The Courier article, “S.C. pastors weigh in on ‘1% CP Challenge’?” (Jan. 31), highlights the growing concern of state conventions and the SBC in recent years over declining missions giving. I wish I had a more optimistic viewpoint to express about our future, and perhaps I will, but what impresses itself on me now is how Southern Baptists’ chickens are coming home to roost.
SimmsWe can blame the economy, and some do, but the fact is that relatively poor people give more to charities than relatively rich ones, and that includes church giving. If our hearts were mission oriented, we would do as the Macedonian churches did, and as the poor widow Jesus watched put her living into the temple treasury did: “Out of her poverty, she put in everything.”
We can blame the Conservative Resurgence, and its detractors in particular do, but that struggle is largely in the past. Nor did the SBC lose so many churches to other groups that the Cooperative Program should have been crippled. The problem is not the churches who left, but the churches who stayed, which aren’t giving as they used to.
I believe we have only ourselves to blame. I became a pastor in 1974, having seen great, mission-giving churches in my youth, college and seminary days. Having written extensively for the Stewardship Development Association for the past decade or so, my observation, from a lifetime perspective as well as career experience, is that churches and their leaders largely have brought this developing CP crisis on themselves.
A generation ago, churches began to replace their training programs with fun-filled entertainment for youth, or simple Bible memorization, and little to nothing for adults. Many pastors moved away from promoting missions personally and devotedly in public, as if embarrassed by it. The programs that made Baptists into a great missions machine in the mid-20th century evolved as conventions tried to address declining participation, but fewer churches were interested in training. Their interests turned to marketing the church, providing bread and circuses for the unchurched in their communities, luring youth with intensified activities, gathering all the toys and wizardry of the technological age, and counting on their imitation of the culture around them to attract an upcoming generation of Americans.
Why did we ever think that replacing the less glamorous efforts of missions training, teaching and preaching with a flurry of exciting but more superficial entertainment was not going to have deleterious effects on stewardship, and missions giving in particular?
Why did we fail to anticipate that getting away from training and teaching in the selflessness of giving would produce self-centered members who tend to choose feathering their own ecclesiastical nests over enabling the mission of Christ to fly?
What made us think that children reared in activities that did not focus their sights on the world beyond their own, would suddenly become mission-minded adults with global vision?
If I am optimistic at this point, however, it is in the confidence I have, not in us, but in the Holy Spirit who inspires us to respond to the challenge that He, not our convention, lays before us. Worse circumstances than ours have been revolutionized through the power of the Spirit when believers surrendered themselves in obedience.
The response to our convention’s “1% CP Challenge,” by the pastor who said that his church was already giving enough to CP and that the ones who are not need to increase their giving, reminds me of the comments of a pulpit committee once. Trying to impress me with their seriousness about reviving their church, they said that their auditorium was only half filled, but “if we can get someone in there who will go out and visit and get all the old members who aren’t coming to come back, we’ll fill that church.” That was true enough, but it illustrated a problem: They were ignoring their own responsibility to do the work of the church.
Similarly, while it is true that churches now giving 5 percent or 1 percent or nothing through the Cooperative Program should increase their giving, they’re probably not listening to this challenge. The church that’s giving 10 percent heard the challenge, however. What’s stopping it from giving 11 percent, or 15 percent or more? We cannot afford to be like the apostle Peter, whom Jesus gave a sobering prophecy of his future, and who then asked the Lord, “What about John?” Wondering why other churches aren’t giving their fair share is just deflecting the challenge off ourselves. This isn’t a contest to see who can lose less; it’s a challenge to see who can give more. And it isn’t each other we should be trying to best, but the divine Missionary we should be trying to glorify.
Southern Baptist churches need to respond to the need of the present by giving more, without comparison to the unresponsive, and in liberating disregard for our perceived poverty. We also need to begin to revive the education and training efforts of our churches so that yet another generation does not come up in our midst with a woefully inadequate foundation of missionary conviction and commitment.
– Simms is a Greenville County magistrate and a member of St. John’s Baptist Church in Greer. He is a former pastor who preaches and serves interims as opportunity arises.