The Cooperative Program Is More than a Money Trail

The Cooperative Program is a way of polity. In other words, it is a ethos of cooperative work among Southern Baptists that just happens to work best with a certain financial pathway.

It is Cooperative Planning. The Cooperative Program ideal means that none of us get precisely the budget we might plan all by ourselves. Rather, we join forces with sister churches who are around us and plan a consensus strategy and a consensus budget for the work we are going to do with one another.

This kind of vision is difficult for some of our Southern Baptist churches to embrace. I think one reason is because it demands a high level of respect for sister churches, and sometimes we tend to get so wrapped up in our own little silos that we lose sight of intercongregational fellowship and partnership in the gospel. This is made more difficult when Southern Baptist bodies grow very diverse doctrinally, methodologically, doxologically, and otherwise. We can work together through a great deal of diversity, but there has to be some unifying basis around which we gather and work. Our confession of faith is probably the best provision for that need.

Working in this way requires that our mutual respect for sister churches should facilitate a quest for a common plan. We have to be ready to submit our personal visions, plans, and objectives to the communal negotiations of the family of churches and work toward some consensus plan that lies within the realm of the possible outcomes.

To disagree with the budget of one's state convention and then summarily pull out of the Cooperative Program without having at least attempted to step up to the mike and influence the common plan toward some superior alternative is to betray this communal, cooperative planning mindset. It is a go-it-alone approach that views missions not as our common business but as our individual pursuits.

It is Cooperative Fundraising. The entities that benefit from the Cooperative Program have historically agreed to forego direct solicitation of the churches for anything other than the Cooperative Program. There have been, of course, exceptions (like the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering), but the general agreement is that Southern Baptist entities cooperate with one another in raising money toward the common good through the Cooperative Program.

Five years ago I tried to describe the lay of the land before we had the Cooperative Program in a post entitled "The Year 25 BCP." When our entities were counting on direct funding from individual churches rather than upon the common stream of the Cooperative Program, increasing amounts of money were lost to the professional fundraisers.

Cooperative fundraising benefits us all because the moneychangers all take their cuts and we therefore benefit from the relative lack of them in our system. Right now those churches who just give large sums of money directly to the IMB are getting illegitimate benefits. They know about the IMB because of CP-funded promotional work, but they give around that stream. When the Cooperative Program dies, the funding for the fundraising will have to come out of those funds being raised. As the competitive environment becomes more threatening, entities will lose higher and higher percentages of their received gifts to cover fundraising overhead.

It is Cooperative Giving. We had one transitional year when our church delved into a little bit of direct giving to entities. We were, at that time, still in the Baptist General Convention of Texas. When the BGCT capped the amount of CP dollars that could go to Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, making sure that our church's CP dollars could not flow through to SWBTS, we started to give some amount of money directly to SWBTS in order to offset that spiteful act.

I quickly discovered that a lot of perks and benefits come from direct giving. We had never been recognized before, but suddenly the same level of contribution, given directly to the institution, qualified us for the President's Club. I got invited to soirees. Our church's name was printed on fancy programs.

But as soon we were able to do so, we returned to a thoroughly Cooperative-Program-focused giving strategy. Our church didn't get the same level of recognition, but we weren't in it for the recognition to begin with. We just wanted to be found faithful to do our part in giving to support our common Great Commission work. We give not only as an obligation to our Lord in fulfilling the Great Commission, but also as an obligation to our sister churches, that we should not leave others on the hook for more than their fair share of the burden of what we have planned together.

It is Cooperative Work. The Cooperative Program is built around the idea that it takes a multi-homed approach to accomplish the work of the Great Commission. It's wonderful that we have an International Mission Board. Now, who's going to train the missionaries? We're going to need seminaries for that, and they're going to have to produce students who aren't up to their eyeballs in educational debt. By the way, where will the seminaries find those students? They're going to be the students who surrendered to missions at Falls Creek and at other Baptist encampments maintained mostly by state conventions and operated either by them or by folks like our friends at Lifeway. How did they get there? They fell under the influence of pastors or youth pastors or other people at a local Southern Baptist church, which was probably planted once upon a time by a state convention and whose leadership probably attended a seminary. That local church, by the way, will provide the funding for every link in the chain.

The Cooperative Program is simply what you get when you fully realize that none of these parts will thrive without the others. We work cooperatively because we cannot succeed otherwise.

Conclusion

Do you see why I think it is so important that the leaders casting the vision for our convention should be proven supporters of the Cooperative Program? It is more than just a question of accounting. It is more than just dumpster-diving through ACP records to ferret out who gave what when.

Promoting leaders who have a passion for a Cooperative-Program-centered vision for our future means promoting leaders who buy into a whole philosophy of cooperation. It will affect the way that they raise funds. It will affect the way that they view their relationships with one another and with the state conventions and local associations and churches. It will affect the way that they envision the interface between the cogs of their work and all else that happens in Southern Baptist life.

Having this CP-vision is therefore among the most important qualifications for a person who would serve in a role like the IMB Presidency. At least I think so. Whatever bold vision a man might have for the future of the IMB, the power to achieve it will be found only—mark my words—only in his ability to bring Southern Baptist mules (a deliberately chosen metaphor!) together and yoke them into the same harnesses and get them coordinated in the traces. The only approach that has ever accomplished this objective well has been the approach that we call the Cooperative Program.

The best bet for a leader who will successfully accomplish that approach is the man who has already demonstrated an appreciation for it. May the Lord give us that man.

Belonging and Giving

The Southern Baptist Convention faces few questions more important than that of cooperative giving. Not that I'm trying to categorize it as a crisis, the lugubrious tone of some of our prophets and sons of prophets notwithstanding. In the boomiest of boom years, there are still few questions more important for our convention than that of cooperative giving. The voluntary cooperative giving of our churches makes the ministries of the SBC happen. We never take our eyes entirely off of that ball.

Nevertheless, the question does become more acute when we come to it with a spirit of fear. Most of the writing and discussion on the subject of the Cooperative Program in the past decade has revealed that perspective in the author and has engendered it in the average reader. The statistics reveal that we have passed what was the zenith (so far) of Cooperative Program giving as a percentage of church budgets, although we are nowhere near the nadir (which would approach 0% for the first half of our existence). Pressed by frequent comparisons of annualized CP numbers and gloomy forecasts, as well as by the specter of unmet needs and unsent missionaries, among those who care about the Cooperative Program there looms a growing sense of Somebody Has To Do Something.

The connection may not be immediately obvious between this context and Dr. John Mark Yeats's motion in Houston this past summer that Southern Baptists review the membership requirements established in Article III of our constitution (see a mention of this motion buried in this article). Dr. Yeats is a friend and I was immediately interested in his motion simply because he offered it and I know how astute he is regarding the operations of our convention. In fact, I confess that he and I discussed this motion several weeks before he offered it. He is absolutely correct that we have a messenger allocation formula that has not been indexed for inflation in more than a century (although other adjustments have been made to that article). The only thing the status quo has going for it is that it is the status quo. It is time to revise this formula.

I was all the more interested in his motion because we faced the same questions in the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention as we initiated the process of reviewing our own governing documents. For more than a year I've sat in committee meetings and participated in discussion from every imaginable perspective on questions related to membership and giving in Southern Baptist associational bodies. I'd like to offer some thoughts that arise out of that experience—convictions about the relationship between belonging and giving among Baptist churches. This motion provides the context in which these thoughts are important for Southern Baptists to consider.

I have observed that when we are concerned about declines in cooperative giving we almost instinctively consider imposing what are the equivalent of membership dues upon our churches. In other words, there is a way of approaching Baptist cooperation by which people give in order to belong. The rationale goes like this: "We have churches who are not doing their fair share. Why should we recognize them as peers alongside those churches who sacrifice in order to carry forward our work? Let's raise the bar! Only those churches who are contributing significantly to the work through their gifts will we consider to be member churches with us."

The present state of our constitution reveals both that we have tried this style of organization and that we have found it to be unprofitable. The constitution reveals that we have tried this style of organization because Article III presently awards additional convention messengers in proportion to contributions. Pay to play. But the nature of this requirement reveals that we were halfhearted from the very beginning concerning this approach. After all, any church can earn a single messenger simply by contributing a penny, as I understand our documents. Also, parallel to the "money track" of earning messengers is the "member track" by which churches can earn messengers simply by having large membership rolls without regard for their cooperative giving. Finally, the ten-messenger cap (no church can have more than ten messengers) also reveals our initial reticence about thoroughgoing pay-to-play Baptist associationalism—we weren't comfortable with the idea that our largest givers would be able to dominate the annual meeting with messengers. This system has served us through many valleys (the Great Depression) and peaks (the 1950s). It even served us well before we had anything resembling the Cooperative Program. But, as Dr. Yeats so accurately brought to our attention, although we have not voted to change this system, it has changed by itself. The fact of monetary inflation has changed it. A gift of $250 is not today what it was a century ago. Down through the years, although we have amended this article multiple times, we have never increased the amount of the gift nor set up automatic indexes for inflation. I submit that this is the case because we have not seen value in this pay-to-play approach, otherwise, we would have given attention to maintaining it.

To be fair, we all know a great many organizations that thrive under the pay-to-play system. For example, some of my readers will be members in a country club. If that's you, then you (or somebody) is paying membership dues for you to belong. Others of you are members of the Evangelical Theological Society. Yet others belong to Ducks Unlimited. Giving in order to belong is certainly not an approach doomed to universal failure.

And yet, organizations that thrive by requiring people to give in order to belong are generally those organizations that offer defined benefits to those members who will pay their dues. The country club offers you golf and the use of their facilities. ETS members get a subscription to JETS. Join Ducks Unlimited today and you'll receive a DU-branded fleece pullover, as well as a magazine subscription and various other member benefits. The Southern Baptist Convention has never been this sort of organization. We exist not to give benefits to member churches but to provide a framework through which they can give without getting anything in return. That's bad business…and great Christianity.

And yet it is easy for those who love the Southern Baptist Convention and who want to see an increase in cooperative giving to be deceived on this very point. It is easy for us to conclude (wrongly) that the SBC does indeed have something of value with which we can reward the good churches who give the most. Three "perks" come to the forefront in these discussions:

1. We award messengers. As we have already seen, the Southern Baptist Convention awards proportional representation in our annual meeting according to (among other things) gifts made by affiliated churches to convention causes. This is the "perk" of convention membership. It is easy enough, as parliamentary actions go, to ramp up this scheme of proportionality by "charging" more and more to churches before we will award them messenger representation.

   But we ought to ask a question: How many of our member churches actually place much monetary value upon the number of messengers allotted to them? Not many, I think. How many churches actually send all of the messengers to which they are already entitled? Of those who attend, how many of them place a high priority upon being on the floor for the actual votes that we take (apart from those few items which attract some controversial attention)? Considering the fact that a person can attend the meeting as a visitor and can do everything a messenger can do, other than make motions and vote, how likely is any church to follow the (il)logical train of thought: "It's about to cost more to have our ten-messenger allotment to the SBC Annual Meeting: We've got to start giving more!!!"

   I wouldn't bet the farm on it.

2. We place individuals in positions of responsibility (convention officers, committee members, entity trustees, etc.). Beginning in 2006 Southern Baptists began to emphasize the idea that elected officers and appointees should belong to churches who are giving higher percentages of their undesignated gifts through the Cooperative Program. This is the "perk" of convention leadership.

   Southern Baptist messengers have proven that they will elect whom they wish to elect. Statistics do not appear to play that important of a role in our elections. Any particular year may serve as an exception to that rule, but in my opinion SBC elections are becoming more difficult to predict by ANY metric. I do not observe that CP giving or any other measurable item is beginning to correlate more closely with election to convention office.

   With regard to our appointees as well as our officers, the rationale seems to be (and OUGHT to be, in my opinion) simply that we entrust with the leadership jobs of the convention's business those people whom we believe to be best fitted to discharge them with excellence. This makes sense—as churches we have the greatest confidence about the disposition of our gifts when we have confidence in the abilities of those who are putting them to use.

   I'm not saying that faithfulness to give is unimportant to Southern Baptists when we make these decisions. Rather, I'm simply saying that we have refused to make it the only important factor that we consider when we choose our leadership.

   I do not think it is likely that many churches would make their decisions about how to give based upon this "perk." First, the preponderance of churches in our convention never have anyone in their membership who ever receives any appointment or election to any position of convention leadership. This "perk" simply is not distributed widely enough to motivate many churches. This is particularly true for most of our smaller churches. Our largest churches tend to be enterprises unto themselves. If they want outlets for leadership for their members, they have lots of options. This might be more important to those churches in the middle, but only to those churches in the middle that are meaningfully engaged in the governance of the convention. A lot of those churches are already giving at higher levels.

3. We hire and educate individuals as a part of the Southern Baptist Convention's family of entities. This is the "perk" of convention employment (or enrollment). Although not all of the gainful employment to be found under the auspices of the SBC and related entities requires membership in a Southern Baptist church, a good bit of it does. If a church successfully becomes an affiliated church, the members of that church become eligible to work for a few employers. In most cities and towns, this factor is irrelevant. In a few key locales, this "perk" is quite important. Also, when a church affiliates with the SBC its members can obtain an education at SBC seminaries at a deep discount.

   It is important to note that this "perk" does not cost the Cooperative Program a penny. That is, entities and seminaries receive the same CP allocations without regard to how many of their employees or students are members of Southern Baptist churches. Although the amount of money going to any particular SBC seminary changes based upon FTEs, this merely affects the way that our six seminaries divvy up a static pie—the aggregate amount of money going to seminary education is fixed by the budget, not by enrollments. The other SBC entities likewise receive their allocations from the CP budget without regard to the details of their workforces. This perk makes our seminaries a little poorer, but that's about the extent of its impact upon convention operations.

   A few churches might be highly motivated by this last "perk." If large portions of your church staff are receiving discounted seminary education by virtue of your church's membership in the SBC, then the church staff might push for that church to meet any heightened requirements for affiliation. Most churches in the convention, however, do not participate in this "perk" at all. Most don't have any members who work for the convention, and as students go, locally funded scholarships would be much cheaper for a church than would high "membership dues" for convention affiliation.

So, I conclude that the Southern Baptist Convention has little to nothing to offer the average Southern Baptist congregation in the way of a "perk" to generate increased cooperative giving. This is why our periodic flirtations with the concept of making churches give in order to belong have been ill-fated, not to consider the fact that they tend to inflame the negative passions of a body of autonomous and independent churches.

An Alternative

Here's what works better: Southern Baptists need to recognize that rather than belonging because we give, we give because we belong. If the Southern Baptist Convention wishes to see increased giving and participation on the part of affiliated churches, it ought to seek to enhance the sense of belonging among SBC churches. Here's why this works:

First, this is how the Christian life works. This is the gospel, right? I give (when I'm writing out my tithe check) not in order to belong to Jesus but BECAUSE I belong to Jesus. Of course, the gift of salvation is valuable enough to command a hefty sum. It is the pearl of great price! But I do not purchase it; I receive it as a gift. Out of my gratitude and my sense of belonging to Jesus I am motivated to give.

Second, this is how our local churches work. I remember how shocked I was as a seminary student to discover that at least some Jewish synagogues assess membership fees upon their member families. What a foreign concept to a Southern Baptist! Voluntarism is the model in our churches, and our members give to our local churches because they belong there. We all know (and bemoan) that a great many of our members give a pittance (or even nothing at all!), but we do not assess membership dues in our churches. Why? Because in a local Southern Baptist church you do not give in order to belong, you give BECAUSE you belong. This is a matter of conviction for us, not just a matter of convenience.

Third, our history has demonstrated that this has been the most successful strategy for promoting cooperative giving. The idea of requiring contributions to secure membership is a feature of the society method rather than the convention method of Baptist cooperation. Beyond the fact that Southern Baptists are distinctively committed to the convention method rather than the society method, one must take note of the fact that the convention method has historically been a revenue juggernaut compared to those Baptist entities eking out an existence by means of the society method.

In our relationships with Jesus, with our local churches, and even with our families, we give because we belong, not the other way around. The best way to get Southern Baptist churches to give more to our cooperative work is to give them a greater sense of belonging together in this work.

How to Cultivate Belonging

"OK, Barber, that's all well and good, but tell us how, exactly, the Southern Baptist Convention is going to make local churches feel a greater sense of belonging?" I'm so glad you asked!

My enthusiasm comes not because I don't see the challenges before us. Although our giving levels have been worse at some moments in our history, I don't think that our sense of belonging has ever been weaker. I'd better hasten to clarify what I mean: We've got great churches, and we get along better than people like to acknowledge in giving us credit for it. I'm not trying to say that we do not belong together or that we can't move forward together. I'm just drawing a conclusion from several measurable phenomena:

1. An increasing number of our churches are hiding the fact that they are affiliated with us.
2. The number of conclusions that you can safely draw about a church when I tell you that it is a Southern Baptist church is decreasing. One does not have to believe that diversity is bad to understand that diversity does not build a sense of belonging. Something else has to exist alongside diversity in order to build a sense of belonging among diverse churches. The more diverse the churches are, the more robust that something else has to be.
3. Recent decades have witnessed the growth of sub-affiliations and dual-affiliations among SBC churches.
4. Even among those churches that have long, historic relationships with the other churches of the SBC, active participation in those relationships has been declining. That is, the number of people interacting with sister churches at associational meetings, state convention meetings, and national SBC meetings is certainly not growing (and I'm including in this not only the official annual meetings but also the various conferences, camps, and other events that characterize our fellowship).

All of these phenomenon, unless they are offset by items that have somehow escaped my notice, bespeak an erosion of the sense of belonging that ought to characterize a church's membership in the SBC. It is no surprise to me that cooperative giving would not experience stratospheric increases in such an environment. I am aware of the challenges.

Here's Dr. Barber's prescription for increasing that sense of belonging:

First, I recommend that we embrace formally the confessional nature of our convention. Southern Baptist churches have associated with one another organically wherever three factors have overlapped: (1) doctrinal similarity, (2) geographical proximity, and (3) strategic commonality. In this Internet age, geographical proximity is becoming less important, but the cultural, linguistic, and governmental factors that often accompany geographical proximity keep it from going away entirely. Because of the factors that brought about the Conservative Resurgence, many Southern Baptist bodies have explicitly shied away from emphasizing doctrinal similarity as a basis for association. The idea that "doctrine divides" leads panicky denominational employees to try to de-emphasize doctrine in order to keep the base together. This kind of thinking is a poison pill.

After all, look at all of the new sub-affiliations (the 3:16 conference, Founders, IX Marks, etc.) and competing affiliations (Acts 29, Willow Creek, etc.). Most of them emphasize a specific doctrinal viewpoint even stricter than our Baptist Faith & Message. Several of them even adopt some methodological stackpole. Such "divisiveness" has not sapped their strength; it has made them grow!

It is not enough to give churches no reason to leave; we have to give them a reason to belong. That reason cannot be atheological if it will succeed. Churches are, at their essence, theological entities (or else they are not churches). For this reason, the SBC ought to embrace the confessional nature of our convention and do so formally.

Informally, we already are a confessional fellowship of churches. The Baptist Faith & Message already defines the work of our entities and defines the parameters by which churches participate in the convention, even though it does not yet define the parameters by which churches belong to the convention. Informally, a church has to be in agreement with the BF&M in order to participate robustly in convention work.

The time has come to take that next step and to state formally what we practice informally. My state convention, the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention, already exists as a confessional fellowship of churches. Although the Baptist Faith & Message need not be the formal statement of faith of a member church, all affiliated churches of the SBTC must, as a condition of affiliation, affirm the BF&M. This has been the approach of the SBTC since its inception, and the convention has grown both in population and in enthusiasm.

To accomplish this in the Southern Baptist Convention may require that we adopt a tiered approach to our statement of faith, identifying some subset of doctrinal ideas in the BF&M that are mandatory upon affiliated churches. After all, the BF&M was not drafted with this particular purpose in mind, and it may not perfectly articulate the items that constitute the bond of belonging among SBC churches. Of course, our periodic amendments of the BF&M could continue to adapt the document for suitable use as our statement of affiliation parameters, but the more we try to do with the BF&M (i.e., we use it as our terms of employment for seminary professors, rules of affiliation for member churches, apologetic document for interdenominational dialogue and for evangelism, etc.), the more difficult we may find that it is to craft a single document that serves all of those purposes equally well.

I'm comfortable with the BF&M exactly as it stands, but I'd prefer a confessional fellowship along the lines of some similar-but-not-identical faith statement than a continued dichotomy between our de facto and de jure parameters for convention affiliation. Accomplishing this would be hard work. The stakes would be high. Done poorly, it could cause trouble. Done well, it could be a B-12 shot in the Southern Baptist arm.

Second, we need to look to the activity of our churches to learn how to improve what we do with our convention.

• People who don't yet feel a sense of belonging to our local churches but who participate in some of our activities and consume some of our services are called "prospects" at the local church level, not "freeloaders." Our approach to them is generally not to chastise them for not giving enough but to make to them the positive case for belonging. Where belonging takes root, giving will blossom.
• In our local churches we have learned how to implement a warm welcome for people on the way in. Why don't we do that at the level of the Southern Baptist Convention? Where are the first-time attendee badges for messengers to the SBC? Why not host a meeting for them at the beginning of the annual meeting at which they get to meet all of our entity heads and hear about convention ministries? When was the last time you were given the opportunity to call a newly affiliated pastor and welcome him to the convention in the way that one of our church's members might contact a new member or a first-time visitor and welcome them? What are we really doing to cultivate a sense of belonging in those who are on the way into the SBC?
• Our local churches know that the cultivation of belonging is a process, not a one-time event. The process takes more or less time for different people, depending upon their personalities and their past experiences. Consider, for example, the ethnic diversity that the Southern Baptist Convention has been cultivating in the makeup of its member churches. We have been able to see the new affiliation of larger numbers of non-anglo SBC churches than at any previous point in our history. But just because those churches have affiliated does not mean that they already feel a full sense of belonging to the convention. Draconian pay-to-play strategies designed with anglo churches in mind (to elicit stronger cooperative giving from them) might have disastrous unintended consequences among those churches, anglo or otherwise, who are on the way into the convention.

Third, we cannot be afraid of losing some churches along the way. We do not need to go on any sort of gleeful purge, but we need to acknowledge the fact that some of the churches who once belonged within the SBC no longer belong there. For example, alongside Dr. Yeats's motion in the article that I linked above you'll find a motion to disfellowship a church in Waco, TX. That church responded to the motion by stating that they long ago considered themselves to have departed the SBC. We know that they no longer belong here. They know that they no longer belong here.

It is an axiom of human relationships: Where everyone belongs, nobody does. Relationships are defined both by inclusion and exclusion. Your relationship with your spouse is both inclusive and exclusive. Your relationship with your local church is both inclusive and exclusive. Both inclusion and exclusion define the nature of the relationship. Skittishness about exclusivity will kill the convention.

Kowtowing to the most exclusive voices in the convention would likewise destroy it, of course. A sensible approach focused upon reasonable doctrinal similarity, geographical proximity, and strategic commonality is the winning move.

Fourth, we certainly do not need to reduce further the opportunities for involvement in the convention. The "Covenant for a New Century" in the 1990s eliminated and consolidated entities, reducing the number of boards and commissions on which Southern Baptists could participate. Doing things like consolidating our entities further (combining our mission boards, for example), whatever else they might accomplish, would result in reduced opportunity for involving individual Southern Baptists. Involvement fosters a sense of belonging. We ought not to dole out positions of responsibility to those who have given no indication of a sense of belonging and commitment to the convention, but we also ought to acknowledge the potential of involvement in convention ministries to deepen and solidify the sense of belonging that participants bring into the experience.

Fifth, we need always to make the phenomenon of belonging in the SBC (that is, the degree to which a person values belonging to the convention and is publicly associated with belonging to the convention family) one factor that we consider when we define success and promote heroes. If the platform at our meetings, the bookshelves at our stores, and the articles in our newsfeeds are dominated by people who do not belong among us, whatever else they communicate verbally, we are nonverbally communicating that belonging does not matter. I'm not advocating isolationism—I'm not calling for this to be the only factor or even the most important factor. But if denominational meetings and publications do not value belonging and commitment to the SBC family, who will?

Conclusion

Rather than writing all of the recommendations that I have just written, I might simply have spouted off this little axiom and left well-enough alone: The best way to cultivate a sense of belonging is to cultivate a reality of belonging. Belonging is more a state of affairs than a sentiment. The sentiment ("I feel like I belong") and the state of affairs ("I really do belong here") can and do get out of sync sometimes, but the mismatch will not long endure. It is in doubling-down on the three elements of our identity as Southern Baptists (doctrinal, geographical, missiological) that we rediscover the reality of why we belong together. Feelings will follow facts, and giving will follow belonging.

For this reason, we in the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention have abandoned proportional representation and membership dues. Affiliated churches receive ten messengers, no matter what size they are or how much they give. In place of carrot-and-stick we have a confessional fellowship that cultivates a sense of belonging. This is not only the way forward for Southern Baptists in Texas; it is the way forward for Southern Baptists everywhere, I believe.

Is Your Money Where Your Mouth Is?

Baptist Press is reporting that that Florida Baptist Convention faces a liquidity crisis in the future because of its commitment to forward 50% of the Cooperative Program funding that it receives from churches to the Executive Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention to fund missions on a national and international scope. Half of the money, of course, the FBC would retain to fund missions within the state of Florida.

I'm a big fan of this kind of reallocation. Yes, there are gospel needs within our states. Yes, we need money in places like Florida in order to address those needs. But no, it is not the right priority to take more than half (or, in the case of some state conventions, as much as 80%!) of Cooperative Program money for ministries within our states. I'm thankful that states like Florida have begun the process of reallocating their budgets.

The story goes on to reveal a rift between two philosophies of how to accomplish this reallocation without bankrupting the convention. One approach would address the problem primarily by cutting expenses in other areas. I think that's a good approach, for a number of reasons. Another approach would slow the progress toward 50% to avoid financial stress on the convention.

Here's what needs to happen. Every pastor or church in Florida who has ever complained about bloat or inefficiency at the Florida Baptist Convention needs to step up right now with increased CP giving as they see the Florida Baptist Convention take bold steps to forward more funding to the field. As the FBC acts with a greater sacrificial commitment to see the gospel carried around the world, if the member churches of that convention continue (or worsen!) the current sorry state of CP giving among SBC churches, they simply reveal that all of the excuses bandied about are just that—excuses designed to cover up the real motivation of self-absorbed greed that I fear underlies most of our declining cooperative financial estate in these days.

A Proposed Improvement to the Cooperative Program

The Executive Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention should develop an online "bill-pay" application and provide it for free to Southern Baptist Churches. It should interface with the major church management software packages. It should enable churches to send CP dollars with a single click. The application should, in cooperation with the state conventions, know the respective CP budget in effect for each church. When the church clicks the button to authorize the payment, the funds should transfer immediately to their final destinations (e.g., IMB, NAMB, seminaries, state Baptist university, etc.).

Ideally, the convention should provide for the churches' discretionary use an additional, compatible piece of software, an application that would track contributions for the local congregation. This software should give churches the option, if they choose to utilize it, to forward CP gifts automatically when each batch of contributions is posted.

Thus, if I give $1000 to FBC Farmersville on Sunday, by Tuesday the funds are already in Richmond, Alpharetta, Fort Worth, Grapevine, etc.

The interest earnings gained by having the funds available on a weekly basis to our cooperative enterprises would be more than enough to fund the development and hosting costs to the convention. Furthermore, harried volunteer Treasurers and Finance Committees in smaller SBC churches would appreciate something from the SBC to make their lives easier.

The Gospel of Geography

What percentage of money given to Southern Baptist churches should ideally find its way offshore to international missions projects? Everybody in ministry—everybody—has an opinion on this question. Furthermore, not one participant in the conversation is entirely free from self-interest in the matter. The topic is ripe for demagoguery, but I think it also can be discussed reasonably, resulting in a greater effectiveness for Christ and the Great Commission.

2.5% For All of the World?

Great hand-wringing has occurred of late of the overall percentage of Southern Baptist funds that leave the shores of the Southern Baptist Convention. We hear that 2.75% of Southern Baptist funds go offshore. That figure, the implication asserts, is terribly low. Or is it?

What if we could convince every Southern Baptist Church to give 10% through the Cooperative Program? For most of my lifetime I've heard that number given as the target percentage desired by Southern Baptists for our local churches to consider. Certainly, considering what an improvement it would be over recent trends, a 10% CP gift from every SBC church would cause traffic in Nashville to grind to a halt for the obstruction posed by denominational employees cartwheeling in the streets.

So, 10% from the churches would be a considerable increase and a good goal.

What if we could convince every state convention in the SBC to forward 50% of their CP receipts to national and international causes?

I believe that the originators of the Cooperative Program had a divinely inspired idea when they suggested a 50/50 division between CP funds retained within a state convention and CP funds spent on national and international causes. Although there are details to be accounted in that division such as the costs of promoting the Cooperative Program, from its inception the Cooperative Program featured the general idea that state conventions and the national SBC should share CP dollars equally.

As a parenthetical item of interest, I note that the 50/50 calculation and the recognition of CP gifts from individual churches were never intended to include designated gifts. From time to time a fallacious view of the CP—that designated gifts to particular elements of the SBC system should count as CP giving—has entered Southern Baptist discussions about the CP. Southern Baptists are indebted to Augie Boto for his research at the Executive Committee uncovering the source of that fallacy in an erroneous entry in the Encyclopedia of Southern Baptists, corrected in later editions, that misstated which gifts rightfully qualify as CP gifts.

So, with regard to the budgets of our various state conventions, I have been, am, and foresee continuing to be an advocate of the 50/50 split. A friend recently planted in my thinking a wonderful realization: It is the 50/50 division of money that recognizes state and national conventions as equal partners and denigrates neither ministry. If every state convention would forward 50% of CP receipts, the amount of money going overseas would greatly increase and we would witness expansive missions work through Southern Baptists around the world.

The budget of the Southern Baptist Convention already forwards a full 50% of CP receipts to the International Mission Board for use throughout the world.

So, where does that leave us? 10% x 50% x 50% = 2.5%, right?

Where Would Increases Come From?

The United States of America certainly doesn't contain 97.5% of the world's population, so shouldn't we want to get more of our money overseas? That's the argument that's been advanced, and it has merit. Selfishness as believers is a pernicious vice to be avoided.

However, I have heard friends employ this percentage mainly when they were speaking about restructuring the Southern Baptist Convention and various other entities in the SBC family. It seems to me that even if the diagnosis is correct, the proposed cure is a poor one. The low number in the formula above pertains to local churches, not to our convention entities.

What if we shut down everything in the SBC family except for international missions? No colleges and universities. No summer youth camps. No state church planting or evangelism emphases. No retirement homes. No seminaries. No NAMB. No ERLC. In other words, what if we scrapped entirely the Convention Method decision that we made 160 years ago and went with the Northern Baptist societal approach (which, after all, turned out so great for them)?

The resulting percentage going to international missions under that approach? Still a number well down into the single digits unless we were able to ramp up local church faithfulness to give to missions. The logjam keeping dollars in the United States rather than getting them out to "lostness" simply lies neither in Grapevine, Texas (for FBC Farmersville) nor in Nashville—it lies right under my nose.

Is 8% for the whole world really that much more moral or faithful or urgent or obedient or "missional" or Great Commission focused than is 3%? If the population of the United States of America consists of only 4.52% of the world population, then doesn't the logic presently being advanced require that your churches forward at least 95% of their income to other places and subsist on the remaining 5%?

No? Why not?

What's Good for the Goose

I suspect that we all could excel at giving other people's money to some worthy cause. It is in the giving of our own resources that we reveal our hearts. In this sense—that we should sacrifice on our own parts before calling upon others to sacrifice—it certainly is true that charity begins at home.

I've never heard an argument for state conventions forwarding less than 50% of their CP receipts to Nashville that I couldn't apply with equal vigor to an argument for my church sending less CP money to the state convention to begin with. Conversely, if I have good reasons for not giving through the CP every dime that people put in our offering plates here at FBC Farmersville, then I ought to resist the temptation to be disrespectful toward people who spend CP dollars here in the United States rather than sending it all overseas.

The Missiological Value of Money Kept

Once upon a time, no nation on the planet was more effectively engaged in the sending out of missionaries than was the United Kingdom. The vitality of Christianity in the United States over much of our history has been to some degree a result of factors unique to the USA but also to some significant degree an impact of the evangelical fervor exported to our nation from the British Isles. London was formerly the world center of Christianity. Today? Not so much.

When the churches at home decline, there is no percentage of giving that can sustain the missionary enterprise abroad. Now, at this time, we Southern Baptists are at precisely the wrong moment in our history to be abandoning the spread of the gospel at home, even if we do so in the seemingly altruistic desire to spread the gospel more effectively throughout the world. If we were in a strong position at home, that would be one thing. But we are not.

This is not an argument for the status quo. I'm all in favor of a discussion about how we can use our money more effectively both at home and abroad. By all means, let's have a vigorous discussion about whether CP money spent within the borders of the US is apportioned and applied effectively. If we can do more ministry with less money, then I'm all in favor of that.

Unfortunately, that's not the way that the percentage discussion has gone among Southern Baptists. Rather, as it has transpired on a popular level (not necessarily in line with the way that prominent figures have framed it), it has been laced with foolish unstated presumptions that money kept within our shores is a bad thing and money sent abroad is a good thing. Yet, but for ministry performed within our shores, there would be no money at all going abroad from the United States.

Occasionally in the summertime I'll put ice water into the large orange cylindrical cooler that we own. It's always easy to get a cool, refreshing drink while the cooler is full. Just push the spigot button and the vigorous stream of water will knock the cup out of your hand. But later, when the water level has dwindled to near the bottom of the cooler, it's not so easy to fill the cup. This percentage discussion, it seems to me, amounts to a suggestion that we ought to open the spigot wider or tilt the cooler more aggressively, when the real problem is that we need to refill the reservoir.

The beauty of the Convention Method—a beauty recognized by prior generations yet seemingly lost on many today who seem infatuated with Societal missions—is that it recognizes the value both of keeping churches healthy at home and of using that health and strength to spread the gospel abroad. We need to hear more about the value of the Convention Method these days.

What we desperately need is a spiritual awakening in the United States of America. What we desperately need is a reformation among our churches (which will contribute greatly to the spiritual awakening that we need). Apart from that, it makes little difference what percentage of our ever-dwindling resources we send overseas. With such an awakening, the impact of our sacrificial offerings on the spread of the gospel will be more than you could imagine.

Dollars or Percentages? Which Matters to the Great Commission?

First of all, the Southern Baptist Convention (i.e., the national denominational apparatus of employees) has no business whatsoever lecturing any church about what it gives or doesn't give to missions. We believe in and practice the association of autonomous local churches. It is not only the privilege, it is the responsibility of each local church to determine and submit to God's priorities for the spending of God's money. I am therefore opposed to efforts to set litmus tests for denominational service based upon arbitrary percentages given through the Cooperative Program. If an autonomous church gives $10 through the Cooperative Program, the Southern Baptist Convention's only suitable response to that is to say "Thank you."

All that just to say that there's no political football here. I've voted for and supported a lot of pastors as SBC officers and leaders whose leadership was exhibited in areas other than their CP giving.

However, as a thinking exercise and not a political exercise, I want to consider this idea that missionaries spend dollars and not percentages, and therefore that it doesn't much matter what percentage a church gives through the Cooperative Program so long as it gives a large number of dollars. On the surface, it sounds like a good idea, but I think that the present demographics of our convention's life suggest otherwise.

People cite a plateauing or even decline of Southern Baptists statistics. These figures seem to suggest a stasis in Southern Baptist life, but that is misleading. I suggest that Southern Baptists are on the move, and in a radical way. Americans are moving rapidly out of rural areas and into the cities. Commensurately, Southern Baptists are migrating out of small rural churches and into urban (generally larger) churches. Thus, although the average SBC church is small, the average SBC person goes to a much larger church than the "average church" figures would lead one to believe.

So, you've got people who grew up in a small SBC church that gave 15% through the Cooperative Program. They move off from that small country church and wind up at a metropolitan church that gives 2% through the Cooperative Program. Let's say, for a hypothetical point of comparison, that 20 such churches are entirely emptied out into a single metropolitan church.

That metropolitan church, although it only gives 2% through the Cooperative Program, is actually giving a much higher dollar amount (by an order of magnitude!) than were any of those smaller churches. But that's not a fair point of comparison. The dollars given to missions by the metropolitan church must be compared to the dollars given by the association of churches that has been eviscerated by the American move from the country into the city. At that point, it becomes clear that percentages ultimately add up to dollars (or else we'd all set them really high).

This blog post does not provide an answer to the question, but it does show how the answer can be calculated. The dollar amount most important to the calculation is the per capita dollar amount given through the Cooperative Program for any given church. I'm willing to suggest that some of our larger churches do pretty well in this regard. At the heart of the question, as it deals with changing circumstances in the SBC, is the simple matter of how many members of the large, urban church that gives a small percentage through the Cooperative Program are people who (hypothetically) could not have been reached by a church giving a higher percentage to missions. Certainly, if we are dealing with transfers rather than new converts, every person who moved from a smaller, higher-CP-percentage church to a larger, lower-CP-percentage church has contributed to a larger number of dollars going to missions from that particular church, but to an overall missions-giving decline.

It would be a mistake to throw stones in any direction over these statistics. Megachurch pastors aren't fueling these developments, nor are the pastors of smaller churches. This is a matter of societal demographic trends, and we're all carried along in some ways on the current of them. We would, however, do well to consider that our convention is in the midst of transition from a convention of many small churches to a convention of fewer larger churches (and historically, the church of 200 counts as a "larger church" in the SBC). If the model for larger churches is one of lower percentage giving through the CP, then the Southern Baptist Convention's cooperative enterprises will be forced to learn to get by on much less money.

Seminaries and the Cooperative Program

I just wanted to direct you to Dr. Thomas White's latest post. Since I've been blogging a good bit about the Cooperative Program lately, it seemed appropriate to direct you to it.

And one other thing: I've decided to re-open my CP series. Most of the previous material, plus a few extras, went into my article for the Southern Baptist Texan. I had thought that I would exhaust all that I had to say there, but then I remembered why I love blogging—none of the word-count limitations inherent to print media. I'm thrilled to have the opportunity to contribute to what I consider the greatest state paper in Southern Baptist life, but I think that there is enough material left on my cutting-room floor to stitch together another thing or two.

Good Thoughts All Around on the GCR

I'll summarize my thoughts under two heads:

Johnny Hunt Was Right On the Money

Pun intended.

In an interview published in Baptist Press yesterday, SBC President Johnny Hunt said something to the effect (as the headline characterized it) that the Cooperative Program is not the only door into the Southern Baptist Convention. I believe that he is correct and that his observations are worthy of our consideration.

Let me state first of all that I am not at all supportive of any changes to the Cooperative Program. Only undesignated gifts should count as a part of CP calculations. I'd prefer that everyone have good opportunity to give through a state convention rather than giving in any sort of a designated manner. That's the ideal.

Support of the Cooperative Program in an undesignated manner is valuable to the Southern Baptist Convention, and it ought to be recognized and encouraged in ways that designated gifts are not recognized and encouraged. Designated gifts can be recognized and encouraged in other ways (and already are), but we ought to put a premium as Southern Baptists upon encouraging Cooperative Program giving.

However…

CP giving is not the sine qua non of Southern Baptist identity. The messenger body of the SBTC wisely fended off a proposed resolution amendment that would have made the Cooperative Program THE distinctive feature of being a Southern Baptist. You sure can't make that declaration historically, since the SBC existed 80 years with no Cooperative Program at all! Ours is an ecclesiological identity and not a programmatic one.

Let me be clear: Southern Baptists who give entirely differently than the Cooperative Program ought to be welcomed, respected, and appreciated for their giving. They shouldn't be described as people who support the Cooperative Program, but they should be described as people who support whatever it is that they support. And if they are supporting the whole SBC package, just in a different way or by a different formula, then they should be described as people who support the SBC.

What's more, Southern Baptist elections and nominations should not be tied slavishly to any analysis of CP giving percentages. Is it a fiction to say that we pray about these matters and follow the leadership of the Holy Spirit? Would we tell the Holy Spirit that we will not follow His leadership unless He leads exclusively to people who have given through the Cooperative Program?

Cooperative Program giving should be A factor duly considered in these matters, but it should not be THE factor controlling the process. A few years ago the CP veered dangerously close to being emphasized too much in the process, IMHO.

I do not take the election of Johnny Hunt as the convention saying that the CP needs to be scrapped or that the SBC needs to be torn apart and put back together from top to bottom. But his election most certainly does represent the people of the SBC saying that they'll elect whomever they wish as the officers of this convention, and they will neither tie their own hands nor surrender their own ballots to anyone else's determination of who gives enough by this method or that method so as to be qualified to serve.

The sole qualification to serve as president of the SBC is that you have won the confidence of the people of the SBC for service in that role. The same principle ought to be applied to nominations all the way down the line. During the Conservative Resurgence, we rightly concluded that doctrinal integrity is more important than financial conformity to a single favored giving plan. We make a terrible mistake if we determine that faithfulness to support the Cooperative Program is unimportant, but neither is it all-important.

David Hankins Was Also Spot-On With His Remarks

In a separate article in Baptist Press yesterday, David Hankins presented four affirmations from state convention executives to the Task Force. I will present and interact with each of them:

First, Hankins opined that "the structure that has served Southern Baptists in the past is well suited for the future." I believe that Hankins is speaking with regard to our macro-structure. In other words, we have local churches, local associations of churches, state conventions, and then the Southern Baptist Convention. Hankins is stating that we ought to move into the future with all four of those tiers still intact. With that sentiment I agree.

Now, within those tiers, I do not know that we must stay with precisely the same structure. For example, I believe that some helpful refinements could bring us a brighter day for NAMB. I don't take Hankins to be saying that no minor changes in structure can be considered. If he were saying that, I would disagree. But with him I affirm that our basic structure is precisely the structure for our future as Southern Baptists.

Second, Hankins reminded the task force that "state conventions are necessary, crucial partners for a Great Commission Resurgence among Southern Baptists." Do I agree? Sort of.

I would re-word the whole matter thusly: "State conventions are as necessary and crucial as partners for a Great Commission Resurgence among Southern Baptists as is the Southern Baptist Convention." It goes too far to include the word "necessary" in an unqualified sense in either case, IMHO. The local churches are the only necessary component to a Great Commission Resurgence. I believe that both the state conventions and the SBC are helpful, maybe even crucial, partners in this endeavor, but they are not necessary.

Nevertheless, I believe that Hankins means by his statement exactly what I said when I reworded it. He's comparing the necessity and cruciality of the state conventions to the task force and the SBC that inaugurated it. In that context, the state conventions are just as important.

Third, Hankins stated that "the NAMB serves a vital role in a coordinated, comprehensive evangelism and church planting movement for Southern Baptists." I agree entirely, and have said as much on several occasions. Southern Baptists must not emerge from this reorganization without a board separately tasked for evangelism and church planting in North America.

Fourth, Hankins suggested that "the Cooperative Program should be the vehicle of choice for funding Southern Baptist initiatives related to a Great Commission Resurgence." Again, I agree entirely, and have been busily writing along those same lines myself.

Conclusion

It just goes to show that there are good ideas on all sides. If we humbly listen to one another and fervently pray, we just might be able to accomplish some worthwhile things in all of this.

What's Cooperative about the Cooperative Program?

In our propagandizing about the Cooperative Program (and I use the word "propagandizing" in its noblest sense), we've always landed heavy on the word "Cooperative" and left the "Program" part as the unaccented syllable. Our very good reason for that emphasis is the fact that programs inspire nobody while cooperation is a noble and uplifting concept. I also note that, in our expositions on cooperation, we tend to emphasize the concept of people cooperating with other people and churches cooperating with other churches. These are worthy emphases, and certainly the Cooperative Program does represent the cooperation of people with people and churches with churches. Normally, those doing the propagandizing are denominational employees trying to recruit people and churches to engage (or engage more fully) in the Cooperative Program.

Nevertheless, we must admit that EVERY funding system by which more than one person or more than one church fund joint ventures is, by its definition, just as "cooperative" with regard to people and churches as is our Cooperative Program system. The Lottie Moon Christmas Offering, although it is not a part of the Cooperative Program, is a fine example of people cooperating with other people and churches cooperating with other churches to reach people for Christ.

The true genius of the Cooperative Program—the novel aspect of cooperation that it introduced like a soothing balm—was that, in addition to the cooperation of people and churches that had always been present among Southern Baptists, it introduced an unprecedented level of Southern Baptist entities cooperating with other Southern Baptist entities. What had theretofore been a competition to see which entities could tap most effectively the pool of Southern Baptist charitable funding became a cooperative effort to solicit Southern Baptist funding in harmony. The loss of the Cooperative Program would not constitute the end of Baptist Christians and Baptist churches cooperating with one another, but would certainly endanger the cooperative relationships of our Southern Baptist entities.

I submit as my thesis for this post the following idea: The greatest danger to the Cooperative Program today lies not in the idea that churches will cease to cooperate with one another, but in the threat of the various constituents of Southern Baptist life not dealing with one another cooperatively. In specific, several factors pose dangers to our forward movement together.

1. A weakening of the cooperative relationship between the various state conventions and the national Southern Baptist Convention.

   Technically, our Southern Baptist family is non-connectional. In other words, the conceptual relationship between my state convention (the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention) and my national convention (the Southern Baptist Convention) is one of disconnected partners. The Southern Baptist Convention is not a subsidiary of the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention. The SBTC is not a subsidiary of the SBC. Each could conceivably exist apart from the other, although neither could exist apart from the churches.

   Practically, however, the state and national levels of our convention are intricately interwoven. The boards and committees of our national convention and entities, for example, often are structured to require proportional representation from the various state convention areas. The Cooperative Program is one factor that increases this enmeshed relationship between state conventions and national convention. Because of the Cooperative Program, the national convention is dependent for its funding upon the decisions of state conventions regarding how much CP money to keep for their own operations and how much to forward. Sometimes it is apparent that these decisions have been made in ways very favorable to the state convention and very unfavorable to the national SBC, while in some cases the state conventions have labored very sacrificially to give greater funding to national and international missions. The national convention needs the state conventions to do well and to be in a position to practice good stewardship of CP funding.

   Conversely, Cooperative Program funding is generally solicited by an appeal to the Southern Baptist love for missions in general and international missions in specific. The states, therefore, have a vested interest in the health and success of the Southern Baptist Convention not only for their spiritual reasons (as people who love the Lord and want to spread the gospel), but also because the number of CP dollars coming into state convention coffers will be determined more by local church buy-in to the SBC's program of missions than by any other one factor.

   State conventions and the national convention, then, are like partners in a three-legged race. Each needs the other for the success of the Cooperative Program.

   Starting in 1979, the national Southern Baptist Convention took a dramatic turn to the right in its theology and practice. If any state convention partners were out-of-step with the pre-1979 SBC, the change in the SBC may have made the intricate dance between state convention and national convention a more graceful one. However, if any state convention partners were well matched with the pre-1979 SBC, then the dramatic changes in the SBC posed a threat to their cooperative relationship. One of two things had to happen: (a) either something like the Conservative Resurgence needed to happen in those state conventions to facilitate greater cooperative agreement between the two tiers of SBC cooperation, or (b) the cooperative relationship between the two bodies was inevitably going to weaken, eroding the foundation of the Cooperative Program (or, theoretically, (c) state conventions could hunker down and try to wait to see whether the SBC meanders back left again after leaping to the right).

   Evidence of both outcomes among the various state conventions could likely be presented, although decorum prevents me from giving examples or naming names. My point is simply this: We employ the name "Cooperative Program" alike whether state and national convention are working at cross-purposes or laboring in harmony. No matter how much a state convention keeps for its own uses and no matter how little a state convention forwards to national or international causes, we indiscriminately refer to the system as the "Cooperative Program" and treat these various systems as though they are all equally "cooperative."

   This is a farce.

   What is needed is not a season of recriminations or attacks between state and national tiers of our Southern Baptist family, as I am in danger of provoking with these words. My goal is simply for Southern Baptists to acknowledge that state-national relationships within the SBC vary in their levels of cooperativeness, and that these variances have implications for the health of the Cooperative Program as well as upon the actions of local churches and other partners in the CP family. I pursue this goal not in the quest for some sort of blame-game, but because the Cooperative Program cannot, in my estimation, be strengthened by cultivating denial of this reality. The Cooperative Program can never be stronger than the cooperative nature of the relationship between the state conventions and the national convention.

   Not that the state conventions alone contribute to problems in the cooperative relationship. I confess that I have, in the past, allowed my exasperation over specific examples of financial hostility toward the national SBC by specific state conventions to provoke me into intemperate and categorical language speaking of the stinginess of state conventions. Such language on my part, as well as GCR-related statements critical of our state conventions, are no solution prone to bolster the health of the SBC or the Cooperative Program. Rather, they are more likely to make the problems worse by heightening tensions that need to be relaxed. And obviously, any past statements I have made about state conventions have not been meant to apply to ALL state conventions—I do not apply any of those characterizations to my own state convention, which is a model of cooperativeness, IMHO. I need to speak and write more carefully in the future, for the cooperative and collegial spirit between state conventions and the national SBC is too important a feature, and often too fragile a feature, for reckless talk to be allowed to endanger it.

   Lackluster participation in the Cooperative Program by the local churches is a problem in our generation. Does the root of the problem lie in some dissatisfied angst not properly addressed by the SBC? In some cases, probably so. Does the real problem concern an isolationism and self-centeredness among churches that increasingly seek to become an empire unto themselves? Again, this is likely at least partly to blame in some cases. But let us not forget that in some cases churches are circumventing the Cooperative Program not because they are upset with the missions program of the SBC, but because they are delighted with it. They perceive an uncooperative relationship between their state convention and the SBC. From their vantage point, the Cooperative Program is already broken, and not by their own hands. They are acting, as they perceive it, not in violence to the Cooperative Program so much as in self-defense on its behalf.

   I know whereof I speak—once upon a time it was me. I'm thankful that it is me no longer, but I am sympathetic toward those who claim that these factors shape their Cooperative Program giving (or lack thereof, as some would count it).

   For this reason each and every state convention in the Southern Baptist Convention should, if it has not already done so, adopt the Baptist Faith & Message in its latest revision. The national Southern Baptist Convention and the various state conventions should labor hard to reconcile any differences in methodology or any age-old tensions that might be present. A sincere and united front among the state conventions and the national convention would bolster local-church participation in the Cooperative Program, for it is this kind of cooperation among the tiers of Southern Baptist life that either is or gives rise to the most winsome features that commend the Cooperative Program over all other approaches. This is also one of the reasons why the Georgia Baptist Convention's proposed strong constitutional stance on the authority of the Bible is such a splendid idea. The GBC's action demonstrates that Georgia Baptists are in theological harmony with Southern Baptists across the nation. Such demonstrations, whenever they occur, strengthen our cooperative work with one another.

2. A weakening in the cooperative relationship among the individual state conventions. Today we witness the divisive phenomenon of congregations seeking affiliation with state conventions other than those headquartered in their home states. A few years ago the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention was solicited along these lines and very wisely demurred. The creation of a climate of state conventions competing with one another for the same churches is injurious to the fabric of cooperation within the Southern Baptist Convention. For any state convention to accept into its membership churches from another state is nothing less than a declaration of war against a neighboring state convention. An ecclesiological Anschluss makes a poor foundation for cooperation at the national level.

   Such actions necessarily further heighten tensions between any offending state conventions and the national convention. The state convention admitting churches beyond its state is, by definition, no longer a state convention. It is, at least, a regional convention. It may be a group coveting the status of national convention—an incipient schismatic competitor to the national convention. Cooperative trust, particularly as the division of funds is concerned, is difficult to maintain in such circumstances.

3. Any increase in designated giving. People have the freedom to designate their gifts. Churches have the autonomy to designate their gifts. I affirm this liberty as an important one. Nevertheless, designated giving is not Cooperative Program giving, and is indeed injurious to Cooperative Program giving.

   Any pastor of any church ought to recognize the truth of this matter. When we consider making the jump to designated giving and societal missions, we ought first to ask ourselves, "What if the members of my church were to follow this example in their giving to local church ministries?" Who is going to designate money to pay the electric bill? Who is going to designate money to purchase insurance? In budgets, like in churches, sometimes the "dishonorable members" turn out to be quite important after all! All of our churches receive designated gifts, but none of us would be comfortable will allowing this "dessert" of designated gifts to become a substitute for the main course of undesignated gifts.

   Our ultimate motivation for preferring undesignated giving over designated giving is not greed or megalomania or a desire to suppress freedom. We encourage undesignated giving because we realize the hidden inefficiencies of designated gifts. The causes for which we designate money could not function apart from the health of those causes to which nobody ever designates anything. The beautiful building built by designated gifts is rendered useless when the Electric Company shuts down the power for lack of payment.

   For this very reason, perceptions that mechanisms other than the Cooperative Program are more efficient are often illusory. My church can engage an unreached people group directly and cut out all that is in the middle, but as we do so we take advantage (mostly for free) of strategies and the identification of UPGs developed by IMB personnel, partnerships fostered by state convention relationships, staff members educated by SBC seminaries, and laypeople educated and inspired by decades of SBC mission emphases. If our churches could not parasitically feed off of these CP services, could we really participate directly in a worldwide strategy for evangelization at a lower cost?

   At all costs, the Southern Baptist Convention must avoid the confusion of designated giving with Cooperative Program giving. To make this mistake will be to lose the capability of developing any overall convention strategy and will be to goad our entities at every level of the SBC family to take individual fundraising initiative. The end result of any growth or encouragement of designated giving will be a return to 1900. SBC family entities will be incentivized to forsake the Cooperative Program methodology and make direct appeals to churches for designated gifts. Work to develop an overall strategy for convention ministries will be undermined, and the advantages of the convention method will be lost.

Yes, the Southern Baptist people will cooperate for missions. Yes, Southern Baptist churches will reach out to one another to cooperate upon a wide variety of important ministries. These things are so natural as not to be fragile. Like the grass underneath your nearest sidewalk, the sprouts of intercongregational cooperation among Baptists are indefatigable even in the face of the most cumbersome of barriers.

However, let us not take for granted, and let us not place into further jeopardy, the great Pax Baptistica by which our entities have come to lock arms with one another and work in harmony with one another rather than in competition. This formal cooperation among entities is the great jewel of our denominational life. And if the Cooperative Program is weakening at all among Southern Baptists, then I suggest that we look in this area of how our various institutions get along with one another first for the causes as well as for the solutions. Not that no causes exist elsewhere, but because these factors are most within our grasp and control and because they have great power to motivate and influence the participation of Southern Baptists at other levels.

The Long Road to the Cooperative Program

Farmersville, Texas, sits adjacent to U.S. Hwy 380 in Collin County. Ours is the final remaining section in our region of this major highway to remain in a two-lane condition. The asphalt through this area is pockmarked with potholes and patches and is one of the worse highway surfaces in our area. The highway has not been resurfaced because it is supposed to be entirely redesigned and replaced with something better. That process has taken place first to our east and west because the redesign inside Farmersville is so much more difficult and expensive than the roadway projects in the more rural surrounding areas. In Farmersville the highway proceeds through a small "canyon" of underpasses past an active railway line and Farmersville's Main Street. The embankments are rather narrow and the widening and improvement of the highway will require substantial work. Also, the highway in Farmersville is crowded with residences and businesses sitting right on the highway. The location of those businesses and homes right on the highway spelled convenience for people when they were erected, but now the proximity that was once convenient has become a problem.

Follow the same highway approximately 650 miles to the West, and U.S. Hwy 380 couldn't possibly look more different. There are no gas stations, no local eateries, no houses, and very few intersections. There is one very significant attraction in the area—a very important site where a defining moment of our history took place—but visiting is difficult because there is no lodging available and the driveway to the attraction is 20 miles long. Inconvenient? It sure is. But since the attraction in question is the Trinity Test Site in the White Sands Proving Grounds—the site where mankind first detonated an atomic bomb—a long, inconvenient road to this radioactive hotspot has probably been a blessing instead of a curse.

Two points on the same highway illustrating in very different ways that efficiency and convenience and brevity are not always the best outcomes or the most important variables in the equation. Long roads can be beneficial and short roads can be disastrous, for sometimes things happen on the journey that are as important as whatever happens at the destination.

The road to the Cooperative Program was a long, good road.

In the nineteenth century, Southern Baptist churches large and small generally did not have budgets for their support of missions. Fundraising for cooperative projects took place through the collection of special offerings. Speaking of highways, along Bus U.S. 641 in Murray, KY, you'll find a historical marker at the First Baptist Church in that town. There in 1900, "under leadership of H. Boyce Taylor, First Baptist Church, Murray, began in 1900 a new approach to church finance. Taylor, pastor 1897-1931, avidly promoted this unified budget plan." Here began the road to the Cooperative Program.

As late as 1917 the SBC was taking official action to encourage Southern Baptist churches to adopt and follow budgets. Truly, the adoption of the Cooperative Program amounted to the adoption of a radical new way of operating financially from up at the local church level through every stratum of Southern Baptist life down to the entities of the national convention.

Radical changes are difficult to make in a voluntaristic union. The careful patience and deliberate inclusiveness of the process is worthy of note. Before proposing a permanent structural change to the operations of the Southern Baptist Convention, the leadership of the SBC embarked upon a one-time trial run called the Seventy-Five Million Campaign. The campaign name was no mystery—Southern Baptist were attempting to raise exactly $75 million dollars to be distributed among various Southern Baptist causes. The time period from the launch of the Seventy-Five Million Campaign to the adoption of the Cooperative Program was a full six years, from 1919 to 1925.

These six years were filled with a truly inclusive and thoroughgoing effort to involve and inform every Southern Baptist of the benefits to be gained by moving to such a plan. The Seventy-Five Million campaign recruited people to assist the effort at every tier of the Southern Baptist family from the local churches to the national campaign. Southern Baptist laypeople across the South enlisted to give "four-minute speeches," mimicking a successful grassroots fundraising campaign by the United States Government during World War I.

Both in its successes and its failures, the Seventy-Five Million campaign was time well spent in determining the future path for the Southern Baptist Convention. It succeeded in demonstrating that Southern Baptist entities were better off financially to join in cooperative fundraising than to continue in the internecine solicitation rivalries that are unavoidable in systems that rely upon designated gifts in special offerings. Yet the campaign also failed in ways. Its high pledge total ($92 million) seduced SBC agencies to go deeply into debts that its far lower actual collections ($58 million) could not possibly retire. The progress of the campaign also revealed how delicate and intricate a process it would be to craft an agreement that distributed costs and proceeds of the campaign in a manner agreeable to everyone involved. By exposing these difficulties in the trial run, Southern Baptists better prepared themselves to minimize or avert them in the final form of the Cooperative Program.

All things considered, the journey from budgetless churches and special offerings to the Cooperative Program took a full twenty-five years. Many would not consider it a very efficient process that takes so many years to accomplish its goal. Southern Baptists, however, have historically been a people reluctant to sacrifice the sole Lordship of Christ over His church in the name of efficiency. Dictatorships are incredibly efficient. The most efficient system for Southern Baptists would be to appoint one man as pope and let him make our decisions for us. We have resisted such a system because we believe that Christ is already Head of the church, and that we have no authority to go about making vicars for Him, lest we depose Him from His rightful throne.

So, this twenty-five year process was not very efficient, as some people measure efficiency. And yet, viewed another way, it was an incredibly efficient and productive process. It not merely secured the compliance of Southern Baptists but actually accomplished the wholehearted buy-in of a national organization of volunteers. Indeed, it accomplished it so well that a full fifty years later people were referring to the Cooperative Program as a "sacred cow" in Southern Baptist life.

How long has it been since the Southern Baptist Convention has proposed or adopted anything that has been as popular and beloved among grassroots Southern Baptists in the pew as the Cooperative Program has been? It seems to me that there is something about the long road to the Cooperative Program that is helpful to all of us.

It commends to us pastors the value of patience in leadership. Brash and forceful bullying may win short-term victories, but it is no good foundation for lifetime ministry. I agree with Stan Norman that our decision making can be as much discipleship as administration—that the winsome and longsuffering work of securing consensus within the church reaps as many spiritual benefits as it reaps practical and secular benefits. Such changes last.

It also provides, I believe, a clear pattern for our present Southern Baptist leaders to examine and emulate. The SBC in 1900 stood at a moment in which dramatic changes were appropriate to help the convention realize a better cooperative ministry future. The need for those changes became persistent and clear enough that they spanned multiple SBC presidencies and numerous SBC annual meetings. Rather than ramrod their changes through and browbeat Southern Baptists into submission, these visionary leaders took the time and made the sacrifices to win Southern Baptist support from local churches, associations, state conventions, the national convention, and the various entities at every level. Although this made their work slower, it also made it more long-lasting and more effective.

Such leadership is more rare today in our nation. We live in a day in which Congress authorizes the expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars without even bothering to read the legislation that does so, all because we have leaders who don't want to waste a good crisis and who drown out opposition by declaring that the sky will fall unless changes are made immediately.

I am hopeful that our reorganization task force will not follow the example of President Obama. The task force needs to take at least a year after they have adopted and published specific recommendations for our convention. They need to send emissaries to each and every state convention annual meeting and hold Q&A sessions open to all Southern Baptists. In some larger states, the task force might even be well advised to augment the Q&A at the state annual meeting with a series of regional meetings along the same lines. Only after Southern Baptists from the local church level to the national meeting level have had ample and lengthy opportunity to examine the proposals on their merits should our leaders expect us to be ready to vote.

Highway engineers have recently been examining the Dallas North Tollway in the aftermath of a spate of terrible accidents to determine why drivers are getting on the Tollway and traveling in the wrong direction (e.g., Southbound on the Northbound lanes). Several fatalities have resulted from these accidents. Last night one of our local news anchors reported on the engineers' progress. They have looked at some possible enhancements to make the Tollway safer, but they have noted that every wrong-way driver considered in the recent sample was driving while intoxicated. Alcohol begins to impair judgment from the very first drink. As concentrations of alcohol grow in the bloodstream, people start to turn onto the roadway without giving much thought to their choices. The results can be disastrous. Whether in driving or in decision making, it is impossible to devise a system that will work well even for thoughtless, rushed, or distracted people.

Southern Baptists certainly sit at an intersection. We must choose a route. Let us not be afraid of the long road. Let us be a people of careful deliberation rather than high-pressure rushed decisions. Some voices are pressuring the task force to "blow [the SBC] up" in a hurry. Let us take a good look around before we push down the plunger and detonate the TNT. The members of our task force will spend hours in meetings and will work hard to bring before us what they believe to be their very best recommendations. We honor their work when we take the time to read and consider their thoughts carefully. Let us not be a people who reflexively adopt sweeping legislation that we haven't even read carefully or submitted before the Lord in fervent and lengthy prayer.

And certainly, if we would consider any major changes to the Cooperative Program, let us remember that a great many godly and intelligent people spent a quarter of a century arriving at the plan that we call the Cooperative Program. We honor their work if we pause longer than 1/50th of the time that they put into creating the Cooperative Program before we make any radical changes to it.

The Year 25 B.C.P.

What was life like in the Southern Baptist Convention before the birth of the Cooperative Program? Few people are alive today who hearken back to that time, and none of them were really old enough before 1925 to provide much in the way of first-hand testimony about the SBC before the CP. The decades having swiftly passed, all we can do today is read about it.

Fortunately, there's plenty to read. The state of Southern Baptist life in the year 1900 (to choose an arbitrary moment in time) was interesting and produced plenty of ink.

• At Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, W. H. Whitsett had just lost his job for having claimed that Baptists did not immerse until 1641. As the culmination of a process marked by political intrique and behind-the-scenes personality clashes, Southern welcomed to her helm a relatively obscure Texas expatriate who had been serving in Newton Centre, Massachusetts—Edgar Young Mullins. One contemporary critic remarked that Mullins was not properly educated for the prestigious liberal arts position, since Mullins had pursued training as a common telegraph operator as a member of the inaugural class of a mere "agricultural and mechanical school in Bryan, Texas." Although Landmark sentiments had succeeded in ousting Whitsett, Landmarkers had not managed to place into Louisville a president sympathetic to their agenda.
• The aforementioned critic, Benjamin M. Bogard, was fomenting an agrarian, populist uprising that started in the Arkansas Ozarks by splitting the Arkansas Baptist State Convention in 1902 and then eventually united with other similar movements to lead several churches out of the Southern Baptist Convention nationwide. Bogard and his followers were reacting primarily against efforts in the Southern Baptist Convention to pursue "efficiency" and "professionalism" by consolidating Southern Baptist money and executive power in towns and cities (towns and cities being relatively recent developments west of the Mississippi).
• The two parties in Arkansas, the New South "efficiency" party and the agrarian "common man" party, were fighting over who could rightfully claim the mantle of the recently-departed J. R. Graves, father of "Landmarkism." Truly, both parties were thoroughly Landmark (as was the preponderance of Southern Baptists in Kentucky, Arkansas, Mississippi, Texas, much of Tennessee, and a handful of other regions). Graves's own son-in-law and heir-apparent, O. L. Hailey, amidst much fence-jumping, considered both sides to be in line with Graves's teachings.
• Regionalism, probable slight theological dissatisfaction with Southern Seminary, and vision for a slightly different kind of seminary education in the Southwest led B. H. Carroll just one year later (in 1901) to launch a Theology Department at Baylor University. This department grew rapidly over the following decade to become Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas.
• Lottie Moon, having served in China for nearly three decades, was surviving the dark days of the Boxer Rebellion, a militaristic anti-Christian uprising marked by such shameful excesses as the Taiyuan Massacre of Christian missionaries, believers, and children in the Summer of that year.
• Robert Cooke Buckner, having established himself as a pioneer of orphan care twenty-one years earlier, rushed to Galveston in 1900 in the aftermath of what is still today the deadliest hurricane in American history. Buckner gathered up and took to his Children's Home in Dallas roughly a hundred children from the swath of destruction, some of whom were orphans but some of whom merely hadn't yet located their parents in the chaotic aftermath of the storm. His passion for children earned him the nickname "Father Buckner."
• George W. Truett was the pastor at First Baptist Church of Dallas, Texas, where he assisted in the development and funding of such expansive ministries as Baylor University Medical Center (founded 1903). Truett became a world-renowned preacher and a tireless champion of religious liberty.
• Isaac Taylor Tichenor had just resigned from the presidency of the Home Mission Board. His is widely regarded as the most successful administration that the HMB/NAMB has ever known.
• After a fire, the First Baptist Church of Farmerville, Texas (where I now pastor), was constructing the sanctuary in which we now worship.

A lot was going on in Southern Baptist life, as you can see. Southern Baptists, seeing a wide variety of needs, had begun to respond in a wide variety of ways. We were involved in health-care, orphan-care, theological education, and missions both domestically and internationally. The Southern Baptist Convention, the various state conventions, and the various local associations were all robustly active. The area west of the Mississippi River was not at all considered "reached" by Southern Baptists. Evangelism and church planting were naturally considered by Southern Baptists to be an enterprise that began right at home.

The churches were young. Their facilities, if they had facilities, were young. The associations were planting new churches. The educational institutions were mostly young. The hospitals were young. The orphanages were young. Indeed, the simple realization that the South actually would stand on its own two feet again after the disasters of Civil War and Reconstruction was pretty young itself; therefore, the thought of Southern Baptists doing anything beyond first surviving belonged to the generation alive in 1900. At every strata and in every way, we were a young convention.

The upside of all of this: The Southern Baptist Convention in 1900 was an innovative group of people looking for creative ways to proclaim and live out the gospel. The manifold ministries that so many Southern Baptists take for granted were birthed, many of them, during this era.

The downside of all of this: These young institutions, starving for money, developed inefficient and counter-productive methods of soliciting donations from Southern Baptist churches. Some specific weaknesses of the pre-Cooperative-Program approach to Southern Baptist financial support:

1. A class of Southern Baptist employees emerged whose sole business was to solicit money from churches. These "agents" existed at virtually every tier of Southern Baptist life and at virtually every entity. They were not bad people, but they had a bad job that tended to provoke resentment among the churches. Consider this passage from the Missouri Baptist Word and Way of early 1901:

   Every observing person must recognize the advance of a dread commercialism which is eating like a [cancer] at the vitals of our generation. . . . This sordid money-loving spirit on the part of God’s professed people has led them to form their co-operative bodies on a “money basis,” and this often on a fixed basis which necessarily excludes the poor man or church from their councils. . . . We are coming to believe that there should be no agents going up and down the land whose sole business it is to get money. They learn to make money through God and educate our people in a bad way. They should be preachers of a whole Gospel, like Paul. A faithful Gospel preached in its fullness will set the churches upon methods, Scriptural methods, which will not only collect the money needed, but which will insure its faithful expenditure. Let our agents change front, and instead of seeking only the money of the Lord’s people, let that whole matter take the secondary and incidental place where it belongs, and make piety, consecration of life and property the great burden of their message.

2. Some of the fundraising arrangements left Southern Baptists with the suspicion that their gifts were not reaching the causes for which they were solicited. William A. Clark, while serving as the General Missionary for the Arkansas Baptist State Convention, also served as a fundraising agent for the Home Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention. He served under what was a common arrangement for the day—he got to keep for himself 100% of the gifts that he received from churches until he had received the amount of his salary. The board then received gifts beyond that amount. In the first church to make a gift to the Home Mission Board for a given year, then, none of the money actually made it to the Home Mission Board. The Board, however, was doing what was necessary to recruit motivated individuals to solicit funds in the local churches.

3. As a result of these developments, some Southern Baptists believed that gifts to Southern Baptist causes did more to provide the livelihoods of certain prominent families in the SBC than to spread the gospel. Widespread involvement of siblings and offspring of prominent Southern Baptists in denominational enterprises fueled these suspicions. In Texas, B. H. Carroll and J. M. Carroll were both serving, and some disgruntled Southern Baptists in Texas alleged financial improprieties on J. M. Carroll's part. Carroll was vindicated upon subsequent investigation, but the point is not that the charges were justified at all, but that Southern Baptists were lobbing accusations against one of the Carroll brothers.

   John H. Eager was a fundraising agent of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary who worked full time to appeal directly to SBC churches and wealthy people to give funds to the seminary. His brother George was a professor at the seminary. His other brother Patrick was president of Baylor Female College in Belton, Texas, before settling as a faculty member at Mississippi College. These brothers were the children of an influential pastor in Mississippi, E. C. Eager.

   So, if you were a Mississippi Southern Baptist, you might attend a church that E. C. Eager pastored and hear one Sunday from an agent seeking to raise money for Mississippi College where Patrick H. Eager was employed, and then the next Sunday from John Eager raising money for Southern Seminary where George Eager was employed. Nepotism eroded some Southern Baptist confidence that it was only the family of God being enlarged by Southern Baptist generosity.

   The Carrolls were gifted brothers who each contributed greatly to Southern Baptists in Texas. The Eagers were fine people and committed Baptists as well. Southern Baptists are probably better off for the contributions of each. They were likely as dedicated and skilled as some of the families in Southern Baptist life today in which siblings and lineal descendants are able to parlay relationships into denominational posts. The SBC would be far the worse were it not for some of these (technically speaking) "nepotistic" arrangements. Yet the situation, when combined with the higher-pressure environment of direct monetary appeals to the churches, made for an easy avenue of criticism for those who chafed under the constant requests for gifts.

4. The multiplication of institutions and agents meant that some churches were inundated with people seeking a Sunday to speak at the church and take up an offering. And all of this came at the time when, at least in the Southwest, many of these churches were just undertaking either the construction of their own facilities or the retirement of associated debt.

5. The resultant distribution of funds was haphazard rather than strategic, reflecting more the skill, lineage, and network of the employed agents than the spiritual importance of the institution. E. Y. Mullins used to complain that the seminary belonged to everybody (in the Southern Baptist Convention) and therefore belonged to nobody. In other words, he believed that "local" interests such as state colleges and hospitals and the like had a great fundraising advantage over the seminary.

Southern Baptists who wanted more money to reach "lostness" in the years B.C.P. (Before the Cooperative Program) and who were wearied of the negative aspects of accelerating competition in fundraising appeals to the churches began to look for a better solution. Why do Southern Baptists not face this problem today? Because of the Cooperative Program.