Nearly 30 percent of recent SBC seminary graduates now serving as church pastors identify themselves as Calvinists, according to data presented during the opening session of a conference on Reformed theology and the Southern Baptist Convention.
By contrast in the SBC at large, the number of pastors who affirm the five points of Calvinism is around 10 percent, Ed Stetzer, director of LifeWay Research, said in reporting various findings by LifeWay Research and the North American Mission Board Center for Missional Research.
The numbers of graduates who affirmed Calvinism rose steadily between students who graduated in 1998 and those who completed their degrees in 2004, Stetzer said. In the last year of the study, 34 percent of those serving in SBC churches identified themselves as five-point Calvinists.