The most bewailed SBC statistic is the average percentage of undesignated receipts given by churches to the Cooperative Program. The figure stands at 5.16% having declined from over 10% back in the days prior to the Conservative Resurgence. The decline has been incremental, steady, and relentless although during Frank Page’s tenure as SBC Executive Committee CEO the percentage has stopped declining and is more or less flat.
SBC leaders and others regularly speak of raising the percentage and returning to the earlier times when churches were happy to devote a tenth of their budgets to the CP. Sometimes this comes in the form of nostalgia and occasionally plans are offered.
- Churches should “tithe” to the CP just like they expect members to tithe to the church.
- Churches used to give 10% or more. They should just do it again.
- A church that gives less than 10% (or more recently from a state convention leader, less than the average) is not genuinely cooperative, or fully cooperative.
- If leaders, trustees, prominent pastors would just give greater percentages then the rest of the denomination would follow.
- Churches that give more in direct gifts to NAMB, IMB, and other Southern Baptist causes than they give to the CP are not cooperative.
- Great Commission Giving is a disaster for CP giving. If we just got rid of it churches would give more.
- Churches should be judged as to their cooperativeness on the basis of their percentage rather than on the dollar amount they give to the CP.
After following the matter for so many years, I’ve concluded that a lot of Cooperative Program increase talk is based more on magical thinking than reality. Some Southern Baptists have successfully divorced their thinking from reality on the CP believing that there’s a magic pill, an incantation, another grand program that will cause the CP will take off like a rocket…
…if we only taught our people that a church CP “tithe” is as biblical as a personal tithe, no matter that the Bible doesn’t teach this.
…if we had leaders who called out all those churches whose percentages are less than average as not being fully cooperative, no matter than CP bullying and shaming has never worked.
…if all of our elected leaders, trustees, employees were required to be in churches that gave 10% or more, and thereby disparage a considerable portion of all churches some of which give large sums.
…if we only stopped letting churches share their total giving to Southern Baptist causes, as if that is something to be ashamed of and as if ignorance is preferable to facts.
…if we only pushed percentages and ignored dollars, and ignore the unassailable fact that only dollars pay the bills, not percentages.
This discussion absolutely needs some new ideas. Do either Ken Hemphill or J. D. Greear have any new ideas?
Baptist Press asked both Hemphill and Greear about the CP. The question to both was: Please describe why you believe support for the Cooperative Program, Lottie Moon Christmas Offering and Annie Armstrong Easter Offering is vital to Southern Baptists’ mission and vision.
Hemphill: This is a key issue that motivated me to become a candidate.
First, establishing the budget requires cooperation at every level of SBC life. It is fine-tuned by the Executive Committee and approved by messengers at the annual convention. A church’s non-restricted gift through CP should be the norm for the sake of budgeting and planning.
Second, cooperative giving is a biblical approach to funding missions by churches who work together for kingdom-sized goals. As a funding mechanism for supporting missions, it has absolutely no peer in Christian history.
Third, CP giving and our mission offerings allow every church of every size to be an equal partner in the ministries of the state and national convention. Percentage giving is not measured by the size of the gift but the size of the sacrifice. We must celebrate percentage giving rather than actual dollars given by a particular church.
Greear: Cooperation between churches for the sake of mission is why the convention exists, and that cooperation has enabled Southern Baptists to produce more church planters, more missionaries, and more seminary graduates than any other group in America. Cooperative giving through the CP, Annie Armstrong and Lottie Moon Offerings is a powerful and proven method for supporting Great Commission work.
As a former IMB missionary and a two-time seminary graduate, I have been the beneficiary of the CP in multiple ways. In recent years our church has increasingly gotten involved in giving, and we only plan for that to continue. We want to call a new generation of Southern Baptist churches, similarly, to rise up and engage in cooperative mission and giving.
Institutions like the CP and the entities they support enable our mission efforts to have staying power, and they should be important to all Southern Baptists.
There’s not a new idea from either.
Hemphill wants to emphasize percentages. In earlier comments he disparaged the idea of “neo-societal” giving, perhaps targeting solidly SBC churches that feel led to give large direct gifts to Lottie Moon and Annie Armstrong, or to partner directly with either of the mission boards to plant churches and reach the nations. It eludes me why any denominational leader would not celebrate dollar gifts, direct gifts, along with CP percentages.
Greear notes the usual items for promoting SBC giving in that the CP helps seminary students, missionaries. Elsewhere he calls “for churches to give more to the CP” and for state conventions to be “celebrate[d]” for “getting money to the field.” I believe he means by this that the state conventions that are reducing their portion of CP giving so that more money can get to the home and foreign fields are to be commended and celebrated. He also “encourage[s] all forms of Great Commission giving. We do not, of course, want to foster a societal approach, but we need to allow churches freedom in engaging.”
If there is anything new in all this it might be that non-traditional churches like Greear’s are giving heavily to all things SBC, including the CP. The past few years have seen more traditional megachurches like Ronnie Floyd’s and Steve Gaines’ greatly increase their CP giving.
My hacker and plodder SBC pastor opinion is that neither candidate will move the CP needle although Greear as a post-boomer has a better chance of influencing others to increase CP giving.
Frank Page’s successor, if he is wise and positive like Page, can help the CP. A new generation of state convention leaders, and this is where most of the CP money is spent, probably have the best chance of positively influencing churches on their CP giving. If these leaders instead declare war on a segment of Southern Baptists over theology or over percentages then the CP is guaranteed to decline.
IMHO the best the SBC can hope for is a plateaued CP. This is largely because the missions landscape has changed. Because churches are now more directly involved in missions via international and domestic mission trips and Disaster Relief they are spending some of what they gave to the CP for their own mission efforts. THAT is the easiest way to sell the congregation on supporting the fad of rather expensive and heavily subsidized overseas and domestic church mission trips. Just like the bus ministry in the 70s, a decent size church is considered ‘gospel negligent’ today if their pastor and/or members are not involved in short term mission trips regardless of how ineffective these missions effort might be. So churches believe they have no choice but to join the crowd. This is not likely to change ANY TIME SOON. In fact, missions support will likely continue to move in the church personalized direction….The benefit of pricy mission trips can be debated in another post.
Because of this new normal, I believe ‘Simple SBC’ (scaling the SBC back to International missions only) is the only reasonable answer. We need to scale back and eliminate entities that duplicate State Convention work or address issues that are not directly related to International missions and let the State Conventions take the lead. We also have too many brick and mortar seminaries generating cookie cutter graduates, MOST of which are ill equipped to serve in the small rural/suburban churches where most of their ministries will begin. And most graduates who come to seminary from new convention areas rarely return to their home state to serve because of the more lucrative opportunities offered to them in the richer states where are seminaries are located. Our emphasis in seminary education should be on branches of maybe two or three seminaries and online degree pgms vs. maintaining six brick and mortar institutions to compete for students. Our seminaries have all had to develop under graduate programs competing with our Baptist colleges to survive! That is certainly good evidence that we have too many. If we scaled back at the SBC to International Missions the current 5-6% of CP giving would be more than adequate to support our cooperative efforts.
Lots of wisdom here from the Plodder. I wonder what the CP percentage would be if you removed all the megas from the equation. We may find that the percentage decrease among average size SBC churches is not as steep as we think.
[It eludes me why any denominational leader would not celebrate dollar gifts, direct gifts, along with CP percentages.]
Because celebrating dollar gifts typically marginalizes the many smaller churches in the convention and their ability to give to the CP. That’s usually not the intended consequence obviously, but I think Hemphill is making the attempt to encourage and engage the smaller churches in continued or increased cooperation. I for one am happy to see that.
I read the full interviews last night and thought both men gave great answers. When is Voices going to do their Q&A with Hemphill?
I saw that Greear has been assigned the last speaking slot at the Pastors Conference. What a huge advantage for him to not only get to speak at that, but to do so right before the convention begins and ballots are cast. Maybe it was a coincidence that he’s going last? (Hahaha.)
Celebrating or expressing appreciation for dollars in no way marginalizes any church, large or small. It’s more of that magical thinking to believe that the CP will thrive if we just get the smaller churches involved or if we (ahem!) marginialize larger churches because their dollars don’t translate into someone’s arbitrary percentage.
The major difference between the era when SBC churches gave an average of 10% to the CP and the present time is that in that earlier time, the churches had a greater Southern Baptist identity that permeated everything they did. It was assumed that all of the Sunday School classes would only use material from the Sunday School Board. Most churches had an active WMU promoting giving to Lottie Moon and they wouldn’t even consider supporting non SBC missionaries. The members of the churches themselves came from predominately SBC backgrounds and were almost all Southerners to boot. Contrast that to today where the population of most of the large metro areas of the south consists of people from all over and the churches now reflect the reality that a large portion of their membership is from non SBC backgrounds, so there isn’t the instinctive without question support of all things SBC. The former Catholic members who moved down from New Jersey are probably not big time supporters of the Tennessee Baptist Convention.
Another significant trend affecting this reality is the significant growth in parachurch ministries – a large portion of the church members were involved with Campus Crusade or Intervarsity in college and continue to support the people in those ministries. Therefore, it’s no big deal to support non SBC missionaries and they’re not strongly attached to the CP and its various ministries.
The tension being played out in this years SBC President’s election reflects the differences between the churches in the rural areas who still have a strong SBC identity as they have had few transplants move in and are life long Baptists on the one hand and the churches in the large metro areas which have a more cosmopolitan population of transplants who don’t have the strong historic ties to the SBC and its agencies. The rural churches who have been giving their 10% are questioning the loyalty of the larger churches which give a lower %. Summit Church in the RTP area of NC reflects the reality of a church in a large growing metro area where there are far more out of state transplants than NC natives and the church most likely reflects that reality in its membership and its approach to the CP. The Church at Brook Hills is another church in a large metro area and while it supports IMB missionaries it also supports some who are sent through other agencies.
Its not that the rural churches are better than the large metro churches who don’t give as high a % – if the rural churches had more people from non SBC backgrounds, their % support to the CP might change, too. The large churches who give a smaller % to the CP should understand why there is questioning of their degree of support for the CP by the small rural churches. The key is that both types should be grateful for the contributions to the collective mission efforts.
Good points. If through elections or nominations or other means we look askance at Non-traditional (that’s small “T”) churches and leaders then the SBC tent gets a lot smaller. JDG, one would think
would be embraced seeing the over 700 baptisms annually, a climate that energizes tremendous sending capacity, Baptist beliefs (BFM affirming), millions to SBC causes, and even affirmation by his state convention leader.
Generation change, 21st century leader rather than 20th century.
More good points.