What is the "SBC Annual Church Profile?"

Call you state convention and they will give it to you again.

 

Your local association should also be able to provide you with the information. :thumbsup:

 

I used to be clerk... the ACP is this pain in the rear report you are supposed to fill out about your membership, how many people joined that year, how many in SS, how many in this, that,the other. You should have gotten a hard copy of it the mail, but I think most churches do it online now. If you're SBC, you "should" have been doing it for years. I say "should" because I think we're probably like two years behind on ours by now... I'm no longer clerk and we can't seem to keep one once they figure out what all a clerk actually has to do... LOL

 

When I Pastored, I instructed my secretary to NOT fill out this report. I believed the hyper-numbers driven convention and those churches who list 10,000 members but only have 3,000 members attending was not a healthy situation.

If there was more integrity in the reporting, I may have considered reporting. However, I felt it was wise to not include our numbers.

Oh, I had a friend whose church left the SBC, 5 years later they were still sending him an ACP and he was getting calls from the state convention to ensure he sends it in. He kept telling them, "We left years ago, please stop calling." They may have stopped now, but I found it amusing.

 

You have no real clue as to the use of the ACP. Average Sunday School Attendance is the real defining number of actual church attendance and the Sunday School numbers are included on the ACP.

 

We track our attendance and numbers consistently through our database for the ACP take almost no time for our administrator. It helps our convention, both national and state, as well.

It really isn't a big deal. We need honest numbers from our churches. I make no bones about it numbers do matter but they matter respectively. We can determine our ministry impact by noting our numbers but also remembering the people behind them.

The ACP is a good device to help measure denominational effectiveness.

 

If you have an opportunity to listen to Ken Whitten's sermon at this year's SBC Pastors Conference in Orlando, do so! In it he makes some interesting comments about the ACP. (I hope I am correct about his comments being about the ACP!!) If not, ignore this post.