ALPHARETTA, Ga. — With nearly half of the 43,000 churches in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) baptizing three or fewer people, according to 2007 statistics, Baptist evangelists and others are taking action.
The Conference of Southern Baptist Evangelists (COSBE), the North American Mission Board (NAMB) and state and local Baptists are partnering to reverse this baptism trend.
With financial assistance from NAMB, COSBE launched a Baptism Assistance Project (BAP) to help address the "no and low" baptism trend among Southern Baptist churches.
The number of baptisms across the convention fell to 345,941 in 2007, nearly 19,000 less than the 364,826 baptisms in 2006. SBC churches have not recorded 400,000 annual baptisms since 2000; the all-time record was 445,725 in 1972.
To address this problem, the new project provides a COSBE-certified evangelist who will preach at any SBC church requesting assistance. Churches must commit to a detailed planning and preparation process and agree to take a "sacrificial" love offering that does not directly go to the evangelist but back to the BAP. BAP, in turn, provides the COSBE evangelist a modest predetermined honorarium, travel and lodging expenses.
"Many churches feel they are too small to use the ministry of a full-time COSBE vocational evangelist," said Brian Fossett, COSBE’s current president. "These churches feel they could not meet an evangelist’s financial needs.
"However, COSBE members have a passion for harvest evangelism and are committed to this project even though, for most of us, the honorarium is significantly lower than our ministry’s budget needs for a week," said Fossett, of Dalton, Ga.
"Our goal is to conduct at least 100 meetings under BAP each year," he said. "We conservatively project that we could see well over 1,000 professions of faith resulting from these 100 meetings."
BAP is available to any church, regardless of size or demographics. For more information, visit www.sbcevangelist.org.
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