“The Difference” is easy to see.
It’s a DVD being mailed to Southern Baptist churches across the country.
“The love of Southern Baptists is making a difference through the Cooperative Program,” the cover of the DVD states.
“The Difference” DVD focuses on how Southern Baptists have been at the leading edge of helping victims of Hurricane Katrina – as well as victims of the tsunami in Asia, the earthquake in Pakistan and other natural disasters.
“Pastors are supported” when Southern Baptists give through the Cooperative Program, the DVD cover notes.
“Congregations are being restored.
“Lives are being changed forever.”
The Cooperative Program, however, reaches far beyond disaster relief: State by state, nationally and internationally, CP gifts from Southern Baptist churches help impart the gospel to people in need of Christ within state lines and across North America and the world.
“The Difference” DVD, distributed by the Cooperative Program office of the SBC Executive Committee, includes four video segments of varying lengths that can be used in sermons or other parts of a church service, Sunday school and any other setting to explain the crucial role the Cooperative Program plays in the overall scope of Southern Baptist outreach, from disaster relief to evangelization of people worldwide in cities and across the countryside who do not know the name of Jesus.
David Hankins, executive director of the Katrina-impacted Louisiana Baptist Convention, states via the DVD: “The wonderful thing about our Southern Baptist network and our Cooperative Program mission funding process is that not only were our partners able to come to our aid in this disaster, but also not one other ministry failed that was going on before the hurricane, except those right in the hurricane area.
“We didn’t have to bring home one international missionary because of the worst natural disaster to ever hit on U.S. soil. Why? Because the Cooperative Program had that taken care of.
“Could you imagine,” Hankins continues, “if all these affected areas had been supporting their missionaries just directly out of their congregation, and their congregation was destroyed? Not only would it stop that ministry here, but those missionaries would have been left without a lifeline out there in the faraway places in the world – .
“Southern Baptists’ Cooperative Program has taken care of all these ministries – 24/7, 365, we’re still up and running while we take on this additional task of rebuilding our churches here in the path of Katrina,” Hankins notes.
Additional resources
A second Cooperative Program resource also is being mailed to the SBC’s 43,000-plus churches: “When Saints Go Marching In” by Hankins, who formerly was the Executive Committee’s vice president for Cooperative Program, and Norm Miller, a freelance writer and an ordained minister in Richmond, Va.
The small book likewise recounts “how and why Southern Baptists” – the nation’s third-largest disaster relief group – “made such a difference” in Katrina’s aftermath, the book’s cover states.
The DVD and book are the first in a line of quarterly CP missions resources to be released by the Cooperative Program office of the Executive Committee.
Also being distributed in conjunction with Cooperative Program Day, April 9, in the Southern Baptist Convention: a four-part series for state Baptist papers adapted from a 2005 book on the Cooperative Program, “One Sacred Effort,” by Hankins and Chad Brand, associate professor of Christian theology at Southern Baptist Seminary.
The series addresses the “Great Need” at the heart of the Cooperative Program – people amid “the world’s pain … (who are) ready for the gospel”; the “Great Strategy” – one that is thoughtful, prayerful, comprehensive and cooperative, as opposed to competitive, for advancing the gospel; the “Great Results” – with “thousands of missionaries, thousands of seminary students and hundreds of workers in children’s homes and other helping ministries” supported through the Cooperative Program; and a “Great Obligation” – responding to Jesus’ call: “Pray the Lord of the harvest to send forth workers into the harvest” (Matthew 9:38).
‘More convinced than ever’
Morris Chapman, president of the Executive Committee, noted, “Now more than ever, I am convinced that the Cooperative Program is the most efficient and effective funding method for accomplishing the Acts 1:8 mandate to be Christ’s witnesses – beginning where we are, and ultimately reaching to the ends of the earth. Consequently, I am greatly encouraged by the incredible amount of fresh energy and synergy focused on the Cooperative Program. Bob Rogers, VP for CP, and his team are producing some exciting new resources to heighten awareness among Southern Baptists of the tremendous return on kingdom investment achieved through the Cooperative Program. Their efforts, together with the recent adoption of the Ad Hoc Cooperative Program Committee’s recommendations by the state executives and the Executive Committee, are already getting traction and building momentum.
“Just imagine,” Chapman said, “what we can accomplish with greater CP support: more missionaries sent with the gospel to unreached people groups, more church planters to establish more new churches that will reach more people, more seminary trained ministers to equip churches to reach the lost and disciple the saved, more ministry that shows the love of Jesus in practical ways, and more godly influence on the moral and cultural challenges we face as a nation.
“Again, it is my fervent prayer that these concerted efforts will inspire a renewed sense of passion among Southern Baptists to give systematically and sacrificially through the Cooperative Program so that together we might do more than ever to reach people of every tribe and tongue, every people and nation with the glorious gospel,” Chapman said.