State convention executive directors have agreed to affirm a portion of the Great Commission Resurgence (GCR) report requesting a 50/50 division of Cooperative Program (CP) receipts – after consideration for shared ministry funds – between state conventions and the Southern Baptist Convention.
Frank Page, SBC Executive Committee president, announced the agreement in his report during the EC’s Feb. 22 session in Nashville, Tenn.
State convention executive directors agreed to the 50/50 move during their annual meeting Feb. 14-17 in Williamsburg, Va., said Emil Turner, executive director of the Arkansas Baptist State Convention and president of the Fellowship of State Executive Directors for 2011-2012.
Turner emphasized that state executive directors felt it important to make a statement to affirm their “strong support” of the Cooperative Program in light of the approval of the GCR report by SBC messengers last June.
“State conventions are already in this thing,” Turner said. “Several years ago, state executive directors agreed to get more money to the Executive Committee,” which distributes Southern Baptists’ funding of the International Mission Board, North American Mission Board and other SBC entities. “Since then, we have all been working together to make that a reality,” Turner said.
The concept of shared ministry funds “has strong historic roots,” Turner said, referencing the establishment of the Cooperative Program in 1925. Shared ministry funds differ from state convention to state convention, but include monies set aside for various state-supported ministries. Shared ministry fund allocations are not counted as a part of the 50/50 CP allocation forwarded to the SBC.
Jim AustinJim Austin, executive director-treasurer of the South Carolina Baptist Convention, told the Courier he agrees “in principle” with a 50/50 division of CP funds, but said the process of defining what shared ministry funds are could be a “sticking point” as autonomous state conventions take up the discussion.
Austin, who attended the state executives meeting but had to return to South Carolina before the vote was taken on the final day of the conference, said a working definition of shared ministry might be different for each state. “That’s the point I tried to make during our discussion [before the vote],” he said.
He said one example of a shared ministry might be South Carolina Woman’s Missionary Union, which receives state CP support and funding from the Janie Chapman state missions offering, but which also promotes national missions offerings in South Carolina churches. Another example, he said, might be The Baptist Courier, a CP-supported state Baptist institution that publishes news stories about the work of the International and North American Mission boards.
“For South Carolina, with all the institutions we have,” he said, “we will be very different from a state that has no institutions.
“Depending on how you define shared ministry, we [in South Carolina] may already be [at a 50/50 division].
“We’ve got to work through that process, pray it through and hope we can come to unanimity in our thinking about it,” Austin told the Courier.
Page, addressing the EC meeting Feb. 22, said the state execs’ affirmation of a 50/50 CP allocation represents “a quantum shift in methodology,” while acknowledging that “it will take time for some conventions to achieve the goal.”
“We understand that we do some things together as shared ministry items, but understand it’s still very historic that these state conventions are joining in wanting to do more to reach the vast lostness of this world,” Page said. “That’s not going to have immediate impact, but over time, it’s going to have significant impact for the work of reaching this continent and this world for Christ.”
On Feb. 21, the Great Commission Council, which is composed of presidents of SBC entities, voted unanimously to affirm the executive directors’ agreement, and after Page’s address, the Executive Committee also voted to affirm the milestone.
Turner presented the fellowship’s official statement to Page on Feb. 18, which reads in its entirety: “We affirm the challenge of the Great Commission Resurgence report that each state convention, within their own autonomy, strive to achieve the historic goal of 50/50 division of Cooperative Program receipts with the Southern Baptist Convention after consideration of allocations for shared ministries.”
The GCR report, approved by messengers to the SBC annual meeting in Orlando in June 2010, included in “Component Three” a request for increased CP and “other Great Commission” giving by churches and state conventions.
Additionally, the GCR report listed “Challenges” for various SBC entities, including those for state conventions, stating the need to “return to the historic ideal of a 50/50 Cooperative Program distribution between the state conventions and the SBC.”
Some state conventions have announced plans to work toward a return to a 50/50 allocation.
David Hankins, executive director of the Louisiana Baptist Convention and former vice president in charge of CP promotion at the SBC Executive Committee, said state conventions as a whole send a larger percentage of their receipts to the SBC today than they have in previous years.
“The last 10 years it has inched upward about 1.5 percent in SBC’s favor,” Hankins said. “We are headed to a 39-40 percent range for SBC, and that’s in a time when percentage from churches continues to decline rapidly.”
Last November, South Carolina Baptist Convention messengers voted to increase the percentage of CP funds forwarded to the SBC from 40.44 percent to 41 percent.
State conventions are free to set their own timeline for realization of the 50/50 CP allocation, Turner noted.
– By Tim Yarbrough, editor of the Arkansas Baptist News, with additional reporting by Butch Blume.