According to a Kentucky Baptist Convention official, 2,587,995 Kentuckians “are lost without Christ.”

Ross Bauscher, Evangelism Growth Team Leader for the Kentucky Baptist Convention, announced those figures at the convention’s annual meeting earlier in November. The context was a talk he gave promoting a major evangelistic campaign planned by the state’s largest denomination for early next year, the aim being to win some of the souls he said are lost.

Statistics are a helpful, if limited, measure of the vitality of religious movements. There are statistics on religious membership (defined by denominations), religious identity (revealed by individuals in surveys), worship attendance (reported by either) and various subcategories.

Until now, I’ve never seen anyone offer such a precise estimate of the hellbound population, and it would be interesting to know the methodology. Unfortunately, the formula used for the unusual statistic — measuring the relationship between individuals and God — is unclear.

Bauscher said in an interview he got the statistic from a researcher with the convention’s national affiliate, the Southern Baptist Convention. Bauscher said he asked for the Kentucky figures after hearing more general statistics that three in four residents of North America are lost. However, the researcher — with the convention’s North American Mission Board — declined to comment when contacted.