Youth Baptism numbers
“The sky is falling, The Sky is Falling”, shouted Chicken Little after the acorn fell on it’s head. When ask how he knew this he replied “I saw it with my own eyes, heard it with my own ears and part of it fell on my head”. And while the sky really didn’t fall on Chicken Little there was cause for alarm, after all his head did hurt.I don’t want to be accused of being Chicken Little and sounding a false alarm but it maybe time to sound the alarm about youth ministry in Kentucky. In looking over statistics over the last 30 years, I have noticed a trend. Youth (ages 12-17) baptisms have steadily declined over this time period. And while I know that baptisms are not a true measure of discipleship and that not all churches report and that fewer churches are reporting today than reported then…I have heard all the debate, the truth is we are loosing ground at a phenomenal rate! And we are baptizing fewer and fewer while the number of youth this age in Kentucky keeps growing and growing. Just about every school system in Kentucky is about to build, building or just finished building.
A look at the numbers: The last year that we baptized more than 4000 students… 2000. The last year we baptized more than 4500…1990. More than 5000…1982, and it has been since 1975 since we baptized more than 6000. And every student in our youth ministries was born after 1990. In the last reporting year we have on Kentucky Baptist Convention churches only 50 baptized more than 10 students that year. Out of almost 2400 churches, only 50 had double-digit baptisms. In fact there were some associations, that all their churches combined did not have double-digit baptisms of students.
It isn’t any better in the Southern Baptist Convention either. In the past month I got from NAMB, preliminary data on the top 100 churches in the SBC in youth baptisms for 2007. The magic number to be one of the top 100 churches in the entire SBC in student baptisms was 33. I was glad that 2 of our Kentucky Baptist Convention churches were on that list, but saddened that more weren’t.
So we are we to do? I wish there was an easy answer to that question. One thing we do is to be more intentional in our evangelism efforts. It was refreshing to sit with Danny Pacetti, the youth minister at Jefferstown Baptist Church and hear him talk about how they are going to be more intentional in their ministry.
One of the places they are going to do this is with Uptown. J-town Baptist for 10 years has successfully sponsored Uptown. On Friday nights it is a place for students to come and play games, hang out, be with their friends, etc. Pacettie says, “Everybody in J-town knows what Uptown is and where it is”. It has been a safe place for parents to drop off their students.
Most communities, he continued, have a “real need for a space for their kids to hang out and get together with their friends, as churches we can utilize that need”. But part of his frustration came in that students that came to Uptown were not being reached with the Gospel. Pacetti says that their commitment this year is to be “intentionally verbal” with “every individual” that enters Uptown.
There is an old adage that says, “a journey of 1000 miles begins with a single step" ;. For Chicken Little is was a step toward the king where he met Henny Penny, Ducky Lucky Goosey Loosey, Turkey Lurkey and the others. For Danny and the youth ministry team at J-town Baptist it is a step to be more intentional at Uptown. For me it is a commitment to be more intentional in sharing the Gospel when I am with students.
The sky is falling and I know it because I see it with my own eyes, hear it with my own ears and have been hit over the head with the reality of the truth.
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posted by: Joe Ball on September 2nd, 2008
