In 2025, we celebrate the centennial anniversary of our Southern Baptist Cooperative Program (CP). Since 1925, SCBaptist churches have given more than $2 billion through the CP. Those funds, cheerfully and sacrificially given by cooperating churches like yours, have carried the SCBaptist work to every neighborhood in our state and to the farthest corners of the world. If you are giving faithfully to God’s kingdom work in and through your local church (and if that church is giving faithfully and sacrificially through the CP), this work is your work. The missionaries, the seminarians, the church planters, the university students, the Connie Maxwell children, the church leaders being encouraged and resourced — the full length of SCBaptist mission and ministry thrives because you give.
As Southern Baptists, the CP is the only thing we do that practically fuels everything we do. It is like undesignated giving in your local church. Regular, undesignated giving populates the church’s budget, while special offerings and designated gifts provide that extra boost in a specific initiative or ministry area. Designated giving and special offerings are great, but you can’t build a church’s ministry strategy around them. For example, you could designate tens of thousands to the children’s ministry for new televisions, but if the budget cannot sustain the electricity or the ministry leadership salaries to put on the program, those new televisions are worthless.
Because the needs are pressing and the opportunities are great, our Baptist local, state, national, and international ministries are dependent upon special offerings each year (associational, Janie Chapman, Annie Armstrong, and Lottie Moon) to supplement their budgets. However, like undesignated giving in your local church, CP giving fuels the entire ecosystem of SCBaptist mission and ministry every day of the year. SCBaptists are serious about raising up generations of church leaders and mobilizing our people to the nations with gospel intentionality. By God’s grace, we have built an entire ecosystem around this purpose and, together, we have committed to fund it through the CP.
We need strategic harvest events across the state that provide clear and compelling gospel opportunities for our lost friends and neighbors. We need well-planned statewide children’s and youth programs that instill gospel hope and Christian discipleship in our youngest minds, fostering a devotion to the local church and a hunger for the mission. We need collegiate programs that reach, disciple, and send from all campuses in our state — which, in many ways, are the most strategic mission field on Palmetto soil. We need healthy Baptist universities to train young professionals in every field with an unyielding biblical worldview. We need cohorts, trainings, and resources for church leadership that strengthen the churches while facilitating and extending their shared mission. We need a communications agency to tell our story and inspire our people.
Nationally, the six SBC seminaries need ministerial students with deep faith in Christ and a nurtured appreciation for our cooperation. The North American Mission Board needs church planters and chaplains who have already put their hands to the work for a season beside successful planters and chaplains. The International Mission Board needs missionaries with theological training and missions-mobilization experience. State and national Disaster Relief bodies need perennial administrative and organizational continuity in order to respond quickly and efficiently when crises come. Annual/occasional special offerings supplement all of this work, but only the CP fuels the entirety of the Baptist ecosystem.
The entirety of our work thrives because you give through the CP. As part of our Give+Go initiative in 2025, your SCBaptist creative team is making available a free, downloadable digital resource kit to help keep your church’s CP celebrations in front of your people. Monthly announcements slides, bulletin inserts, posters, videos, and more are available at scbaptist.org/giveandgo. The Holy Spirit empowers our cooperative work, and in our Baptist ecosystem the CP fuels it. The opportunity before us in our generation is great. Now is the time to celebrate the CP and educate our people on the what, why, and how of our shared mission.
— Tony Wolfe is executive director-treasurer of the South Carolina Baptist Convention.