[*] 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 |