New data from the North American Mission Board (NAMB) indicates that almost 20 percent of congregations in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) now identify as non-Anglo.
The new report from the NAMB's Center for Missional Research revealed that "10,049 of 50,768 SBC congregations identified themselves by an ethnicity other than Anglo in 2011," according to Baptist Press. The most significant increase in non-Anglo SBC congregations comes from an 82.7 percent increase in the number of African American congregations, though Hispanic and Asian churches grew by 63 and 55 percent, respectively.
That's good news for the SBC, which elected its first African American president, Fred Luter, in June 2012. At that time, the Washington Postreported an estimated 3,400 black churches in the denomination.
But in spite of the growing number of African American congregations and increasing diversity overall, NAMB officials cited concern for a "variety of ethnic groups in North America with no Southern Baptist ...
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