The Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, lost more than a quarter of a million members from 2023 to 2024, according to the latest annual statistics compiled by Lifeway Research.

Southern Baptist congregations across the country lost a combined 259,824 members, according to the annual church profile.

With 12,722,266 members, the SBC is the smallest it has been since 1974.

The good news from the reports was that more people were attending services. In 2024, an average of more than 4.3 million people worshipped weekly in a Southern Baptist congregation, more than in any year since the pandemic.

More than 2.5 million participated in a small group Bible study each week.

Churches also reported 250,643 baptisms in 2024, up from 226,919 in 2023.

“We rejoice that God is using Southern Baptist churches to reach people with the gospel,” said Jeff Iorg, president and CEO of the SBC Executive Committee. “We celebrate the upward trends in baptisms that we haven’t seen in the past 30 years.”

The number of SBC churches declined from 46,906 in 2023 to 46,876 in 2024, including congregations that closed and those that are no longer affiliated with the denomination.

Alabama has the fourth-most Southern Baptists by state: Texas ranks first (2,409,860), then Georgia (1,135,843), Tennessee (1,083,684), Alabama (933,549), North Carolina (884,663), Florida (764,853), South Carolina (602,129), Kentucky (520,424), Virginia (507,760) and Mississippi (502,416).