Comparing the Cooperative Program to the Mighty Mississippi, Tony Wolfe told Southern Baptist messengers, “What we’ve been entrusted is not some rippled stream. It is a fast-flowing river, and it is full of torrential currents that support the entire ecosystem of gospel mission and spiritual life among our Southern Baptist family.”
Wolfe, executive director-treasurer of SCBaptists, was the convention preacher for the Southern Baptist Convention Annual Meeting in Dallas this week.
“The truth is, you and I honestly don’t know where our ‘bread’ (CP giving) will be needed most in the days ahead,” Wolfe acknowledged. “We just don’t know. We acknowledge the brokenness of the world at which we invest, and we send out as much bread as possible, as often as we can, trusting that the moving waters will multiply its effectiveness by God’s grace and His own kindness.”
Defining the Cooperative Program as “a unified effort in a diversified strategy,” Wolfe reminded Southern Baptists that money given through the Cooperative Program will “go farther, rise higher, spread wider, work deeper, and last longer” than that given through any other cause.
Southern Baptists will never see, nor will they ever catalog with all their many statistics and reports, the Cooperative Program’s eternal impact, Wolfe observed. “Only the ledgers of heaven can possibly record the full effect of our Southern Baptist intergenerational faithfulness through our Cooperative Program,” he said.
Wolfe encouraged Southern Baptists to “look downstream” to marvel at how our Cooperative Program has become such a powerful force in advancing the Great Commission.
“Preachers will be called whom we didn’t even know would be born. Churches will be started or revitalized thanks to some resource that we didn’t even remember that we created, and lives will be changed through some relationship that we didn’t even intend to build,” he noted.
Even visionaries cannot see all the good that will be accomplished, Wolfe allowed. “But when we send our bread,” he continued, “we choose to trust the One who moves the waters and stirs the winds more than we trust those who release the bread or who plant the trees.”
Winds may blow and trees fall, and “sometimes the winds blow east and the tree falls accordingly, and just when you get used to it, the wind blows west and another tree falls differently,” Wolfe said, urging Southern Baptists to keep sending their bread on “the surface of the waters.”
“We keep our investments traveling on the surface of the waters, and we keep our attention focused on the fields downstream because they are white unto harvest, the Lord Jesus has told us,” he said.
Wolfe recalled fishing with his brothers while growing up on the banks of local rivers, standing idly by overanalyzing every single thing he did.
“I would cast and then reel and cast and reel because I got frustrated, no matter how hard I tried,” he said. “I would cast the bait where I wanted it, and then the currents would take it somewhere else. So I’d reel it up and I’d cast again, and the current would take it somewhere else.”
Wolfe said he finally realized that he could waste his entire time fishing, trying to put the bait exactly where he wanted it. “Or, I could just throw the line in the water, trust the currents to do what currents do, and then catch the fish that bite,” he said.
While there are things that may frustrate us about cooperative work right now, Wolfe maintained, “It’s my prerogative to stay joyfully and sacrificially and strategically engaged, doing everything I can to move us toward greater clarity and greater missional effectiveness.
“I’m still casting lines in this flowing river (Cooperative Program), and I’m still catching fish all over the world because my message is too urgent and my mission is too clear and my time is too short to waste a single day of my life,” he said.
Southern Baptists’ strategy is “to turn diverse, disparate tributaries into one roaring intergenerational river for generations,” he said. “God has been pleased that, through the Cooperative Program, the gospel has floated along this river to the nations.”
And because of the faithfulness of generations of Southern Baptists, more than $20 billion have flowed down that river. And as a result, countless souls now will be surrounding the throne of God in heaven, he said.
“The need for this critical hour is not a critical spirit, but a confessional consensus and a cooperative conviction,” Wolfe challenged. “This is our moment. This is our time. Don’t waste it.”