North Carolina Baptists, gathered for their 178th annual meeting in Greensboro, N.C., Nov. 10-12, eliminated the option for churches to contribute to the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship through the state convention.
Business sessions moved according to script and were often ahead of schedule. Until the final morning, not a single ballot vote was required, nor had a single messenger spoken from a floor microphone. That rapid trip through the agenda slowed for a long anticipated Giving Plans Study Committee report, which messengers adopted after making a significant amendment.
The committee’s recommendation reduced North Carolina Baptists’ four giving plan options to a single plan, with options.
North Carolina Baptists since 1991 have offered multiple giving plans, each with a distinct distribution of funds that reflects a different priority. Plan C of the state convention’s current giving options sends 10 percent to the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.
Plan C directed money to CBF that in other plans would have gone to the SBC. “Plan C Only” congregations numbered 160 this past year, down slightly from previous years. A few congregations also customized their own giving plans by combining elements of the four options offered by the state convention.
In the giving plan presented by the study committee, the primary alternative to giving to the SBC was an option which allowed a church to forward 10 percent of its gift to the CBF. Other options proposed by the committee let a church designate 2 percent to an Adopt-An-Annuitant program or 2 percent for divinity schools at Gardner-Webb or Campbell universities, and it allowed for up to three negative designations.
Matt Williamson, pastor of Oak Forest Baptist Church in Fletcher, moved that the CBF option be deleted from the plan because, he said, the fellowship does not subscribe to scriptural inerrancy. After much discussion, messengers approved his motion on a ballot vote by a margin of 55 to 45 percent.