Southern Baptist pastors and church members may be entering historic times in their stewardship and global outreach.

“Today … we have the privilege of looking to a historic step forward as Southern Baptists in the work of the Cooperative Program,” Anthony Jordan, executive director of the Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma, told the Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee Feb. 21.

“If we follow all the way through with it, it will be a historic breakthrough for the kingdom and for Southern Baptists,” agreed Morris Chapman, president of the Executive Committee.

Not since the Cooperative Program was founded in 1925 – as Southern Baptists’ primary channel for supporting state-by-state, national and international missions and ministries – have state and SBC leaders joined together in “a definite focus … and a vision,” as Chapman described it, to strengthen the outreach facilitated by churches’ gifts through the Cooperative Program.

Jordan reported to the Executive Committee that state convention executives during their annual meeting the previous week had adopted a set of recommendations, objectives and strategies to underscore the Cooperative Program as vital to Southern Baptist efforts to carry life-changing, life-saving faith in Jesus Christ to the ends of the earth. (For a complete list of the recommendations, click here.)

The Executive Committee, in turn, voted to commend the state executives’ report “to all Southern Baptists” and to “respectfully request the state conventions act upon those recommendations” later this year during their respective annual meetings.

The recommendations note, for example, that a “commitment to biblical stewardship” must be promoted, including tithing by church members; Cooperative Program gifts provided by churches to their state conventions; and CP gifts provided by the states to global SBC causes.

“It is going to take us joining together as churches, as pastors and leaders, to tell the story of the Cooperative Program and to put it again in the position of being at the front end of everything we do in missions,” Jordan said. “We believe it is essential that we re-educate and re-position and re-strengthen, and tell the story again and again so that our people understand what the Cooperative Program is able to do,” especially because many who join Southern Baptist churches “come out of backgrounds that have no understanding of the history of what we have done together and what we do cooperatively” through the Cooperative Program, Jordan said.

Stewardship

The Executive Committee, in addition to endorsing the state executives’ report, voted to add stewardship education to its ministry assignments, pending messengers’ approval during the SBC’s June 13-14 annual meeting in Greensboro, N.C.

The stewardship ministry – to “produce, develop, publish and distribute products that help Southern Baptists to grow in commitment to Jesus Christ by applying biblical principles of stewardship” – would be transferred to the Executive Committee from LifeWay Christian Resources.

Chapman told the Executive Committee during its Feb. 20 session, a consensus had emerged that “the Cooperative Program and the issue of stewardship work better when they’re coupled together … .

“If we are right with the Lord in the area of stewardship,” Chapman noted, “we will be right with the Lord in the area of the Cooperative Program, and we will become a giving people by biblical standards.”

Strategies

Among various strategies set forth in the state executives’ report:

– Teaching stewardship not just in churches but also in SBC seminaries and Baptist colleges and universities, including “financial freedom” from excessive debt and poor spending habits; developing stewardship materials for various cultural groups and for children and youth; creating a stewardship-oriented website for pastors and church leaders, along with an e-mail database for delivering CP updates; and incorporating biblical stewardship into the process of planting new churches.

– Mobilizing high-profile pastors as “CP Champions” and recruiting churches to pilot a year-long stewardship/Cooperative Program emphasis to build awareness of the impact a church can have via CP missions in fulfilling the Great Commission.

– Encouraging state and national publications “to actively include CP stories and information as regular features in every issue … . The CP connections must be clearly stated in each article; we cannot assume our people know all that is accomplished through their participation in the CP.”

– Linking mission trips with the Cooperative Program: “To help churches understand that volunteer missions should be built on the foundation of their giving through the CP, not in place of it.” Jordan added: “You would say, “Well, that ought to happen naturally,” that if somebody does a state mission project or does something nationally or internationally, they will immediately understand that the reason the work goes on when they get on their plane and go home is because our missionaries are serving because of our gifts through the Cooperative Program.” Jordan noted: “I wish that were always the case … . What we want to do is to challenge all of us to make that the essential factor of our mission trips – that they see that the ongoing work … is done because of their giving through the Cooperative Program.”

Jordan said the state executives “from the very beginning challenged ourselves that we would do more in extending the dollars that we receive at the state conventions … to the work that is done beyond our states to the ends of the earth … . Our kingdom is not simply our state, but the kingdom of God is the ends of the earth.”