Well, our venerable flagship giving scheme is a century old and there’s a bunch of stuff going on at the SBCAM in Dallas next month. A Baptist Press Story of May 13th featured the group picture above and I recognize a number of people. Someone do an analysis of the dozens of people in that picture. Chances are most of them are on the Cooperative Program payroll which doesn’t mean they aren’t good people committed to the Lord and his work through Southern Baptists. It does mean that there is a financial connection between keeping the CP going, however weakly, and putting food on your table
I qualified as both a supporter and a critic of the CP years ago. I still support it. I have offered criticism of it for several decades because most of what we have gotten over the years is just cheerleading.
Take the photo above. Find out how many SBC employee leaders smile at the camera, quite a few including some entity CEOs. How much do folks in the pews get to celebrate paying these employees? Few people know. The information is secret. We are not privileged to be informed of how much. Maybe they are paid too little. Maybe they are wildly overpaid. Let me have the information I need to decide which. We could do this as a convention by passing financial reform measures. Give that a snowflake’s chance in Gehenna.
We could be celebrating a century of existence of the CP and a half-century of steady decline. If you find that exhibit, send me a picture of the graph that shows it.
We could have attempted, sometime in the last two generations, a rebrand, retool, and/or relaunch the CP. Nope. We just slog along with the same approach, same program, same message: “how about you pew sitters just give us more money?”
There was a loud but rather tepid attempt to pry some CP dollars away from the wasteful state conventions, you know, the organizations that have sucked up 60% and above of EVERY CP DOLLAR for decades and decades, almost all of which stay in the legacy southern states. The state conventions built magnificent organizations and structures, a la Ozymandias. They were the go-to employer for whatever connected individual needed a job. Give a denominational bureaucrat a money flow and he will spent it year-after-year-after-year. He will never slow down until the money flow is cut.
Now, the two most important organizations, IMB and NAMB, get record direct offerings and the CP is diminished in its value to them. Churches have taken the approach that sending money direct to them is better than sending to the state convention in CP contributions where only 30 cents or so go to the mission boards. That is a trend that will not be slowed by any party in Dallas.
Dare I say it: messengers still have to vote next month to lop off the first $3 million of CP giving to pay lawyers. Churchgoing Baptists gave millions of dollars to their churches for the grand common mission support scheme. Now Millions that will go to direct payments of legal bills. No missionary in West Africa gets a dime of that. No church planter in Alaska gets a dime of that. Not one hungry mouth gets fed. Legal bills.
The group pictured above gathered to sign a “Declaration of Cooperation.” Fifty years ago another group gathered and signed a “Declaration of Cooperation.” What happened to the CP in those 50 years? Steady, consistent, persistent, depressing decline.
Will signing a new one reverse the decline?
You make the call.
____________________
