Cooperative Program receipts at the SBC level (after state conventions take their cut and not counting money sent directly that by-passes the states) was UP in the last fiscal year about eight million dollars.
One legacy state convention, Florida, has voted to keep less than 50% of CP receipts. This is quite a change from the practice of most legacy state conventions which are accustomed to keeping somewhere in the neighborhood of 60-65 percent of a CP dollar.
These state conventions added more members by transfer (or other means) than baptism: Alabama, Alaska, Dakota, Mississippi, BGC Texas, Utah-Idaho. Alabama and Mississippi are the only two large, legacy state conventions that had significantly less additions to membership by baptism rather than by other means of membership (transfer of letter or statement). About 44 %of Alabama church membership increase was by means of baptism, Mississippi, about 45%.
Which means that most state conventions had more additions to membership through baptisms than by other means, but not by much. Only a few state conventions reported that their churches baptized significantly more people than added by transfer: In the New York convention about five people are baptized for every new member who joins by transfer or other means. In the Baptist Convention of New England it’s about three per. In Puerto Rico-Virgin Islands it’s about four per. I would still be curious as to whether the presence of the evangelistically aggressive seminary, Mid-America Baptist Theological Seminary is a good part of the reason for NY’s high ratio of baptisms to other additions.
There are only three state conventions in the SBC “Billion Dollar Club”. Georgia and both Texas conventions reported total receipts above a billion dollars for 2014. The total receipts reported by all 46,499 SBC churches was $11.2 billion. That’s about the same as the total Gross Domestic Product of Macedonia or Armenia or Madagascar or Nicaragua…or, the budget for the state of Montana.
Alabama is easily the leader in contributions to the SBC Cooperative Program allocation budget, $17.38 million for the 2014-2015 budget year. Georgia is second but slipped significantly farther behind Alabama from the previous year.
North Carolina is easily the leader in designated gifts (mostly Lottie Moon and Annie Armstrong), $19.35 million.
For those who like to toss out shocking but fairly meaningless figures, Southern Baptists gave the following amounts, per member:
- $720 to their church. That’s about $13.85 per Sunday. This is about the per capita GDP in the Congo.
- $79.38 to missions. That’s about $1.53 per week.
- $9.87 to the Lottie Moon offering.
- $3.67 to the Annie Armstrong offering.
Any statement by a denominational leader that begins, “The average Southern Baptist gave…” is completely meaningless.
I think the total scoring for tonight’s NCAA championship game will be 59 points with Alabama getting 61% of those.
