By Mickey Noah


The North American Mission Board’s new South Region is the old “Bible Belt.” Some 13.7 million Southern Baptists live and worship here. Seemingly, there’s a church—Baptist or some other denomination’s—almost on every corner.


With so many churches and so many Baptists in the South, believers should vastly outnumber non-believers, right? No more SBC churches need to be started in the South, right? Save the new church plants and missionaries for the “unreached” regions of North America, right? Well, not so fast.


The South Region’s old tag as the Bible Belt was perhaps true at one time but today, it’s a myth. It’s a myth because an estimated 64 percent—67 million people—of the more than 104.3 million people who live in the South are considered to be “lost”—without Christ. Yet, there are more Southern Baptists and SBC congregations—38,671—here than anywhere else in North America. But one-fourth of North America’s 259 million non-believers live in the South.


Take Mississippi, for example. USA Today voted the Magnolia State the most “religious state in America.” Mississippi has more churches per capita—one for every 1,300 people—than any other state. So why plant more churches in Mississippi?


“With the number of churches in Mississippi, our state should look dramatically different on issues such as how we live, teen pregnancy, the divorce rate, our success rate in missions and evangelism, etc.,” says George Ross, director of the ONE8 church planting network and lead pastor of Lifepoint Baptist Church in Senatobia, Miss., located in the top northwest corner of the state. “But the state doesn’t look different. Our stats show that 50-54 percent of Mississippians are unchurched.


ON MISSION • Summer 2011 39

Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52