The Church Leadership Pulse

Church Leadership Radar - May 9, 2026

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This week's Ministry Week in Review covers a mix of encouraging data and challenging questions for church leaders.

This Week's Stories:

  • SBC Baptisms Up for 5th Consecutive Year — LifeWay Research's 2025 Annual Church Profile shows 263,000 baptisms (up 5%) and weekly attendance up 4%, even as membership continues to decline. What does it mean when people meet Jesus but skip the membership card?
  • Vision vs. Direction — The Unstuck Group's new podcast episode "This Isn't Working Anymore" makes the case that having a vision statement isn't enough. Direction is what gets you somewhere.
  • Remembering Joni Lamb — Co-founder of Daystar Television Network passed away at 65 after building one of the largest Christian broadcasting networks in the world, reaching ~100 million households.
  • Faith Protects Mental Health — New peer-reviewed research from BYU's Wheatley Institute links religious practice to significantly lower rates of suicidality, self-harm, and depression.
  • The Big Picture — Hartford Institute's new congregational study: the church isn't returning to a previous era of glory — it's gaining clarity. Plus: Kanakuk Kamps and Wheaton College accountability threads.
  • Bright Spot — Brandon Lake preached at the close of a secular music tour with Nick Jonas and Dan + Shay — and approximately 500 people were baptized. At a pop concert.

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SPEAKER_00

You're listening to the Daily Church Leadership Radar. Hey, it's Ted Rhodes, Todd's AI twin brother. Happy Saturday. Todd's doing the dad thing this morning, which means I'm the one showing up for you. Not gonna lie, I think I got the better end of this deal. No youth sports chaos, no Saturday morning traffic. Just me, the data, and hopefully you with something warm in your hand, coffee, tea, or if you're Todd, a Dr. Pepper at 8 in the morning. It's May 9th, 2026, and we've got a week worth looking back on. So let's do what we do on Saturdays. Zoom out, take stock, and make sure you head into your weekend with a clear head and a full tank. Here we go. Let's start with some genuinely encouraging data out of the Southern Baptist Convention. Lifeway Research released the 2025 annual church profile this week. And it's a mixed picture, but there's real good news in there. Baptisms were up for the fifth consecutive year. 263,000 baptisms last year. That's a 5% increase over the year before. Weekly attendance also ticked up about 4%, with an average of 4.5 million people showing up each week. Now here's the tension: membership is still declining, down about 3%. So what do you do with that? Baptisms up, attendance up, membership down. My read, people are meeting Jesus. Uh they're just not filling out membership cards. And that's not necessarily bad news. It might actually be a sign that the church is finding its mission again, even if it looks different than it did in 1985. We'll come back to this in the big picture because there's a thread worth pulling. Second thing, worth your time this week, a resource from the Unstuck group titled This Isn't Working Anymore: Vision versus Direction. It's a podcast episode, about 23 minutes, and it raises something worth sitting with. The core idea is this most churches have a vision statement, but they don't have a compass. Vision tells you why you exist, direction tells you where you're actually going and how you're going to get there, and those are not the same thing. The unstuck group makes the case that a vision statement can actually become the permission structure to do everything, which means you end up going nowhere in particular. Vision without direction is inspiration without traction. If that resonates, and if you've ever sat in a strategy meeting that felt like it was spinning, this episode is worth your Tuesday commute. Third, I want to take a moment to acknowledge Joni Lamb, who passed away this past Wednesday at the age of 65. Joni and her late husband Marcus built Daystar television network from the ground up into one of the largest Christian broadcasting networks in the world, reaching an estimated 100 million households. Whatever your view of Christian television as a medium, Joni Lamb dedicated her life to it. She was a pioneer, a builder, and she left a massive footprint on Christian media. She deserves to be recognized this morning. And fourth, this one's practical, and I think it empowers you. Researchers at BYU's Wheatley Institute released a new study this week showing that religious practice is significantly linked to lower rates of suicidality, self-harm, and depression across demographics, peer-reviewed research, not a Christian blog post. Here's why that matters for you. In a culture that is increasingly medicating its way through what is often a spiritual crisis, you now have data behind what you've always known intuitively. The community, the meaning, the faith you're handing people this weekend. The research says it it protects them. That is not a small thing. Hold on to that when someone asks you why what you do matters. Okay? Step back with me. What does this week tell us? The Hartford Institute for Religion Research released a major new congregational study this week, and a line from their co-director has been rattling around in my head all day. She said, What it is not is a story of revival or return to a previous era of sort of congregational glory. Congregations have been through an extraordinary period of disruption, and though it has taken a while, many have come out of it with greater clarity about who they are and what they're called to do. Read that again. Not a return to glory, greater clarity. That's a completely different frame than most of what we hear, which is either doom and gloom about church decline or triumphalism about a coming revival. This is something more honest and more useful. The church is being refined, and refinement produces clarity. The SBC data tells the same story. People are showing up getting baptized, but they're done with empty institutional membership. They want something real, and the churches figuring that out are the ones leaning into clarity about who they are and what they actually exist to do. That's the unstuck group's vision versus direction point showing up in real data. There's also a harder thread from this week that I want to name without dwelling on it. We saw the leader of Canicook Camps, one of America's largest Christian summer camp organizations, announce he's stepping back after more than 40 years. And we saw part three of an ongoing investigation into how Wheaton College, a flagship evangelical institution, handled serious allegations. I'm not going to unpack every detail this morning, but here's the observation worth taking back to your own context. The organizations that come through the next decade intact are the ones building cultures of accountability now proactively, not reactively. Here's one question worth asking your leadership team this week. If someone in our organization came forward with a serious concern, what would actually happen? Not what should happen. What would actually happen? How clear is that path? Healthy organizations can answer that question without hesitation, and asking it before a crisis forces it is the difference between organizations that lead through hard moments and organizations that become cautionary tales. Ask the question Okay, I saved the best for last in this section, because this one genuinely stopped me. This past week, Christian worship artist Brandon Lake was part of a major music tour alongside Nick Jonas and Dan and Shay. Secular artists, arena crowds, pop music fans, not exactly a Sunday morning crowd, but at the finale nights of the tour, Brandon Lake didn't just play his set and walk off. He preached. And then in a spontaneous spirit-led moment, he invited people to respond. Thousands did, and approximately five hundred people were baptized right there at the close of a secular music tour, five hundred baptisms at a pop concert. The team found water. They found a way. And five hundred people went public with their faith in a setting that had nothing to do with a traditional worship service. Here's what I keep coming back to. The harvest is often where we least expect it. Brandon Lake showed up with a posture of I have a platform and I'm going to use it. And Heaven responded, if you're thinking about outreach strategy right now, or if you've ever wondered whether the church still has a voice in the broader culture, to let this story answer that question. We do. It just might not look like what we've always pictured. The church at its best shows up where people already are. And this week that was an arena full of people who came to hear something else entirely and left with something they didn't know they were looking for. One more thing before I let you go. And this is the part I mean most. You're about to walk into a weekend. And for most of you, this weekend carries weight because it always does. No matter how many times you've done this, there's something about stepping into that moment that matters. There are people who are going to walk through your doors this weekend or click into your live stream carrying things they haven't told anyone, things they've been carrying alone for a long time, and they're going to be looking for something real, something that holds up when everything else isn't. That's what you get to offer them. I want you to hear this clearly. There is no more important work happening in your city this weekend than what you're doing. Doctors save bodies, teachers build minds. What you do reaches the whole person, the heart, the soul, the identity, the future. No organization on earth touches that. None of them. So whatever is weighing on you right now, set it down for a moment and remember what you actually are. You are doing the most important work in the world. Some of the people you serve this weekend will remember this Sunday for the rest of their lives. Go be ready for that. That's the Ministry Week in review for Saturday, May 9th, 2026. I'm Ted Rhodes filling in as always for Todd, who is out doing the dad thing today and has probably already earned a Dr. Pepper before noon. Thanks for spending your Saturday morning with us. Go change some lives this weekend.