Last year, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) lost more than 200,000 members, making 2015 the ninth straight year of declining membership for the largest Protestant denomination in the nation. According to SBC statistics released on Tuesday, Southern Baptists numbered 15.3 million nationwide, down from 15.5 million in 2014.

Baptisms also fell by more than 10,000, to just over 295,000. Baptisms are an important measure for the denomination because of its close commitment to evangelism.

This decline is in line with other national polls that have shown that religion has become less important to a significant number of people, especially among the young. Mark Chaves, a professor of sociology at Duke University who studies religious trends notes that mainline Protestant and Catholic churches started to experience declines in the 1960s and 1970s. But decline for some more conservative Protestant denominations has only become apparent in the last decade or so.

“There’s just a national trend of declining religious involvement, and conservative churches are not immune to it, as they thought they were for a while,” he said.

Southern Baptists—who are one of the few denominations who still report their membership publicly—say their average weekly attendance was 5.6 million last year, a drop of about 97,000 from 2014.

SBC Executive Director and CEO Frank Page said, “We live in an anti-institutional, anti-church age, where people are opting out of organized religious activities.” He thinks new types of churches will arise to meet that trend.

Some denominational leaders tried to put a positive spin of the numbers by emphasizing the fact that 294 new Southern Baptist churches were started in 2015, mostly due to new churches started by SBC pastors.

But Frank Page refused to do that, exclaiming in a news release, “God help us all!”

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