Southern Baptist Convention president Bobby Welch is applauding a task force report that calls for greater Cooperative Program support from leaders throughout the Southern Baptist Convention.
Chief among the recommendations was one calling on elected leaders throughout the convention to “come from strong Cooperative Program churches” and to be “well-known advocates” themselves of the Cooperative Program.
“Never before has the leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention – from entity heads down to every Sunday school teacher and pastor – needed to sound the call for evangelism and the Cooperative Program,” Welch told Baptist Press.?
“Everybody can appreciate the heartfelt and clear message of the task force – that leadership should lead the way, in both going and giving,” added Welch, pastor of First Baptist Church, Daytona Beach, Fla., which has given at least 15 percent through the Cooperative Program for the past 30 years.
Southern Baptists have been widely praised for their involvement in the Hurricane Katrina disaster relief, with more than 5,000 volunteers spread throughout the region. But what many Southern Baptists fail to recognize, Welch said, is that Cooperative Program dollars provided the “infrastructure” that allowed Southern Baptist disaster relief teams to be on the ground immediately after the storm. Because of the funding stability provided by the Cooperative Program, Southern Baptists can respond quickly and comprehensively in times of disaster and not undercut the deployment of missionaries overseas and at home, and not turn away a single student from SBC seminaries, he added.
The task force’s report, Welch said, could “not be more timely.”
“In my view, we’re at one of our greatest points of destiny and have before us the greatest opportunity,” he said. “However, everything hinges on unity of purpose. … We must now accelerate not only the going but the giving, in light of all the need that is now apparent by the disasters and likely those that lie ahead.”
In recent years, Cooperative Program giving has been stagnant and has struggled to keep up with inflation. One problem, according to the report, is the portion that churches are forwarding through the Cooperative Program. In? 1984, churches forwarded an average of 10.6 percent of their offerings through CP, although today that number is only 6.64 percent, the report said.
“If that trend continues, it’s not going to be many more years until the Southern Baptist Convention and all of our work is just a whimper of what it is and has been,” Carlisle Driggers, executive director-treasurer of the South Carolina Baptist Convention and a member of the task force, told BP.
A lack of leadership, the report said, is at least partly to blame for the drop in support from churches.
Echoing the report, Driggers said SBC leaders – both state and national – should lead their churches to give “10 percent of their undesignated monies” through the Cooperative Program.
“It’s just a fact of life that people follow good models of leadership,” he said. “You’ll always look up to good leaders.”
Another task force member, Robert White, said the Cooperative Program worked so well for so long “that we took it for granted.” White serves as executive director of the Georgia Baptist Convention.
“We believed that it would continue to bear fruit without tending to the need to educate each new generation regarding its importance to all that we do,” White told Baptist Press. “This blas? attitude about the Cooperative Program began to be revealed through the election of SBC leadership who pastored churches with exceedingly low levels of Cooperative Program support. Add to that the rarity of any verbal support for the Cooperative Program from SBC leadership, and the concept of ‘CP Lite’ became prevalent.?
“With the Cooperative Program dollar shrinking at a frightening rate, we are finally awakening from our slumber to recognize that if this trend continues we will no longer have a Southern Baptist Convention as we know it.”
The solution, White said, is to “re-educate” Southern Baptists about the necessity of the Cooperative Program, to elect leaders who are “excellent models” of CP support and to train seminary students about the importance of the Cooperative Program.
“We must have a unison voice of support for the Cooperative Program from all of our national leaders,” White said.
Task force: ‘Changes needed in focus strategy, cooperation’
SCBC’s Driggers part of 8-member study group
By Michael Foust
Baptist Press
IF THE COOPERATIVE PROGRAM is to grow and thrive in the future, then leaders elected to national positions within the Southern Baptist Convention must come from churches committed to the Cooperative Program and must be CP “advocates” themselves, a report put together by a task force of SBC entity heads and state executives says.
The report, plainspoken and candid, was released Sept. 17 in Nashville, where more than 30 entity heads and state executives gathered to discuss its content. It has 13 recommendations and is the fruit of more than five years of work by the Task Force on Cooperation, an eight-member group composed of four entity heads and four state executives.?
The task force was set up in 2000 by the Great Commission Council and state executives to study ways to boost stagnant Cooperative Program growth as well as ways to improve relations between the national body and state conventions.
According to the report, over the last 40 years the Cooperative Program – Southern Baptists’ mode of funding missions, seminaries and other ministries since 1925 – has “gradually begun to vaporize as a high priority” in the hearts and minds of “many pastors, their people, and even denominational leaders.”
“Now scores of Southern Baptists in the pulpits and the pews virtually ignore the plight of the Cooperative Program,” the report says. “As a result, we all have consciously or unconsciously hurt the real growth of the Cooperative Program.”
The Cooperative Program supports both state and national ministries. The process begins when churches forward a percentage of their offerings to the state (or regional) convention, which then forwards a percentage of the monies it receives to the national body. From there, the funds are distributed among Southern Baptists’ two mission boards, six seminaries and other ministries. The portion retained by state and region conventions supports ministries in their respective areas.
Although giving to the Cooperative Program generally increases each year, it has struggled to keep up with inflation. The results have impacted the entities. For instance, in 2003, the International Mission Board and North American Mission Board – both of which receive CP funds – were forced to cut their respective budgets, preventing new missionaries from being assigned to the field.
Members of the task force were: Jerry Rankin, president, International Mission Board; William Crews, past president, Golden Gate Baptist Seminary; Robert Reccord, president, North American Mission Board; Morris Chapman, president, SBC Executive Committee; Robert White, executive director, Georgia Baptist Convention; Carlisle Driggers, executive director-treasurer, South Carolina Baptist Convention; Wyndell Jones, retired executive director, Baptist Convention of Iowa; and Anthony Jordan, executive director-treasurer, Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma.?
In 1984, the report says, churches forwarded an average of 10.6 percent of their offerings to the Cooperative Program through their state convention, although today, that number is only 6.64 percent. Leaders must head the effort to reverse the trend, the report asserts.?
“Too many top Southern Baptist Convention leaders and officials for too many years gave scant attention or support to the Cooperative Program as they discharged their responsibilities,” the report says. “It is well known that a number of our leaders in the past generation hardly ever spoke about the Cooperative Program or promoted it in one way or another. For the most part, their churches were poor models of Cooperative Program support. As a result, it has been projected that thousands of pastors and churches reduced their Cooperative Program percentage of undesignated monies as they followed the example of those who led them.?
The report concluded that while the Cooperative Program has been resilient through the years – surviving economic depressions and wars – its future is murky without a boost in cooperation and funds.
“The truth of the matter is … that when it comes to Southern Baptist cooperation for the sake of the kingdom of God and when it comes to an all-out commitment to the Cooperative Program, we are in a situation that only promises to get worse unless we improve our relationships with each other in the Spirit of Christ,” the report says. “God shall not bless us, and we shall never reach the world one person at a time by doing any less.