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Articles in this issue:
Table of Contents
An Army of One
From the Editor:
The End of the Christian Right
The Open and Affirming Lutherans
Angling for Anglicans
The Fighting Atheists
Not in My
Canton
China's Lama Obsession
Scientology's Terrible, Horrible,
No Good, Very Bad Year
Letter to the Editor
Contributors/Staff
New books
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Letter to the Editor
Thanks to Andrew Manis for his
informative article on falling Southern Baptist membership.[Baptists
Shrink, Religion in the News, Vol. 12, No. 2] Actually,
the trend may have started before it appeared in the numbers he cites. When
the Baptists officially apologized in 1995 for supporting slavery, and tried
to move away from their exclusivist racial heritage, they began to affiliate
existing Black congregations as a way of speeding up the reconciliation. By
2008, 20% of congregations were ethnic minority and a million members were
African American. This led to apparent membership increases, but was in fact
an artifact of the accounting procedures. Without those bonus members, the
decline would have appeared well before the current crisis. A
congregation-by-congregation tracking of heritage SBC churches would
probably show an even more dramatic pattern of decline.
Ron Stockton
University of Michigan-Dearborn
Rstock@UMich.edu |