Many who attended the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting on June 14-15 in Phoenix, Ariz., expressed trepidation before the event. Controversies over biblical inerrancy, church funding and bureaucracy, and the proper vision for growth and missions threatened to tear apart the largest of all American Protestant denominations. The meeting took place against a backdrop of dispiriting news: Baptisms in 2010 had plunged 5 percent from the previous year, reaching their lowest level since 1948. Total membership and average worship attendance were also slightly down. Many aging SBC congregations have failed to reach the growing minority communities around them.
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