(ABP) — After a decade of steady decline, attendance at the Southern Baptist Convention is expected to jump this year, amid ripples of unrest with the current leadership and perhaps the first openly contested presidential election since 1994.
Several estimates suggest at least 10,000 Southern Baptist messengers are charting a course for Greensboro, N.C., where the SBC annual meeting will be held June 13-14. But if interest continues to grow in the final weeks, there could be several thousand more.
Fewer than 10,000 messengers registered between 2001 and 2004 before attendance jumped to 11,641 for the 2005 convention in the SBC's headquarters city of Nashville, Tenn. That's a far cry from the 40,000 that attended during the height of the conservative-moderate conflict of the 1980s.
Since the Nashville meeting, however, Southern Baptists have witnessed the top executives of one mission board resign amid mismanagement controversy, the other mission board president has experienced conflict with trustees, the threatened first-ever removal of one of those trustees, a statistical decline getting progressively worse, and the emergence of a network of reform-minded bloggers protesting the “exclusionary” tactics of the SBC leadership.
Southern Baptist leaders rightfully claim some positive momentum too, such as the national recognition that followed the SBC's disaster-relief work after Hurricane Katrina.
But there's no denying the growing unrest stirring among some Southern Baptists, who expected more from the conservative movement that has held the convention's reins for 27 years. Now, for the first time since moderates withdrew more than a decade ago, there is talk of party politics and busing church members to the convention next month.
Statistics released following the Nashville convention showed that nearly 83 percent of the messengers drove to the meeting last year. Greensboro, like Nashville, is located in an area that is thick with Southern Baptist churches and linked by several major highways. A large number of drive-in messengers could easily make the trip, and their response is likely to determine whether the attendance is one to remember.