re: #158 Shiplord Kirel: Fan of Big Bird, Bert, and Ernie

An example from my experience: Thirty years ago, the gigantic First Baptist Church of Lubbock had twenty thousand members, roughly 10% of the local population. It was the second largest Southern Baptist congregation in the world. Today membership is less than three thousand, average age is about 70 in spite of an elaborate outreach program at nearby Texas Tech, and they have changed their name to just First Church.

That’s an absolutely catastrophic decline in membership in a little over one generation. Which is good to see.