To Grow in New England, Southern Baptists Crack ‘Yankee Stoicism’
Overall church membership is up by nearly 10 percent in the region.
The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) is a fixture of the religious landscape in the American South, where grits, Republican politics, and SEC football are king. But the region where you’re most likely to find a growing Southern Baptist church is the land of lobster rolls, progressive politics, and Boston Red Sox baseball: New England.
A new analysis by Lifeway Research found that the area spanning Connecticut to Maine was the only place to see an uptick in SBC church membership over the past five years. But the growth in the Lifeway report was miniscule—a 1 percent increase in a region with fewer than 1 percent of SBC churches—compared to the widespread decline across the denomination.
Southern Baptist membership decreased everywhere else during the same time period, with the biggest drops in the Pacific (down 22%) and West North Central (down 14%) regions.
Still, for pastors in the region with 358 of the SBC’s 47,198 churches, the growth in New England was “an absolute encouragement, an affirmation of what God is doing here,” said Aaron Cavin, Send City missionary for Boston with the SBC’s North American Mission Board (NAMB).
Calvin recently shared the data with local church planters at a training session, and “it was a celebration,” he said. “It almost makes us a bit more resolute.”
According to NAMB, Southern Baptists have planted 1,018 churches in the Northeast since 2010, an average of around 44 churches per year. That includes New England along with New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore.
While the Lifeway statistics measured church growth only among existing congregations that reported membership numbers in 2017 and 2022, hundreds of SBC churches have started ...