Rusk County Baptists, 2020

Number of Baptist Churches in Rusk County, Texas in 2020: 49 or 97?

In researching for my Rusk County Baptist history, I became interested in the religious makeup of the population. I looked at the information from the data collected by the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies (ASARB) for 2020. This is reported at the Association of Religious Data Archives site. A comparison of the number of Baptist churches I have located in Rusk County versus the data compiled by ASARB shows how far off our understanding of religious bodies in the United States is or can be. For 2020, ASARB identified 49 Baptist churches in Rusk County. I have identified 97 Baptist churches in Rusk County, that I believe existed in 2020 (even that is tricky, until I have contacted every one of these churches). I do not blame ASARB; they do not have the personnel and financing to do “boots on the ground” research for every county in the United States. They depend on reporting. However, the Rusk County Baptist History Project shows almost twice as many congregations and adherents as the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies found. [Note: I used estimation based on known numbers in order to come up with the number of adherents (church members) in each group for which I did not have statistics.] The ASARB count had 5 Baptist categories. I have added two that were missed. I have also changed National Missionary Baptist Convention (which is one specific convention) to National Baptist Conventions, in order to represent several conventions that have the name “National” in common.

Details and Explanations.

American Baptist Association. Total 16; count off by 6 churches. [Two of these have disbanded since 2020, and there is one new Hispanic church/mission, which I do not know whether it existed in 2020.] I estimated the total membership based on the average membership of the churches that were counted.

Baptist Missionary Association of America. Total 4; count off by 1 church, and no member statistics were given. I obtained my church member statistics from the 2017 BMAA Directory & Handbook, the closest date that I had to 2020.

Independent unaffiliated Baptists. Not counted. I identified 7 unaffiliated Baptist churches in Rusk County. One has disbanded (not sure whether that occurred before or after 2020). One of these may be in the BBFI (it used to be). I estimated the total membership based on the average membership of the similar churches (ABA, BMAA) in the county, but the total is probably high. I suspect that some of these churches tend to remove non-attending and non-resident members more so than the ABA & BMAA churches.

Primitive Baptists. Not counted. Even I did not know this church still existed until I started the Rusk County Baptist History Project. I thought they had disbanded, but the church simplyy changed meeting locations. I estimated the total membership based on the attendance.

National Association of Free Will Baptists. I used and repeated the ASARB count, but wonder if the Mt. Olive Church at Compton had already closed by 2020.

National Baptist Conventions. Total 36; count off by 31 churches. The African-American Baptist churches were severely undercounted. I lumped all these in one category since ASARB had only one category, but some of these churches probably participate in different National or General bodies than others. I estimated the total membership based on the average membership of the churches that were counted.

Southern Baptist Convention. Total 29; count off by 2 churches. Southern Baptists usually collect statistics diligently and accurately (as best we Baptists can). The count difference between mine and theirs might occur for any number of reasons. For example, two Kilgore churches are just barely in Rusk County and participate in the Gregg Baptist Association. They might have gotten counted with Gregg County (it takes a bit of carefulness to determine which county these two churches are in). One SBC church in Henderson merged with another church. I estimated the total membership based on the average membership of the churches that were counted.

According to the U. S. Census Bureau, the total population of Rusk County, Texas was 52,514 in 2020. If my estimation is reasonably accurate (which I think it generally will be) and if my math is correct (which it often is not), Baptists make up about 38% of the population of Rusk County.

Note: This is a preliminary finding, which I may need to adjust as I move this work forward.