[*] Mega Shift: the Shell Game

Last time I blogged on this subject, we talked about the (a-hem) loose methodology James Rutz used to decide there was a move of God afoot about which the rest of us ought to be learning something. Let's remember that in that 4-ish page introduction to his book, I did not call into concern his lavish attention to the miracles he could find witnesses for, but I called into account his method for defining and deciding who were and who were not "core apostolics". My problem was that he created one system of measure (method and degree of institutional organization) to place all kinds of people one might call Christians on a spectrum, and then "lopped off the ends" of that spectrum to determine who is and is not growing the fastest.

There's more fire where you see the smoke in that method. Refering back to Mr. Rutz's endnote 15 for Chapter 1, he says this:
I dispensed with 1.238 billion nice folks who comprise the mainline denominations plus the highly overlapping 1.330 billion souls whose only "problem" is that they are capital-E Evangelicals, meaning they are not charismatic or pentecostals. My sincere apologies to my evangelical friends (now perhaps ex-friends), but my numbers cover 1970-2000, and they show that during those 30 years, charistmatics and pentecostals grew worldwide at a blistering 8.8% annual rate, while Evnagelicals limped along at 1.1%.
That's an interesting assertion, but what does it mean? Let's look at a quick chart for one group, the Southern Baptists:

These are the stats for 2004, released in June of this year. Of particular interest is the ratio of Baptisms overseas to church membership (the pink cells).
607132 / 7,400,000 = 8.2%

Now that doesn't look like "limping along" if the base line for "blistering" is 8.8% -- especially if you consider that 607,132 translates into a growth rate year-to-year of 8.9%. But the problem for Mr. Rutz, really, is that this is not an isolated blip on the church growth map. The self-reporting from the SBC International Missions Board is that while 2004 was a high-water mark for the SBC's international mission, it has consistently been baptizing in the 7% range since 1980 -- which, btw, demonstrates the same 5-fold growth since 1980 Mr. Rutz sees in his "core apostolics".

{EDIT 8/24/06} Here's the chart that supports this which I got from the folks at the International Missions Board at SBC:
YEAR    MEMBERS    BAPTISMS    %
---- --------- -------- ---
1980 1,297,418 109,935 8.47%
1981 1,457,477 127,239 8.73%
1982 1,560,566 142,394 9.12%
1983 1,683,573 144,224 8.57%
1984 1,867,993 156,255 8.36%
1985 2,000,847 158,626 7.93%
1986 2,032,193 185,689 9.14%
1987 2,145,113 203,824 9.50%
1988 2,105,066 197,863 9.40%
1989 2,450,884 227,564 9.28%
1990 2,661,668 208,381 7.83%
1991 2,988,052 233,334 7.81%
1992 3,456,900 251,901 7.29%
1993 3,735,949 262,758 7.03%
1994 3,918,915 302,132 7.71%
1995 4,111,979 287,806 7.00%
1996 4,100,923 283,674 6.92%
1997 4,112,181 283,100 6.88%
1998 4,432,292 333,034 7.51%
1999 4,917,088 363,703 7.40%
2000 5,624,018 451,301 8.02%
2001 5,834,043 395,773 6.78%
2002 6,237,706 421,436 6.76%
2003 7,042,714 510,357 7.25%
2004 7,451,242 607,132 8.15%


What is far worse for Mr. Rutz's on-going development of his thesis is that while he attests that he "lopped off" the "slow growing groups at both ends of the spectrum", it is transparently clear as one reads through his book that he has not actually lopped off the Southern Baptists even though there is no way to say that they are "penetcostal" or "charismatic" -- he uses the anecdotes of Baptist missionaries several times in his book. Thus, in accounting for his "core apostolics", he has fudged the recipe at least by 10%.

Now that's all I'm going to say about the method of his fact-gathering. In the last two installments on this book, we're going to discuss the theology of his book.

Other entries in this series: | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 |

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