Alabama’s Baptist churches no longer defined by stereotypes

Finding the average church within Alabama’s 3,200 Southern Baptist churches depends on how you define it, according to Steve Cloues of the Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions (SBOM). 
   
“One way is to take all the churches [in Alabama], total their membership numbers and divide that by the number of churches in Alabama,” said Cloues, an associate in the SBOM’s office of associational/cooperative missions. “The problem is you come out with a strange looking church.”
   
Using numbers reported by 2,900 churches to the SBOM for the year 2001, the mean average church has 245 resident members, a Sunday School enrollment of 190, 10 baptisms and a total offering of $190,200 for the year, with $12,100 given through the Cooperative Program.
   
“So when you say average church, what we usually do is take the church in the middle, or the median average, church number 1,600 out of 3,200,” Cloues said.
   
In which case the median average is a church with 125 resident members, a Sunday School enrollment of 90, five baptisms and took up a total offering of $33,000 with $500 given through the Cooperative Program.
   
Cloues also mentioned that the numbers on the report are affected by how many churches report. “It’s getting more and more difficult to get churches to turn in all their numbers,” Cloues said. “And it’s harder for the larger churches than the smaller ones, because it’s tough to round up all those numbers.” Therefore, several small churches or one large church that does not report can throw off the whole system.
   
So perhaps a better course would be to group churches according to size and compare the similarities.
   
Thirty-six percent of churches belong to the small church category with a resident membership of 1 to 100. In the medium category are 51 percent of the churches with resident memberships of 101 to 500. Only 13 percent of the churches fall into the large category with resident memberships of 501 and more.
   
“Alabama has no mega-churches, because there are none with 10,000-plus members,” Cloues said. “We are really a convention of small churches. But the largest church in Alabama (Cottage Hill, Mobile) has a membership of about 6,400.”
   
The aspects of church life that seem to be most commonly affected by size are the type of pastor, church leadership style, men’s ministries and musical ministries.
   
However, programs that have long been a part of church life such as Woman’s Missionary Union, discipleship ministries (formerly Discipleship Training) and Sunday School, seem to have differences that are less dependent on size and more dependent on the individual churches’ personalities.
   
Daniel Edmonds, director of the office of Sunday School for the SBOM, said that too often the size of a church is used as an excuse for some of the church’s problems, but it is a weak excuse if the church will look to God. “Of all the barriers [a church faces], from size to location, there’s a church out there that’s overcome every one of those. God is able to overcome.”
   
And Cloues points out that numbers should not be the final word in measuring a church’s success or failure. “There are several ways of counting numbers, so you had better know how you got them. Numbers are a good guide, but you’ve got to understand them, interpret them and not get hung up on them.”