Your reaction to the title might be, “OF COURSE we own the Cooperative Program. What’d you think, that we had sold it to the Methodists?”
Or, perhaps, you might react by saying, “The Cooperative Program is not a THING to be owned. We own the entities. We own the assets. Nobody owns the Cooperative Program.”
But I’m using that word in another sense altogether. When President Obama first entered office, every problem with the economy in every speech that he gave he blamed on the Bush administration. But now, all these years into his presidency, that’s a lot more difficult for him to do. President Obama “owns” the economy now. In other words, to whatever degree a president can actually affect the economy, Obama’s policies have more to do with it than do Bush’s, and he’ll have to take responsibility for what becomes of the economy from this point forward in his administration. He owns it.
In like manner, you and I, fellow Southern Baptists, OWN THE COOPERATIVE PROGRAM. It is what it is in 2014 because of the decisions we made in 2013 about our budgets. It will be whatever it will be in 2015 because of the budgetary decisions that many of us are making right now.
- There is no inexorable hand of statistical trending that will “push” the Cooperative Program one way or another. The charts and graphs are not forces in and of themselves; they are merely reports about the decisions that our churches make every year when they adopt their budgets.
- There is no historical voodoo that gives the Cooperative Program a “shelf life” and makes it obvious or unavoidable that it must outlive its popularity and die.
- There is no generational shibboleth that requires you, based upon the bracketing of your birthdate, to support it or abandon it.
Rather, there is only this simple truth: THE COOPERATIVE PROGRAM WILL BE WHAT WE MAKE OF IT—we…you and me…this year. Our predecessors no longer own the Cooperative program; we do. What will we do with it?
Whatever we do, do not blame the leaders of past generations. Do not blame national leaders or state execs. The Cooperative Program is yours…it’s ours. Use it wisely.
It’s a good reminder, Bart. The CP is about the choices we make – individually as givers, corporately at churches. Great reminder.
True in many ways. But the Cooperative Program is a big ship. And although my small church owns maybe a small nail of that ship, it’s not enough to change the course of the CP one quarter of one degree.
I like the Cooperative Program. It’s one of the best ways we work together as Southern Baptists. And I think you’re absolutely right that we (collectively) “own” it. Sure, it can be improved some, but we all have different ideas as to how it should be improved. And unless we can overwhelmingly agree on how exactly to improve it, it’s going to stay the course it’s on, with more or less support from our churches.
I don’t think that’s such a bad thing, but that being the case, it is hard to say that we own it.
Well, of course, one church doesn’t “own” it. The topic you raised had to do with proposing changes. And on that topic you’re right to say that no one church “owns” the CP. That is, if nobody else agrees with you, then no, you can’t change the budget. And yet, if you provide leadership and you propose something with which people DO agree, you can change the Cooperative Program.
Let’s say you’ve got a great idea. What would happen if you went to a number of key pastors in your convention and said, “I’ve got this idea. Let me know what you think of it. And if you like it, I’m not asking you to stand up and propose it, I’m just asking you to bring your messengers and vote for it. I’ll make the motion. I’ll make the speech. I’m just asking you to vote in favor of this idea if you like it.”?
Look at the attendance numbers of the SBC Annual Meeting or of your state convention. How many churches with ten messengers would you have to convince in order to carry the day? Perhaps far fewer than you imagine. If you made that difference, that’d be “owning” it, right?
And if you have the idea but decide NOT to try to carry it forward, then you have to own that you could’ve made the difference, but you didn’t.
Yeah, I know that you’re right. I guess I just see that as more work than it’s worth. Especially since I think the CP is as good as it is. So instead I tend to try to trust that the leaders in my state association are making wise and godly decisions regarding our CP dollars, which I think they mostly do.
Chris:
Regarding your comment, “Although my small church owns maybe a small nail in the ship, it is not enough to change the direction of the CP . . .. ”
At least here in Oklahoma, that is definitely the case. I did a spreadsheet where I sorted a list of the CP giving for all of the 1769 SBC churches in Oklahoma. I knew from antidotal evidence that the larger churches had a disproportional effect of CP giving. But the actual results were shocking.
Here are actual results for CP giving here in Oklahoma. This data is obtained from the PDF’s up on the BGCO website for the year 2011.
[I did this about a year ago and at that time 2011 was the latest year for which info was available. I doubt that this data has changed much since then]
The top 20% of churches in the sorted list gave 80.4% of all CP monies received by the BGCO from the churches.
Here is the complete breakdown:
1st quintile 80.41%
2nd quintile 12.87%
3rd quintile 4.91%
4th quintile 1.66%
5th quintile 0.15%
I decided to see how much leverage the “small churches” have in terms of improving the situation relative to total CP giving. For this test, I decided to have 60% of the churches DOUBLE their CP gifts. I chose the 3rd, 4th, and 5th quintiles {i.e. the smaller churches} as those churches who are doubling their CP gifts while holding the 1st and 2nd quintiles constant.
Here are my results:
Total CP giving by all churches in Oklahoma increases from $25.28 million to $26.981 million — a 6.7% increase.
Here is an additional data point for the original data, as reported by the BGCO: Half of all CP giving was concentrated in only 94 of the 1769 churches. i.e. about 5.3% of the churches gave 50% of the CP funds received by the BGCO.
I can’t prove this, but it is likely that CP giving is skewed like this across all of the legacy states in the SBC. So the future of the CP — as a growing funding source — probably is concentrated in “only” a couple of thousand of larger churches in the SBC.
Some larger churches give a “large percentage” to CP. By large, I mean 5% or more of total offerings received by that church.
Other large churches give “a small percentage” to CP. By small, I mean less than 5% of total offerings received by that church. If this group would ramp up their CP giving then this would have a HUGE impact. Here in Oklahoma if only a select group of around 100 of the larger churches — that now give sparsely (on a percentage basis) would ramp up their CP giving using the Frank Page model it would have a huge effect.
The Frank Page model says that a church that currently gives x% of its budget to CP starts giving x+1% of its budget to CP. For example a church raises its CP gift from 3% of offerings to 4%.
Bottom line, the destiny of the CP — in terms of being a greater source of funding — is in the hands of about 2500 of all the churches in the SBC. These are “larger” (not necessarily mega) churches who currently give a relatively small percentage of their budget to the CP.
Excellent work, Roger. Here in GA the state convention did a similar analysis of the top 100 CP giving churches but refused to share the data with me.
Sorry — antidotal should be anecdotal
We are talking about information obtained informally — not taking some type of medicine to cure a disease.
I guess I should proofread better.
Roger
Bart: Rather, there is only this simple truth: THE COOPERATIVE PROGRAM WILL BE WHAT WE MAKE OF IT—we…you and me…this year.”
Actually, this is not a simple truth, and such is complex for practical and political reasons. To the extent that one has his or her voice heard, one has the potential for facilitating a preferred outcome, but such is impractical given millions of members, thus by far most of us only indirectly participate where the highest level of power resides and functions. We vote for representatives that we perceive will act in the best interest of the system as we see it and others do the same as they see it; and the “winner” of a particular “contest” then seeks appointment of individuals that he or she believes will act in the best of the system as he or she perceives such, but does so in the context of other competing individuals doing the same for a limited number of contested positions. Usually for each position, then, we proceed from 51 to 100 with a possibility of dissent ranging from 0 to 49. The hope is that overall we appoint a group of individuals able to fashion workable decisions that would attract a wide following of individuals (for such surely facilitates a greater chance of successful implementation and expected outcome).
But if one suggests that “we” to a greater extent than “you and me” of a lesser extent have a significant amount of power to very timely enact desired outcomes in the system, one is suggesting something that is more theoretical than actual, but not without some foundation given the informal (and very often invisible) organizational channels. Although ‘we’ own the system, ‘we’ delegate power to others and by doing so attenuate the direct influence of the ‘you and me (but with hope that the ‘you and me’ have given such to one that stands for ‘you and me’ [which at best is inconsistent for obvious reasons], thus experiencing no reduction in potential influence)’. Although as participants in the system we are responsible for the appointment of the people that represent ‘us’ (which sometimes sufficiently represents ‘you and me’), our practicing ownership is less in terms of the exercise of power; nonetheless ‘you and me’ are, notwithstanding the quality of our leaders’ decisions, corporately responsible for their behavior. Thus in Bart’s argument there is present both relevance and irrelevance, a concept borrowed from Tillich to illustrate the ambiguities of existence.
The exercise of power in a system is less in the ability to decide from among alternatives (e.g., convention vote), but is a little more in deciding the alternatives (e.g., committee, inter-committee votes); the greatest power in a system is with the ability to determine the problem, the reality that is then presented for others to decide the response to such (and here we might raise the possibility that a formal position is less important than access, which access involvement probably occurs more often than we realize outside of the formal channels for decision making [and absent disclosure of whose interest is being advocated]). More people are involved in deciding from among alternatives, fewer in determining the alternatives, and even fewer still in defining reality. Although Bart is correct in that corporately ‘you and me’ own it all, systems often disproportionately function in favor of the dominant coalition (which can comprise more than one powerful group that have for now agreed to cooperate due to some superordinate end, which may or may not be organizationally relevant or widely known) which by definition is more successful in getting its people appointed to the more influential positions. At best given our inability to understand, our bounded rationality, our sometimes lack of positive other regard, we are at best intentionally moving in a positive direction that is heavily influenced by only a few, never quite knowing if the direction we are headed is really the best one. Such, of course, demands our attention. Our other option is to be weak and abdicate our responsibility as autonomous beings to ensure all beings and that which sustains such has been and will be given the proper consideration and attention. When ‘you and me’ and enough ‘yous and mes’ have sufficient agreement and have sanctioned means to use it to determine the reality for ‘us’ (to which our leaders, at least for a while, would then realize the power of the body and their responsibility to it), let’s hope the reality we define is worthy of the sacrifices that are surely inherent.
Norm, I understand Bart’s generality (as I think you do also). The big difference, which you also point out, is how long it would take to affect real change.
Because we have moved from a grassroots convention of small churches to a large convention of boards and trustees, it takes much longer to affect change.
The Moral Majority realized this same phenomenon in American politics and so seized upon local opportunities like school boards to affect change.
If your post is accurate, and I think it is, the result of the control moving further and further away from the local church bodes doom for the CP in my opinion. People will not put 20 years into bringing change as with the Resurgence.
If the Convention is to continue to thrive, we have to send power back to the local churches and associations. I don’t see that happening, frankly.
I also don’t see a collapse of the CP in the near future. There is enough fat to live off for many years to come.
Thanks for the thoughtful post.
Jack: “Thanks for the thoughtful post.”
Norm: Thanks, Jack. Can’t really take credit for anything, however, especially the third paragraph, which is basically a restatement of Simon’s work on decision making. Both you are Bart are correct; that is, in the implicit argument that leadership tends to seek its own ends, and from time to time it needs to be reminded, in the most civilized of ways, of the basis of its power. Let’s hope when that time comes, that that which checks or checkmates the power of leadership is not just another system with sufficient support to seek its own ends, too. I am not asking for utopia, just a mature realization that we live in a complex world, and that it is still possible to fashion reasonable alternatives, but such, however, requires a bit more openness than its people are generally comfortable.
Norm said: “”a mature realization that we live in a complex world,””
Complexity is nothing new for political dialogue. Socrates entered upon a time much like ours: culture weakened by war; economic instability, moral decline, and politics of power.
The ancient arguments of Socrates saved Athens and by extension saved the Western world as we know it. Civil dialogue driven by principle and delivered with passion and commitment will find solutions where none currently seem to exist.
Interestingly, Socrates did not formulate complicated arguments like many of his predecessors and contemporaries. He looked for the simple answer–the “one thing.” He often referred to the one thing as “Virtue” (capital V). The source of the river beyond which nothing existed.
I think we can still pursue a simple answer to complex problems though we may need to be creative in how we articulate our views. I think people still long for Virtue–they just need to discover His Name.
A reasonable faith and a faithful reason can dispel some of the despair that many feel as we see culture in the West slide into places that, though unfamiliar to many at present, were not unheard of in the past.
Greetings, Jack. I don’t advocate introducing complexity where it is not needed, in terms of explanation or description, nor do I advocate underestimating an issue to make it (deceptively) comprehensible; stated similarly as Einstein once asserted, and I paraphrase, make it as simple as possible. Granted, Socrates dealt with novel situations in his day, as we do today; differently today, however, is not technology as a tool, but the type of technological tools at our disposal that may have wider, more immediate, and existential consequences. I think we sometimes fool ourselves in thinking technology shields us from issues such as famine and disease, and so forth, and it does to some extent, but a few wrong moves and we could find we are just as close to the edge of life as many ancient civilizations once experienced.
Good point about technology.
Many smaller churches like and participate in the CP and the State convention activities because it is a good and efficient way for them to be connected. There is often a cultural affinity there.
Many larger churches have other options for ministry and programming and prefer to do those. Also, large urban churches often have a different cultural vibe from the programming that comes out of state offices. Those issues will have to be addressed in order for many larger churches to become enthusiastic about giving more money to state conventions. In many cases, changes at the state convention level would not even help because the larger churches may not be willing to abandon their own programming because it is such a part of that congregation.
William:
The action of the GA convention in not sharing that information with you is awful. If I lived in GA and went to a Baptist church there, the GA convention response to you would make me not want to give one dime to that convention.
I was not going to say anything about “sources of information” but since it has come up I’ll reveal my “patented trade secrets”.
I have never asked any state convention or the exec committee for any info. I don’t know what their response might be. One hypothetical thing I would ask for is an EXCEL spreadsheet with 46,125 entries. Each line in the spreadsheet would have name of church, state, total offering that the church receives from members, CP gifts, LMCO, AA, number of members, average number attending all worship services on Sunday, etc. I doubt if I asked the exec committee — or maybe Lifeway’s statistics bureau (Ed Stetzer?) — they would give this to me.
However, with GREAT DIFFICULTY it is possible, to reconstruct this from the websites of each state convention. I have so far done this only for Oklahoma. As far as I know, all states, or at least most of them, put up their “annuals” as scanned documents on their websites. In many cases these are PDFs. These PDFs are “read only” and you can’t copy and paste them to a document, such as Microsoft Word, Excel, or anything else.
However, it is possible to use a commercial program called NITRO to extract data tables from plain vanilla text files off the internet. NITRO is a very expensive program and very few people like us would have it. I bought a license for it one time for a year last year because I was playing around with designing digital signal processing stuff for my ham radio and I needed some coefficients for implementing some bandpass filters. I am a crazy guy who actually implements my own firmware, written in C#, to demodulate PSK31 and RTTY. Also, I have to do stuff such as Fast Fourier Transform to change stuff from time domain to frequency domain to build a waterfall spectral display.
Since I had NITRO laying around, I used it to painstakingly “extract” the stuff for all 1700 churches in the BGCO right off the BGCO website. The stuff was listed in a separate table for each of the 40+ associations in Oklahoma. Even though the stuff looked the same visually on BGCO’s website the organizations of rows and columns for any given association was not the same as for some other associations. This is because some associations had null rows and/or null columns that had no effect of printing but changed the topology of the table. Also some entries used fixed point or floating point values which showed up the same when viewed on a web page put took different processing when using NITRO to import the stuff.
Bottom line, nothing in the SBC is secret if you work hard enough. But I doubt that any agency will give you the keys to the kingdom. BTW, there are various classes of licenses for NITRO. A typical one might run $1,000 per year.
So using Georgia as an example, it is probably possible, at least in principle to reverse engineer their database just by looking at their website. Worst case you would have to take the HTML being sent down to your browser and then parse it yourself. I have done this for specialized reasons when I was a software engineer in Silicon Valley but you have to be a pretty decent programmer in say C++ or Visual Basic to bring this off. Such an effort would probably measured in man-weeks for any given state convention’s data you were trying to extract.
Roger Simpson Oklahoma City
Roger:
Thanks for the explanation.
But I have a question.
Why would a non profit such as a Stste convention or the SBC not willingly share that data with churches that contribute or bona fide members if those churches.
I understand the need not to be run ragged by people answering requests etc.
But the attitude that I pick up from your responses is that they feel the information is secret or something.
Louis:
Today for the first time, [October 6] I have enquired to an agency asking for a copy of their database for the Annual Church Profile. My previous comments should not be interpreted as saying that any of my requests were denied because I didn’t make any requests.
Today I called Lifeway. I asked the Associate Director in Ed Stetzer’s statistical area if he would send me a copy, possibly purged of any church identifiable information, of the ACP database. It could be “blind” data that only contains the “CP giving amount”, “Total Offerings Received” for any given church, and the “church’s state”. I told them I would sign a non-disclosure agreement, if necessary, should they just give me the whole data file with church identifiable fields.
It should be noted that at least for some states this info is “public” because it is up on the state’s website. However, it is not a trivial task to obtain the data in a usable form from the state websites. At least that is true of the states I have looked at so far, which do in fact have the ACP’s up there, which is SC and OK.
Right now I have OK and SC ACP’s in hand in a format which is going to be usable for my analysis.
I am working on GA, AL, and MS and so far I don’t see any ACP info on the state convention website for these states. However, I have not yet drilled down enough to totally eliminate the possibility that the data is hiding somewhere on these state’s websites.
The best method I have found so far is to use a utility from Abobe which allows you to extract a .xlsx [Excel] file from a PDF. Then you can message the .xlsx to strip off boilerplate so you only have a nice tabular layout left.
You still have to have an intelligent program to message the EXCEL file to strip off some column headings, toss out unused columns, convert numerical and character info into a common format, etc. I am using a homebrew C# program to do this.
I found out that there is support in .NET for someone writing in the Visual Studio [C# or Visual Basic] to read an .xlsx file and put all the cells in rows and columns in a two dimensional array of strings. This would then give you something like:
string ACP_String[1800 , 3] for OKLA
string ACP_String[ 46000, 3] for whole SBC
with — for example — six numerical (or character values) of info for each of the about 1800 churches in Oklahoma.
ACP_String[n, 1] = TotalOfferingsReceivedByThisChurch
ACP_String[n, 2] = CPGiftsToStateSentByThisChurch
ACP_String[n, 3] = “OK” {church is in Oklahoma; I need this to apply proper split}
The goal is to be able to say: If every church applied the “Frank Page algorithm” then there would be $x more received in CP funds in Nashville from the states which would result in $.504x dollars showing up in Richmond. Then the IMB could send “y” more missionaries and/or the IMB would be able to scrap plans where missionaries have to pay all of some of their own way and/or solicit support from friends / churches to pay some or all of their own way.
I could easily run various “what if” scenarios such as various different state splits, various CP allocation algorithms used by Nashville, etc. Also I can do sensitivity analysis to see where the most bang for the buck is when various size churches ramp up CP giving.
I’m thinking a result that might fall out from my real-world situation will be that if a “few” churches [maybe about 2000 – 5000] that are “large”, and also have low percentage giving right now to the CP, would ramp up their CP % percentage then this would have a huge effect on the CP. But I have to test out this model with real-world data for various possible CP percentage augmentation scenarios. It would have to be a two dimensional sensitivity analysis where the total CP flowing to Nashville would be a function both the exact criterion used to identify “large churches not sending much to CP right now” vs. the delta in CP giving between the current percentage and some augmented percentage.
I propose to do my data base query stuff in C# using LINQ as the data base engine. This is more of a nerdy approach than using EXCEL for the final analysis but it will allow me to do stuff
— such as multivariate analysis — that I have no clue on how to do in EXCEL.
It should be noted that not all states report stuff that is exactly “apples” to “apples” regarding CP giving, etc. But it is close enough for my purposes.
You are so far beyond me on this I don’t even know how to ask questions but I am very interested in establishing contact with you regarding SBc data and would appreciate your emailing me at sbcplodder@gmail
Thanks
Roger:
Wow!
Keep working.
I do not in any way begrudge an agency for not compiling and crunching numbers the way you have.
But I do find it unacceptable that agencies would have data they would not share.
Louis:
Could I enlist you to help me to get ACP data? I think you are in Tennessee. I have not yet looked into the situation of obtaining the TN ACP data. It could be as simple as just picking it up off the internet. Or it could be as hard as having to do heavy duty negotiation with the TN state convention IT guys. I don’t know.
My Email is rksimpson1@cox.net