Sandy---You are avoiding some serious realities about SBC growth. I was a child in the 50's when the SBC made it's great leap in numbers. It was real---and it certainly did not involve just children joining.
I distinctly remember "A Million More in 54 / Flying High in '55 / . . ." I grew up in Atlanta where my father was Assistant DOM of the Atlanta Baptist Association. Atlanta was growing and so were Baptist churches. Old downtown churches like Atlanta First, Decatur First, Second Ponce de Leon made conscious efforts to start mission churches in the growing suburbs.
Wieuca Road is a prime example. Dr. Roy McClain wrote a letter to encourage his members living in the Wieuca area to help form a new church. Atlanta First and the Atlanta Baptist Association cooperated to purchase a parcel of land and many members of Atlanta First formed the hub of a new church which called it's pastor and grew more than rapidly with new families moving into the area and joining that outstanding church. Second Ponce de Leon had members in the same area who were blessed and encouraged to join. Any number of other new mission churches formed in those years and they, in turn, grew to the point of starting new mission churches as well.
This was the secret of great growth in the 50-60's = COOPERATION and encouragement for new independent churches!Things changed with Charles Stanley becoming pastor of Atlanta First. He was intent on building back Atlanta First to mega status. Immediately, their budget changed from 50% to missions to a pitance. They went from a "Top 10 CP" giving church to "no mention." The money sent for missions, first, purchased a bus fleet to replicate Jerry Falwell's Thomas Road approach to church building. Massive money was spent to purchase prime time on WTBS, then a new UHF station in Atlanta. Stanley put his service on when no other stations were giving prime time away as they used to. Atlanta First became a media mogul of churches in that growing city. They bought more land ajacent to the church and more than doubled their Education Building capacity. It was all about having the biggest church in town---no matter how many children were picked up in front of other existing churches all over the suburbs.
That was the genesis of "child baptism growth!"Where McClain had been active in denominational work in the SBC and Atlanta Baptist Association, Stanley would never attend the weekly Pastor's Conference unless he was on the program. They could care less now about Associational events nor growth. They certainly had nothing any longer to do with the MIssion Center ministering in the poverty part of Atlanta. The money went almost exclusively to their own church growth---and they were becoming noted in Dallas as Criswell did the same / Orlando where it was the same / Nashville and other places where big cities were growing in the South. The mega church concept was supplanting the Mission Church Planting movement!
The reason Southern Baptists are no longer growing is a Mega Church leadership and concept taking over from a Mission Church Planting locally concept. Now the new churches in growing areas are all Satellite Churches under the umbrella of a Mega Church funding it. The gifts and numbers are counted as part of the Mega. It makes those egotitistical pastors look "mighty and growing." Every leader of the SBC now was a former Mega Church Pastor who gets his "undisclosed salary and benefits" from a Denomination run with iron fist by the Mega Church Pastors getting the Presidency or Agency CEO position!
Here endeth the lesson