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.