a team of dedicated lexicographers are collecting words for the very first Oxford English Dictionary. Young Esme’s place is beneath the sorting table, unseen and unheard. One day a slip of paper containing the word bondmaid flutters beneath the table. She rescues the slip and, learning that the word means “slave girl,” begins to collect other words that have been discarded or neglected by the dictionary men.
As she grows up, Esme realizes that words and meanings relating to women’s and common folks’ experiences often go unrecorded. And so she begins in earnest to search out words for her own dictionary: the Dictionary of Lost Words. To do so she must leave the sheltered world of the university and venture out to meet the people whose words will fill those pages.
Set during the height of the women’s suffrage movement and with the Great War looming, The Dictionary of Lost Words reveals a lost narrative, hidden between the lines of a history written by men. Inspired by actual events, author Pip Williams has delved into the archives of the Oxford English Dictionary to tell this highly original story. The Dictionary of Lost Words is a delightful, lyrical, and deeply thought-provoking celebration of words and the power of language to shape the world.
“Human being, vegetables or cosmic dust, we all dance to an invisible tune, intoned in the distance by a mysterious player.”
BY MARIA POPOVA
We are accidents of biochemistry and chance, moving through the world waging wars and writing poems, spellbound by the seductive illusion of the self, every single one of our atoms traceable to some dead star.
In the interlude between the two World Wars, days after the stock market crash that sparked the Great Depression, the German-American poet and future Nazi sympathizer George Sylvester Viereck sat down with Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879–April 18, 1955) for what became his most extensive interview about life — reflections ranging from science to spirituality to the elemental questions of existence. It was published in the Saturday Evening Post on October 29, 1929 — a quarter century after Einstein’s theory of relativity reconfigured our basic understanding of reality with its revelation that space and time are the warp and weft threads of a single fabric, along the curvature of which everything we are and everything we know is gliding.
Albert Einstein by Lotte Jacobi. (University of New Hampshire Museum of Art.)
Considering the helplessness individual human beings feel before the immense geopolitical forces that had hurled the world into its first global war and the decisions individual political leaders were making — decisions already inclining the world toward a second — Einstein aims in his sensitive intellect at the fundamental reality of existence:
I am a determinist. As such, I do not believe in free will. The Jews believe in free will. They believe that man shapes his own life. I reject that doctrine philosophically. In that respect I am not a Jew… I believe with Schopenhauer: We can do what we wish, but we can only wish what we must. Practically, I am, nevertheless, compelled to act is if freedom of the will existed. If I wish to live in a civilized community, I must act as if man is a responsible being.
When asked about any personal responsibility for his own staggering achievements, he points a steadfast finger at the nonexistence of free will:
I claim credit for nothing. Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect as well as for the star. Human being, vegetables or cosmic dust, we all dance to an invisible tune, intoned in the distance by a mysterious player.
For Einstein, the most alive part of the mystery we live with — the mystery we are — is the imagination, that supreme redemption of human life from the prison of determinism. With an eye to his discovery of relativity, he reflects:
I believe in intuitions and inspirations. I sometimes feel that I am right. I do not know that I am. When two expeditions of scientists, funded by the Royal Academy, went forth to test my theory of relativity, I was convinced that their conclusions would totally tally with my hypothesis. I was not surprised when the eclipse of May 29, 1919, confirmed my intuitions. I would have been surprised if I had been wrong.
[…]
I am enough of an artist to draw freely from the imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.
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A recent survey from Lifeway Research, an arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, found that most Protestant pastors (54%) plan to thwart a potential church shooting by having armed members of the congregation. (In 2019, that number was 45%.)
Only 5% of those pastors said their safety measures involve having a uniformed cop on site while only 20% have “armed private security personnel.” Shockingly, for people who seem to think a shootout could occur on any given Sunday, only 1% of pastors bother with metal detectors at the entrance.
It might make sense if smaller churches with less money felt like hiring security wasn’t a viable option so they relied on their own armed members… but that’s not the case at all. In fact, it’s the larger churches (with over 250 attendees each week) that are more likely to have armed members.
That means more pastors think they’re better off having random church members with weapons on them instead of hiring private or public police officers with presumably more training in those situations.
None of the security measures involves praying more. Which is telling since that’s the typical response from Christian leaders whenever there’s a shooting in a public school. Thoughts and prayers are the default conservative responses after mass shootings, but conservative Christians refuse to let Jesus take the wheel when it comes to their own safety. They want action. They’re wrong about which action to take, but they know something needs to change, and a Higher Power won’t help.
It’s also noteworthy that so many of these pastors have just accepted that their places of worship could become actual battlegrounds. Apparently God can’t protect them as much as an assault weapon could.
There is, of course, nothing wrong with having a plan in place in the event of a mass shooting, even in church, and there are legitimate debates to be had about the best ways to stop someone with the intention of harming others. Arming “good guys” isn’t always the best option. We’ve unfortunately seen multiple situations, like in Parkland and Uvalde, where armed cops did nothing significant to stop the shooters.
Given all that, it would be nice if these pastors put an ounce of thought into why gun violence is on the rise.
You may recall that, shortly after the Uvalde shooting, a (now-deleted) tweet from a gun manufacturer called Daniel Defense went viral. That was the company that made the weapon used to kill 19 children and two adults. The tweet featured a child holding a weapon, justified with a Bible verse (Proverbs 22:6).
That wasn’t an accident. Daniel Defense is a Christian company that mixes religion and death for an audience that eats it all up. That company also created the weapon used in the mass shooting in Las Vegas, which killed another 60 people and injured literally hundreds more.
Conservative Christians think guns are the solution to a gun culture they helped create. Just as God is their solution to another problem they created (sin), they see more weapons as the response to a society made worse by more weapons.
Last year, historian Peter Manseaupublished an essay in the New York Times(gift article)in which he linked the conservative Christian obsession with guns and God:
In Florida, Spike’s Tactical (“the finest AR-15s on the planet”) makes a line of Crusader weapons adorned with a quote from the Psalms. Missouri-based CMMG (“the leading manufacturer of AR15 rifles, components and small parts”) advertises its employees’ “commitment to meet each and every morning to pray for God’s wisdom in managing the enormous responsibility that comes with this business.” And in Colorado, Cornerstone Arms explains that it is so named because “Jesus Christ is the cornerstone of our business, our family and our lives” and the “Second Amendment to our Constitution is the cornerstone of the freedom we enjoy as American citizens.”
For many American Christians, Jesus, guns and the Constitution are stitched together as durably as a Kevlar vest.
There’s a reason those companies exist. White evangelical Christians have a higher rate of gun ownership than any other religious (or explicitly non-religious) demographic in the country. The people who loudly and proudly declare themselves to be “pro-life” are also the most eager to put a bullet in a theoretical enemy. And the companies that profit from their gun fetish have helped create a culture where mass shootings are commonplace and citizens are falsely led to believe more guns are the solution to any safety issue—even though other countries are well aware that fewer guns and more restrictions on them are the way to go.
Manseau also (correctly) pointed out that this created another obstacle to gun safety measures: Anything politicians do to keep weapons off the streets and out of the hands of people who might use them for evil is inherently seen by these zealots as anti-Christian.
To imagine yourself as a Good Guy With a Gun… may inspire action-movie day dreams, but it is ultimately a religious vision of a world in which good and evil are at war, where God and firepower make all the difference.
Some of us want to see guns regulated like cars. Owners should have to go through a registration process that involves significant training and insurance and a license that could be taken away if you’re irresponsible. But the conservative Christians who see guns as an extension of their faith—and the solution to a potential shooting in church—refuse to accept any kind of sensible restriction on them. They couldn’t handle attendance restrictions or mask mandates in church during the pandemic, and they can’t handle red flag laws or mandatory registration on their weapons.
They believe freedom involves their ability to hurt as many strangers as possible. (It’s what Jesus would have wanted.) And they apparently also think freedom means having people in their churches who spend at least a part of Sunday morning thinking about how they might have to kill someone that morning in case of an emergency.
Obviously, #NotAllChristians are on board with this belief. Many side with progressives on gun safety and understand what all the data in the world has repeatedly told us about what we need to do to save lives. They are victims and first responders and as troubled by the right-wing obsession with guns as the rest of us. But unless they acknowledge the role their religion has played in creating this increasingly dangerous environment Americans currently live in, it’ll be virtually impossible to create change from within. That means pastors with a spine need to speak out against the Second Amendment extremists even if that means denouncing their fellow Christian leaders.
Disarming the church doesn’t mean putting their congregations in harm’s way. Disarming everyone means more safety for more people. At the very least, weapons should be limited to the hands of trained professionals as opposed to anyone who can get his hands on a weapon and wants to cosplay as a hero.
The 2023 Book of Reports contains several key takeaways: a devastating membership drop, huge losses of member churches, and nowhere near enough bounceback in their baptism metrics.
Of note, the report also provides a little information about an ongoing federal investigation into possible criminal charges over their ongoing sex abuse crisis, as well as some distressing information about their summer recruitment drives for children.
Reading Time: 14 MINUTES
Despite its troubles, the Southern Baptist Convention remains the largest Protestant denomination in America. Every year ahead of its big Annual Meeting, their leaders release a sneak peek at the previous year’s metrics. And this year, that sneak peek has been spectacular. Let’s go over the numbers they’ve just released in their 2023 Book of Reports to see what this beleaguered denomination behemoth is dealing with nowadays.
(Author’s note: The figures I’m citing in this post come from Southern Baptist Convention Annual Reports, which are all available here. Each report covers the previous year’s performance.)
Takeaway 1: The worst-ever Southern Baptist Convention membership drop
Most of the significant metrics can be found on page 8 of their 2023 Book of Reports (page numbers reflect the pages of the PDF file itself). As with all Southern Baptist Annual Reports, these figures cover the previous year.
And last year, their total membership fell from 13,680,493 to 13,223,122. That is a drop of 457,371. That number represents the biggest drop in total membership in the entire history of the Southern Baptist Convention. Since their decline began in earnest in the 2000s, they’ve usually faced drops of about 200k. For example, from 2014 to 2015, they lost 204,409 members. Their previous contender for biggest drop ever came in 2020, when they lost 435,632 people from the previous year’s count.
The last time they stood at 13.2M members was around 1979, when they recorded 13.3M. But those were their halcyon days of explosive growth, as we’ll see in a moment.
Takeaway 2: Baptisms
The 2023 Book of Reports does contain smidgens of good news for Southern Baptists, and their small bounce-back on baptisms is one of those smidgens. Long ago, Southern Baptist leaders decided that their most important focus would be on recruitment. And they’d measure recruitment effectiveness by baptisms. With baptism, new members make a formal statement of affiliation and obedience to both Southern Baptist Convention rules and ideology.
So when baptism metrics falter, Southern Baptist folks get twitchy.
Of course, the pandemic completely destroyed most churches’ and denominations’ performance metrics. This one is no different. Indeed, in 2019 they claimed 235,748 baptisms. But in 2020, they record only 123,160—a precipitous drop indeed. In the two years since, they’ve bounced back by inches: 154,701 in 2021, and now 180,177 in 2022. They are still nowhere near the slow-but-inexorable decline in baptisms that they’ve seen over the past 15-ish years, but they’re hyping this slight increase with all the gusto they can muster.
With baptism, new SBC members make a formal statement of affiliation and obedience. So when baptism metrics falter, Southern Baptist folks get twitchy.
I’d really love to know exactly who’s getting dunked here. Around 2014, a Southern Baptist baptism task force admitted that 80% of their churches weren’t baptizing more than 1 young adults (age 18-29) per year, and that “the only consistently growing age group in baptisms is age 5 and under.” I also know that evangelicals do love to be re-baptized for various reasons (joining a new church, sliding from one denomination to another, wanting to reconfirm their vows to Jesus after periods of laxity, etc).
Takeaway 3: The all-important Southern Baptist baptism ratio
Ever since they began calling themselves the Southern Baptist Convention, these evangelicals have tracked what they call their baptism ratio. This is their ride-or-die, make-or-break statistic. It’s simply a ratio that expresses how effective Southern Baptist recruitment attempts are: the number of baptisms according to the total number of Southern Baptist members overall. It tells us how many Southern Baptist members’ resources it takes to bag one baptism.
If someone doesn’t understand this ratio’s drastic importance, not much else about Southern Baptists will make sense. It’s how J.D. Greear could claim that the Southern Baptist Convention has been in decline for forty years: Their baptism ratio began to tank in the mid-1980s. Even though their membership continued to grow by leaps and bounds, their baptism ratio told the true story: their recruitment simply wasn’t as effective as it’d once been.
Southern Baptist leaders used to really like seeing that ratio in the 1:20 range, but 1:30 was okay in a pinch. It ranged in the 1:20s until the mid-1960s. Then, it ranged in the 1:30s all the way until 1985, when it hit 1:41 for the first time. The denomination flirted with the high 1:30s and low 1:40s until 2001. After that point, they never saw the 1:30s ever again.
If you’re now suspecting that this ratio’s decline is accelerating, you’re quite right. In 2012, it hit 1:50. At the time, I saw a lot of Southern Baptist leaders fretting hard about that and spilling great amounts of digital ink lamenting it. None of it mattered, though, because it just kept getting worse. In 2018, it hit 1:60 (and Southern Baptist leaders were generally silent about it this time). Then, the pandemic walloped them with 1:114 in 2020. They clawed their way back to 1:88 in 2021, and now it sits at 1:73 in 2022.
To put this into perspective, remember that 1979 membership figure, 13.3M? That year, they recorded 368k baptisms for a ratio of 1:36. Had they been operating with 1:73, as they did this past year, that would have given them only about 172k baptisms. That’s less than half what they managed in 1979 with far more effective recruitment. And even then, they already knew their baptism ratio told a story of dwindling effectiveness.
So yes, the denomination’s leaders are trying very hard to celebrate a small bounce back. I don’t think it’ll bounce much further back; most evangelicals seemed to forget all about the pandemic last year and were living life on normal mode again. So I think Southern Baptist leaders will be very lucky indeed if they ever see the high end of the 1:60s ever again.
Takeaway 4: Possibly the biggest-ever drop in Southern Baptist member churches as well
In 2022, the Southern Baptist Convention went from 47,614 to 47,198 member churches. That’s a net loss of 416 churches.
I’ve never seen such a huge drop in member churches. Most reports proudly point to an increase there, not a decrease. In 2018, they lost 88 churches, but normally they gain a few hundred. Even in the sheer chaos of 2020, they added 62 new churches. In 2021, they added only 22, but that’s still a teeny tiny bit of growth.
As I said, this is, of course, a net total. Churches always open and close in the Southern Baptist Convention. Even during their last schism, the Conservative Resurgence that saw almost 2000 churches leave the denomination in 1990, they consistently saw their member church totals do nothing but rise. In the past, I’ve even found specific strategies used by this denomination’s leaders to keep the number of churches growing overall by flinging new churches everywhere to keep pace with closures. Keeping that number rising is a big priority for them.
But this past year, nobody could work around or massage that tally into positive net growth.
That drop tells us quite a story on its own
Back in 1979, 13.3M Southern Baptist members squeezed into 35,605 member churches. Now, 13.2M Southern Baptist members spread out comfortably among 47,198 churches. We don’t know what attendance looked like in 1979, since the denomination wasn’t tracking it in their Annual Reports. But since they started recording it around 1992, attendance has fallen from 40-45% of membership to about 35% of it. That’s all perfectly normal. Even the most devout evangelicals can barely be arsed to show up in church every few Sundays. (It’s probably for the best. If the number of Christians claiming rock-solid every-Sunday attendance actually did it, churches couldn’t possibly hold all of them.)
At least, that’s how things looked until the pandemic.
The pandemic decimated attendance figures. In-person counts dropped from 5.2M in 2019 (36.1%) to 4.4M in 2020 (31.5%). So for their 2022 report, Southern Baptist leaders decided to wrap online church participation in with in-person headcounts for their 2021 figure. That got them 3.6M in-person attendees plus 1.4M claimed online participation, for a total of 5.05M (36.9%). For 2022’s counts, they got 3.8M in-person attendees and 1.06M online attendees, for a total of 4.86M (36.7%).
For the past couple of years, though, I’ve been hearing about how the pandemic has destroyed church finances across the board. At the same time, it’s crushed the spirits of many evangelical pastors who began seeing a darker side of their flocks that they really hadn’t known existed. So it’s not just the Southern Baptist Convention’s twin crises of racism and sex abuse that are alienating evangelicals en masse. It’s also the general toxicity of evangelicals and the sheer financial difficulty of operating a church—even with the incredible tax breaks churches get from our secular government.
When a Southern Baptist church closes, then, all of its claimed members vanish along with it. The denomination’s leaders have known for years that large numbers of churches are closing, and their go-to solution has always been to drown out that truth with tons of new church plants. This time, there’s no drowning out a voice that loud and insistent. Even with them adding 917 new congregations to their member rolls (as we see on p. 93), they ended up with that net loss of 416 this past year.
And one interesting omission from the 2023 Book of Reports
Various news articles online about this year’s reports cite an increase in “undesignated receipts.” And yes, they did rise somewhat over last year, from $9.7B to $9.9B.
What’s so strange is that the 2023 Book of Reports doesn’t list total receipts.
They’ve always listed both together before. Even in the 2022 report, we see total receipts ($11.8B) right under undesignated receipts (again, $9.7B). As far back as I can find, they’ve listed total receipts. Even with the pandemic’s devastation, they’ve listed both amounts.
But for some weird reason, the 2023 report doesn’t include total receipts. It’s not happening because this isn’t the full Annual Report, either. In 2021, we had a similar situation with the Book of Reports coming out ahead of the formal Annual Report released after the Annual Meeting. However, Total Receipts is definitely in that report in several places.
Page 77 indicates that total receipts increased by $304M in 2021. That is true. They recorded it in the 2022 Annual Report. But they also don’t tell us what last year’s total receipts were in this current year’s report.
We can make some educated guesses here. If Southern Baptist reports omit figures they usually include, there’s usually only one reason for it.
Also, on page 7 of the PDF in the 2023 report, we can see that Total Cooperative Program donations fell about $500k from the previous year. Though it’s a tiny drop (.11%) percentage-wise, that drop could function as an editorial comment or vote of no confidence, since churches have in the past threatened to withhold funds from that program over squabbles.
So yes, I am intensely curious about this total receipts situation.
Other interesting takeaways
Back in 2013, Southern Baptist leaders realized that almost no members left anything to their churches in their wills. They dearly wanted to get some of that free money. Page 47 of the 2023 Book of Reports proudly reveals that their action in this area has produced luscious fruit. The Southern Baptist Convention went from $23M in future gifts in wills in 2013 to $628M in 2022.
On page 50 of the PDF, we learn that their Ministers’ Financial Assistance program paid out $11.6M in assistance in 2022. That’s a sharp rise from $8.8M in 2021. That money goes to retired ministers in financial distress, as well as their spouses and widows. About 2/3 of recipients are pastors’ widows. This program sets age and tenure requirements, as well as poverty income requirements for larger amounts of help. Someone living under the program’s poverty level cutoff with 25+ years of ministerial service (or marriage to someone who had it) gets a whopping $550/month if single.
However, at the same time, 748 fewer people participated in their personal life insurance plans and 400 fewer participated in their medical and disability insurance plans. Group employee life insurance plans saw an increase in participants.
These are all absolutely awful numbers. Group employee life insurance plans had about 30k members covered. The personal plans cover almost 13k more members. But with 47,198 member churches and who even knows how many paid ministers and staffers beyond just pastors and their spouses to consider, I’d guess that barely 1/3 of Southern Baptist ministers and spouses are covered by any life insurance plans. The medical insurance plans fare even worse, covering about 25k members between group and personal plans.
I also note that most of their seminaries are struggling with declines in enrollment.
A bright spot of better news from Lifeway
On the plus side, Lifeway’s new president, Ben Mandrell, reports that the organization had “revenue growth” last year (p. 62). After how much Thom Rainer, the previous president, apparently mucked things up, I bet Southern Baptist Convention folks will be glad to hear that news.
On page 69, we also learn that Southern Baptist denominational and church leaders unabashedly consider Vacation Bible Schools to be evangelism opportunities. That means they are completely okay with indoctrinating and recruiting children, especially the children of unaffiliated adults who clearly don’t know that these recruitment events are far more than fun, supervised summer activities with a slight frosting of Jesus-ness to keep their kids busy.
The only moral recruitment is their recruitment. And every accusation is a confession. I hope non-evangelical parents are paying attention here.
Personally, I find Southern Baptists’ eagerness to hard-sell their religion to defenseless little kids to be downright sinister. I know they sense that 4-14 window closing fast on Gen Alpha, the children coming up next after Gen Z. However, that doesn’t excuse their desires. There’s nothing divine at all in Christianity, but there’s even less divine about the sheer Machiavellian nature of evangelicals’ intense focus on childhood indoctrination.
And a letter addressing that federal investigation
On page 11, we find a section titled “Significant actions of the SBC Executive Committee.” The Executive Committee is the denomination’s top-ranking group. They make the day-to-day decisions of the denomination all year long, as well as crafting budgets for the various denominational endeavors (like seminaries). In addition, the presidency of this committee has become the most recent battleground between the two current political factions of the Southern Baptist Convention.
Every year, this section runs after the metrics page. In previous years, it offered staffing news. It talked about people retiring, people getting hired or elected. It recounted lists of who occupied the committee’s top roles. Very rarely, we see important votes recorded—like in 2020, when the report discusses the vote the committee held in March 2020 to cancel that year’s Annual Meeting due to COVID-19.
But this year, the #1 item on the list concerns the Department of Justice’s decision to investigate the Southern Baptist Convention for possible crimes committed in its shielding and shuffling-around of sexual predators in ministry.
I looked, but have seen absolutely nothing about this investigation since August last year. But if the January 6 situation has taught me anything, it is that the wheels of justice grind very slowly—but exceedingly fine.
Of course, the letter in the report expresses complete cooperativeness with the federal investigation, as well as ongoing dedication to fully implement reforms to prevent future sex abuse. I’d expect nothing less, though I wonder how they’ll explain that their sweeping investigation has so far seen only one Southern Baptist church (Freedom Church of Vero Beach, Florida) kicked out of the denomination recently for not cooperating with a sex abuse investigation.
(By contrast, between Fall 2022 and early 2023 they also kicked out one church for being too nice to gay people, as well as five churches for being okay with women pastors. And that first church had voted to leave the Southern Baptist Convention back in 1999. So they were surprised to hear that the denomination had formally kicked them out last year.)
Interestingly, this letter is not signed by any Executive Committee members—except for Willie McLaurin, its Interim President. Since the list is arranged alphabetically, he appears near the end. Drowning out his name, we see various other big-name Southern Baptist officers: seminary presidents, missionary organization presidents, the president of their financial planning group, leaders of important groups like Lifeway, and even the president of the Southern Baptist Convention himself, Bart Barber.
I understand why the denomination felt it was important to show their biggest names supporting the investigation to the hilt, but it’s still such a strange look.
About that Southern Baptist sound bite going around
It’s easy to see why even secular news sites have talked about the 2023 Book of Reports. All of them mention a sound bite mentioned in Lifeway’s article about the report:
The 457,371 members lost is the largest single year numerical drop in more than 100 years.Lifeway, May 9, 2023
That little bit of info appears in almost every article I’ve seen on the topic.
However, I genuinely don’t know where they’re getting that information. All of their Annual Reports are right online. Anybody can look at them and compile information from them. (In fact, every year I do exactly that.) So I went back over their reports from 1920-1925.
There was no membership dip. They grew from about 2.9M members (from the 1920 report) to 3.5M members recorded in 1925, all without a hiccup.
At most, they lost about 800 churches in 1924, 700ish of which were dropped due to an ongoing lack of contact for three year, they said. That same year, they recorded almost 30k fewer baptisms. Otherwise, it was another typical growth year in terms of membership and donations.
That said, I don’t think they’re lying. They’re just not being very specific. Maybe they’re thinking further back, around when a similar pandemic, this time of influenza, decimated communities around the world. If Lifeway mentioned that 100-years figure hoping people would connect their current difficulties to the pandemic we face now, it was a clever move—but I’m not sure that most people would make that connection.
Besides, their Annual Reports from 1916-1920 don’t record anything but membership growth, so that can’t be whatever they’re using as an example.
I’m really curious about what their biggest drop was, if 2022 wasn’t the gold-medal winner there.
I don’t think this Southern Baptist membership drop is just recordkeeping ‘finally catching up’
The director of Lifeway’s research division, Scott McConnell, theorizes that the drop in membership happened because “the record keeping is finally catching up” with long-inactive members. I’m not so sure that’s the reason.
In reality, several factors are contributing to that alarming drop.
First and foremost, churches are closing like whoa. As I said, when a church closes, all of its members leave the rolls. Churches are the ones reporting all of these numbers to each Annual Report. If nobody’s at the church to report those figures, their previous count zeroes out.
Second and almost as important, reporting is purely voluntary and seems to be entirely done on the honor system. The Southern Baptist Convention gathers these numbers through their Annual Church Profile (ACP), which isn’t at all mandatory. Entire state conventions don’t even ask for some of the information appearing in their summary tables.
For example, the Florida Baptist Convention didn’t ask for a total membership count in their ACP, while the state conventions of Florida, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, the Pacific Northwest, and one of the Texas conventions didn’t ask about online worship participation. Moreover, if a church has nothing but bad news to report, nothing stops them from deciding maybe not to report it.
Even back in 2014, that baptism task force lamented that “[m]ore of our SBC churches in recent years fail to see the value of the annual reporting of statistics (Annual Church Profile),” which makes accurate assessment much more difficult. (However, they’re quick to add that their “statisticians” said there was still a baptism decline even if churches weren’t reporting.)
Third, yes indeed, churches are disaffiliating from the Southern Baptist Convention. In the vast majority of cases, they aren’t leaving over the denomination’s entrenched racism (as happened in 2020) or its slow response to its sex abuse crisis. (That said, I’ve found one former Southern Baptist church that appears to have disaffiliated in fear of its abusive pastor being discovered.)
However, the current Southern Baptist stronghold of ultraconservatism, the Conservative Baptist Network (CBN), still fights hard for control over the denomination. Their officially-stated reason for fighting is simple:
The Conservative Baptist Network believes the United States follows the SBC, seeing the SBC as “one of the few remaining roadblocks keeping liberalism from overtaking the United States.”Editorial in Baptist Standard, April 20, 2022
What a hilariously overblown sense of narcissistic importance! But I’d sure like to learn their second reason, because I’m certain they are even more motivated by the $10B+ dollars the Southern Baptist Convention still rakes in every year.
The upshot of the 2023 Southern Baptist Book of Reports
In this age of Christianity’s decline, the Southern Baptist Convention remains one of the few denominations issuing reports like this every year. They aren’t actually humanity’s Designated Adults except in their dreams, but they do act as a bellwether indicating future priorities and strategies of the Christian Right in general. That’s why I find it useful to keep an eye on them.
With this year’s firecracker of a report, we see a still-failing denomination struggling to find good news to report. Its leaders are trying their hardest to put a brave face on endless waves of bad news. They still haven’t recovered from the pandemic, and they probably won’t ever see their pre-pandemic numbers again.
But at the same time, they’re squeezing more money out of fewer churches. They can also look forward to way more money from dead Southern Baptist members’ estates. All of that extra money helps them stay hyper-politicized. It also helps them fling more and more money at recruitment efforts. They need to be spending more there, too. As their recruitment efforts become less and less effective, it takes ever-increasing amounts of resources to bag each baptism.
Amid it all, though, their factions are still at each other’s throats, there’s that scary federal investigation to look forward to, and they’ve got almost a half million fewer members and over 400 fewer churches total to deal with it all.
Their Annual Meeting next month is going to be interesting. I have no doubt about it.
Here’s the link to this article. I admit it might be a little late since several local churches have just their indoctrination week’s.
Article was written by Bruce Gerencser.
It is summertime, a time when school children spend their waking hours in leisure pursuits. I have many fond memories of the warm days of summer, three months of freedom from the rigors of the classroom. I spent countless hours at the swimming pool, riding bikes, playing baseball, going to Kings Island/Cedar Point, overnight camping, and aimless hanging out with friends. I suspect children today do many of the things I did half a century ago.
Evangelical churches know that they will have numerous opportunities over the summer months to — through coercive means — win boys, girls, and teenagers to Jesus. Church members are encouraged to scour their neighborhoods in search of children to invite to their church’s Vacation Bible School (VBS), Backyard Bible Club, or Day Camp. Non-Christian parents, unaware of the ulterior motive of Evangelicals, readily allow their children to attend programs that serve no other purpose than to turn children into Evangelical Christians.
Evangelical churches are quite savvy when it comes to methods used to attract children to what can only be described as indoctrination camps/meetings. Years ago, Vacation Bible School was the main tool used by churches to evangelize neighborhood children. While many churches still use this method, other Evangelical churches use day camps to draw children to their lair. These camps are fun-filled weeks sure to thrill most children. Some of these camps focus on sports. Regardless of the theme or focus, the end game is always the same — evangelizing children and teenagers.
Most of the time at these events will be spent doing fun activities. Fun! Fun! Fun!, says advertising material. What’s never stated is that the fun is a means to an end — making sure every attendee has an opportunity to ask Jesus into their heart/get saved/become a Christian. Some churches even baptize youthful converts at special services at the end of the week.
Sadly, many non-Christian (and Christian) parents are way too trusting. If Evangelical neighbor Susie stops by to invite their children to VBS or day camp, many parents quickly say yes. After all, the events are being held at churches, parents think. What harm could possibly come from allowing my children to go? As those of us who follow closely the machinations and shenanigans of Evangelical churches know, churches are NOT safe havens for children and teenagers. I would never advise parents to send their children to church unattended. The risk is too great, especially now that we know that sexual predators and child abusers are often fine, upstanding church members, pastors, deacons, youth group leaders, and Sunday school teachers. No parents in their right minds would allow their children to spend time with neighborhood registered sex offenders. Doing so would warrant a visit from child protective services. Yet, these very same parents don’t think twice about letting their children attend church activities that are magnets for predators. (Churches rarely do criminal background checks on summer program workers or the ministry teams that go from church to church holding camps/meetings.)
Evangelical churches should state very clearly their motives when inviting neighborhood children to VBS or day camps. Imagine what the response would be if advertising material contained the following:
VACATION BIBLE SCHOOL
We are Wonderful Baptist Church 666 Salvation St Defiance, Ohio 43512 419-956-Jesus
Come Join Us June 13-17 6:00-9:00 P.M.
Lots of Fun and Games Crafts and Snacks Too
And while your children are with us we plan to use coercive means to evangelize them. We plan to scare the hell out of your children, teaching them that if they do not repent, they will spend eternity being tortured by God.
Disclaimer: We plan to use workers who have not been thoroughly vetted. It’s too darn expensive to do a background check on everyone. Besides, we are Christians. Everyone knows Christians would never hurt children.
Something tells me that doing so would drastically reduce VBS/day camp attendance. Maybe not. Surely the fine folks down at First Baptist Church would never, ever do anything to harm children, right? People need to open their eyes and pay attention to the nefarious methods used by Evangelical churches (and some mainline churches) to evangelize and indoctrinate unchurched children. Just remember, it’s never just about fun, food, and fellowship. The ultimate goal is always to win wicked, sinful children to saving faith in Jesus Christ.
In any other setting such methods would be roundly criticized and condemned. Churches, however, get a free pass because they are considered depositories of morality and ethics. Until people realize that churches do not warrant such trust, children will continue to be targeted for evangelization and indoctrination.
Bruce Gerencser, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
by 
Richard L. Fricks 
