Southern Baptist celebrity Pastor Rick Warren launched a 4-part video series in an effort to recognize, address and suggest how to ameliorate the mass decline of the Southern Baptist Church. 

Warren is the founding pastor of Saddleback Valley Community Church — a megachurch in Southern California — a friend to presidents such as Barack Obama and author of the bestselling book “The Purpose-Driven Life.”

According to a report in the Baptist Standard and other sources, the Southern Baptist Church has lost approximately 3 million members since 2006, and more than 1 million between 2018 and 2023. This leaves the SBC with its lowest member count since the 1970s. It has also recently lost approximately 416 churches and 165 parachurch missions.

The report also notes the lower numbers of young people in the SBC. “The COVID-19 pandemic played a role in the downturn,” the report reads, “as did the reality that as older members die, there are fewer young people to replace them.” According to the Standard’s findings, the denomination has consistently been in a tumultuous state in recent years as it has dealt with sex abuse scandals and issues on race, as well as leadership and future direction.

Warren’s video series, named “SBC at the Crossroads,” aims to state the problems plaguing the church denomination and examine a biblical path to revive and revitalize the hearts of Baptist Church congregants, and thereby the entire denomination. 

In the first of these four videos, titled “Denial or Revival?” Warren bluntly states that the point of his first video is to “talk about what (Baptist) leaders seem unable to admit, or to talk about at the annual convention, and that is our continued 17-year decline, where we’ve lost over 3 million members.”

For Warren, the first step to finding a pathway to revival and to revitalization is to “first humbly and honestly admit the crisis that we’re in.”

“We have to remember the height we have fallen from,” he added. He believes the Southern Baptist Church at large is not doing so. In last year’s annual SBC convention, none of the resolutions detailed any kind of information about the general decline of the Baptist population. 

“Last year, our denomination lost nearly one-half million members in one year. We can’t ignore that,” Warren said in the video. “It’s the largest single decline in the past 100 years of Southern Baptist history. … If this crisis, losing half a million people in one year, does not wake us up from our years of complacency, I really don’t have much hope for the SBC. If we continue to lose that many members each year, there will be no Southern Baptists left in just 27 years. … During our 17 years of decline, all we heard at the convention, all we heard was rhetoric and boasting about how great the SBC is.”

Warren believes that the effort to revitalize the Southern Baptist denomination is to revitalize the different churches within it and to stick to what it means to be a Baptist. This is the subject of the second video in the series, titled “What is a B.A.P.T.I.S.T.?”

“Every real revival starts from the bottom up — it is never imposed top down,” Warren said. “I believe that’s one of the obvious causes of our decline; we are now reaping the cost that Southern Baptists have become less Baptist. We’re becoming more Presbyterian in structure and more fundamentalist in our actions and attitudes. For years we’ve been creeping toward a centralization where the local churches are losing their independence and autonomy, and we are increasingly controlled by our institutions and bureaucracies.”

According to a news release by the SBC Stand, the latter parts of the series will be titled “New Testament Case for the Ministry of Women” and finally, “Acts 1-2 Twelve Step Recovery for Churches and the SBC.” The former will examine New Testament passages that support the Great Commission ministry for women, and the latter will lay out scriptural principles that “reveal a pathway for renewing churches to revive a declining denomination.”

This structure is very intentional for Warren. For him, changing the structure of the church is not the foundation of a revitalizing work but the cherry on top. Revival is something he thinks is intricate and nuanced, not reducible to a few bullet points on a list. 

“When a pastor goes into his church, his biggest temptation is to go change the structure. No, you need to work on personal, relational and missional renewal before you go to structural,” he said. “But when you get all four of those lined up, your church is healthy and growing, and then you start having the fifth renewal, which is cultural renewal. Isn't that what we all want to see?”

After retiring from full-time preaching at Saddleback, Warren was recently installed as the first honorary chancellor at Spurgeon’s College in London, named after the famed and highly influential preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon. 

Rafa Oliveira is an intern with ReligionUnplugged.com covering technology and religion. He is a recent graduate of The King’s College in NYC with a degree in politics, philosophy and economics. He speaks Portuguese, English and Spanish and is an ardent Manchester United Supporter.