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.

A Statement of Southern Baptist Soteriological Unity

Together we affirm that all of the gospel of Jesus Christ is found in the Christian Scriptures—that is, the Old and New Testaments—which are uniquely the means chosen by God through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit to communicate His plan for salvation to mankind.

Together we acknowledge the universal sinfulness of mankind and the universal need for conversion.

Together we acknowledge that, as a result of our universal sinfulness, every person with a capacity for transgression against God is guilty of transgression against God.

Together we affirm that all who are saved will spend eternity in Heaven.

Together we acknowledge with sadness that all who are not saved will spend eternity in Hell.

Together we affirm that any who is saved will be saved by grace through faith and not of works.

Together we affirm that none will spend eternity in Hell who is not guilty of his own volitional transgression against God.

Together we affirm that all of those who spend eternity in Heaven will be able to describe themselves accurately as the elect.

Together we deny that any of those who spend eternity in Hell will be able to describe themselves accurately as the elect.

Together we affirm that all who spend eternity in Hell will do so at the displeasure of God and contrary to the initial design and desire of God.

Together we affirm that God, from eternity past, knew exactly who would spend eternity in Heaven and exactly who would spend eternity in Hell.

Together we affirm that none can be saved by any means other than Jesus Christ.

Together we affirm that Jesus Christ, in the sacrifice of Himself on the cross as our substitute, made atonement for our sins.

Together we affirm that all who through faith receive Jesus Christ and His sacrifice on the cross will be saved.

Together we affirm that all who do not receive Jesus Christ and His sacrifice on the cross are condemned already.

Together we affirm that salvation comes in conjunction with personal conversion, an experience closely correlated with and attended by repentance, faith, confession of Jesus as Lord, regeneration, justification, reception of the Holy Spirit, and adoption into the family of God.

Together we affirm that conversion does not come upon anyone without that person’s knowledge nor contrary to that person’s will at the moment of conversion.

Together we affirm that at conversion we were reconciled to God the Father because of His work in God the Son on the cross.

Together we affirm that at conversion we received justification of our sins as the result of God the Son’s sacrifice on the cross.

Together we affirm that at conversion we were born again to eternal life —resurrected with Christ to walk in newness of life, as it were—by the work of God the Holy Spirit.

Together we affirm that the symbol of conversion—that is, of the mortification of the old, condemned, sinful self and the birth of the new, justified self being sanctified—is the immersion of new believers in water in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Together we affirm that God commences at each respective moment of conversion the work of sanctifying the person saved.

Together we affirm that we cannot, apart from sanctification, make unto God offerings of worship in righteousness that glorify Him.

Together we affirm that the Law is just and that God uses it to restrain evil in the world, to show us our sinfulness, and to sanctify believers by showing them His standards of righteousness.

Together we affirm the churches’ duty of preaching and working for the sanctification of believers.

Together we deny that anything not both initially producing some evidence of sanctification and finally resulting in entire sanctification is or ever was true gospel conversion.

Together we affirm that God has called regenerate believers, and only such, to gather as New Testament churches.

Together we affirm that God has used as His means of saving us the proclamation of the gospel to us by those who were believers before us.

Together we receive as our duty the mission to be the witnesses of Christ throughout the extent of the earth to all peoples, calling upon each one to receive the gospel of Jesus Christ—that whoever is the elect of God has certainly been elected to embrace and do some portion of this task.

Together we affirm that although these statements bear witness to the teachings of the Christian Scriptures about the gospel, they do not exhaust them, and therefore, that many facts about the gospel beyond these few beckon us to consider them.

Together we affirm the importance of the gospel, our earnest desire to understand it more fully, and the value of studying and meditating upon the gospel.

Together we acknowledge that our respective studies and meditations have led us to differing opinions on some questions of the nature and operation of the gospel that lie beyond and behind the items delineated in this statement.

Together we affirm that, where we differ on further items of soteriology, we cannot all be right, and indeed, we may all be wrong to some degree, but that when we gain further light, God’s Word will be vindicated as true in all respects.

Together we affirm that, our differing opinions on other matters notwithstanding, our common affirmation of these truths and the other truths expressed in The Baptist Faith & Message constitute sufficient grounds for us gladly to acknowledge one another as brothers and sisters in Christ, to owe one another our love, to serve one another and to serve with one another in the Southern Baptist Convention, and to acknowledge the leadership of one another in convention work as God may grant it.

Together, desiring to know more fully the truth of God, we encourage one another to study, converse, write, confer, consider, and even debate among one another the further nuances of soteriology, so long as in doing so we are diligent to preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.

SBC Name Change Proposal

Tonight at a meeting of the Executive Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention, President Bryant Wright led the Executive Committee to appoint by fiat a task force to study a name change for the denomination (BP). In a matter of hours, Twitter is already alive with discussion over the proposal. People are likely to take sides on this matter based upon their opinions of the idea of changing the name alone. I'll give my opinion on whether we should change the name of the SBC at the end of this post. For now, I'd like to direct your attention to the procedural intricacies of this proposal.

First, it might be helpful to give a brief review of the history of this concept. The messengers of the Southern Baptist Convention are not as clearly on record in our opposition to Satan and Hell as we are in our opposition to changing the name of our denomination (not necessarily a good thing). It has been voted down and voted down and voted down, starting since long before I realized that I was either Southern or Baptist—since long before anyone discussing this matter today was ever born. In 1974, W. A. Criswell came to the messengers of the Southern Baptist Convention and asked them to appoint a study committee to explore a possible name-change. The messengers approved the committee, the committee chose not to change the name, and Dr. Criswell honored the will of the messengers.

In 1999, an attempt was made by members of the Executive Committee to initiate the name-change process within the EC rather than on the convention floor. The Executive Committee declined to do so. An excellent report by Augie Boto outlined the advantages of retaining the historic name of the convention.

In 2004, SBC President Jack Graham asked the messengers in the convention meeting to appoint a task force to consider a name change. Graham, astute president that he was, noted that by 2004 this question had come to the convention floor "seven or eight times" and opined that our convention needed in 2004 "to stop meeting and just talking about this…We need to either put it to bed forever or get on with it."

The convention chose to "put it to bed forever" by a considerable margin.

Here's hoping that, when we use "forever" in speaking about the promises of the gospel, Southern Baptists mean something longer than eight years!

The question of a name-change arose during the GCR debates of recent memory, but no name change task force arose out of the GCR report.

And now, SBC President Bryant Wright has chosen to lead the Executive Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention to take an action that the messenger body of the SBC has explicitly and repeatedly refused to take—to appoint a task force to study a name change. The normal course of affairs is for SBC Presidents who desire the appointment of task forces to ask for the approval of the convention's messengers before doing so, especially on questions of such importance. Why not follow that time-honored process now?

On Twitter, Dr. Albert Mohler reported that Wright had indicated that he followed this process "out of respect for the SBC Executive Committee." I can understand how it would be an indication of respect for the Executive Committee to make them the people from whom Wright sought authorization to take this action. And yet, if it is an action of respect to seek this consent from the Executive Committee, is it not therefore, by Wright's own definition, an action of disrespect of the messengers of the Southern Baptist Convention to decline to seek their consent for this action, especially since the seeking of messenger consent is the standard operating procedure of the convention in matters such as this? Certainly, it may be inadvertent disrespect, but it is disrespect nonetheless.

Southern Baptists on various sides of the issues that we face in this day and time are demonstrating what I believe is a dangerous inclination to belittle and disrespect the messenger body in order to accomplish at all costs the will of the empowered few. This threat was evident during the GCR process when anti-GCR voices were privately expressing the opinion that the messengers of the convention COULD NOT instruct the Executive Committee to do anything—that the Executive Committee was not beholden to the messengers of the convention to follow their instructions. This threat was evident during the GCR debate itself in Orlando when the rules of order were violated and the rights of a messenger were trampled underfoot as he attempted to amend the GCR recommendations. But for the courage of a bold lady standing at a microphone, our convention might have done something possibly illegal that day. This threat is evident tonight, when rather than poll the convention messengers to see whether their opinion has changed on the question of appointing a name-change task force, the action has been taken to short-circuit the expressed will of the SBC and to have this task force after all, messengers be…disrespected.

Let no one supporting such a thing ever breathe a word of criticism about unelected, unaccountable activist judges wresting legislative authority out of the hands of the people where it belongs. Let no one supporting such a thing ever utter the slightest complaint about Presidential Czars and Executive Orders bypassing the will of the Congress. People on all sides of SBC debate have adopted an "ends justifies the means" approach to our denominational polity. We need to repent of it. We need to quit it. We need to start acting in good faith.

Now, I promised to offer my opinion of the name change idea itself. Here it is. If this process goes forward to the messengers of the convention, then I will fully support a name-change so long as it removes the word "Baptist" from the name of our denomination. When the will of the messengers has become an obstacle to get around by any means necessary rather than the sacred core of our polity, then we are no longer Baptists, and we no longer deserve to own that name.

Learning Some Lessons from the Acts 29 Network

A confession: I generally really like the Acts 29 Network. They're a pretty good denomination. I prefer them over the United Methodists. I prefer them over the United Church of Christ churches. I prefer them over the PCUSA. Yes, I prefer nearly any Baptist denomination over the Acts 29 Network, but as non-Baptist denominations go, Acts 29 is definitely in the upper few percentiles of quality.

In fact, I believe that there are several things that many of our Southern Baptist leaders need to learn from the Acts 29 Network:

1. Denominations ought to be confessional communities. Do you want to be a member church of the Acts 29 denomination? Then your church will have to be in agreement with their statement of faith. This is also the principle at work in my state convention, the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention. A church can only be a member congregation of the SBTC if that church affirms its agreement with the Baptist Faith & Message. This is not presently the case within the Southern Baptist Convention—churches can disagree entirely with the BF&M and yet still be member churches of the SBC.

   Our confessional identity need not go as far as that of Acts 29. They require a particular viewpoint on the question of soteriology in order to participate in their network. I think that the present text of the BF&M says all that needs to be said about soteriology, and I would not be in favor of tightening that deliberately vague portion of our statement of faith, but every Southern Baptist church ought to be in agreement with the BF&M as far as it goes.

   To have a confessional community of churches is no violation of local church autonomy. Part and parcel of the autonomy of each local church is its autonomous right to choose which churches, and which kinds of churches, are those with which it will affiliate. We've always had conditions of membership, and these have not been considered by Southern Baptists to be violations of local church autonomy. It has always been thus with money: Autonomously decide to cut the SBC entirely out of your church budget? We'll send you along your merry autonomous way.

   We ought to be prepared to value our theology at least as much as we value our money.

2. Ecclesiology is important enough for our churches to take a stand on it. The first requirement of the Acts 29 Covenant is an ecclesiological requirement. I do not believe that their particular understanding of ecclesiology is the best understanding of biblical ecclesiology (as is often the case when I interact with non-Baptist denominations like Acts 29), but I agree entirely with them that ecclesiology is important enough to the health of a church that we are wise to stipulate and enforce ecclesiological convictions within our fellowship.
3. There's nothing wrong with restricting membership in our denomination to only those who care about it enough to support it financially. The Acts 29 Covenant rightly recognizes freeloading as a sinful habit to which churches are sometimes tempted. Acts 29 churches give 10% of their receipts away. There are benchmarks for how much of that money they ought to give through Acts 29. There are strong suggestions that Acts 29 efforts should have a better-than-average chance of earning the full 10%. That's what Acts 29 ought to do. It only makes sense. I don't know why the SBC wouldn't consider doing the same thing.
4. Promoting our own heroes within our denomination is essential to our long-term health. Some decry Acts 29 as a hero cult—the house that the Cussing Pastor built. I think that's a misguided criticism, as though denominational heroes are a bad thing. When all of your young pastors' heroes are people outside of your denomination, then your denomination is in trouble. That's why the Southern Baptist Convention ought to work deliberately to highlight the ministries of men who are comfortable within and committed to the Southern Baptist Convention. Specifically, we need to advance leaders who are not double-minded as to whether the Southern Baptist Convention is their preferred Great Commission alliance.
5. Conservative theology builds strong churches. With Peter Masters, I agree that conservative behavior coupled with conservative theology will do even better, but I'm thankful that Acts 29 is a conservative group in its theology, as other denominations go. As our SBC nominations process slowly slips its conservative moorings that were solidly in place just a few years ago, we would do well to learn from Acts 29 not to be ashamed or reluctant about the conservative stands that we were once willing not only to talk about but also to put into actual practice.

This list of accolades may seem to be coming from a strange source—you might have easily concluded in the past that I regard Acts 29 as Enemy Number One. What am I doing writing a post praising Acts 29 and urging Southern Baptists to learn from them?

Well, the fact is that I've never harbored hard feelings against Acts 29. I just recognize that Acts 29 is another denomination of churches, outside of the Southern Baptist Convention. Compared to anyone who would make the Southern Baptist Convention a wholly owned subsidiary of Acts 29, that makes me look like an Acts 29 hater. But that's just a function of juxtaposition, and not a good, absolute measure of my feelings.

Acts 29 churches are preaching the gospel. People are now going to Heaven rather than Hell because of Acts 29 (and Acts 29 believes that Hell exists). Acts 29 is planting churches at an admirable rate. Bravo for them. We could learn a lot from them, and as long as we learn the right things from them, we could be much better off for it.

If Heaven Ain't A Lot Like Dixie?

So, the "Southern" in "Southern Baptist Convention" has had the attention of the blogging world lately. Right out of the gate, we ought to acknowledge that the topic is an emotional one. The likelihood of this matter coming to an actual vote—and if it does come to a vote, the outcome of that vote—will be determined at least as much by non-rational factors as it will be determined by lists of reasons pro and con. What's more, I confess that I also have as many feelings as I have thoughts about the question. I will endeavor, in this post, to stick with thoughts and leave the feelings aside.

Thesis to Test

I have seen two logical rationales offered for changing the name of the convention:

1. The argument from identity: This rationale asserts that the Southern Baptist Convention is not really all that Southern, and that the name therefore does not fit the identity of our convention.

2. The argument from pragmatics: This rationale asserts that our convention's name poses a practical obstacle to our evangelistic efforts in regions other than the South.

Evidence to Consider: Southern Baptist Identity

How would we test the first argument, the argument from identity? Is the Southern Baptist Convention no longer Southern? One way of examining this thesis would be to look at demographic data describing the SBC. The Association of Religion Data Archives contains a fascinating set of data from the year 2000, showing the geographic distribution of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Geographic Distribution of Southern Baptist Adherents

Fourteen states lie east of and including Oklahoma and Texas and south of and including Missouri, Kentucky, and Virginia. Kansas makes up the outside northwestern corner of this plot of geography, but is not included in this collection of states.

Ranked by number of Southern Baptists living in the state, the top fourteen states are the fourteen Southern states. Collectively, they account for 17,635,679 self-identified Southern Baptists. The other thirty-six states outside the South account for 2,206,936 Southern Baptists.

Thus, a whopping 89% of Southern Baptists live in the South, compared to 11% outside the South.

Geographic Distribution of Southern Baptist Congregations

Ranked by the number of Southern Baptist congregations, the states line up similarly. The fourteen southern states again dominate the listing. One noteworthy exception appears, however—California, one of the largest states in the nation, just edges out Arkansas for the fourteenth spot on the list. Arkansas takes the fifteenth slot.

The fourteen southern states account for 34,365 of the SBC's congregations, or 83%. The other thirty-six states collectively have 7,100 congregations representing 17% of the convention.

Southern Baptist Adherents as a Percentage of State Total Population

California's successful grasping of the fourteenth slot in the previous table might have something to do with the fact that California is so much larger, both in land area and in population, than is Arkansas. What happens when Southern Baptists are measured as a percentage of the state's population?

Over 32% of the population of the Sovereign State of Mississippi identifies itself as Southern Baptist. At the other end of the table, barely 1% of the folks watching a Minnesota Golden Gopher game are likely to be Southern Baptists.

In this category once again the fourteen states of the South take the top fourteen slots in the table. Examine them collectively, and you learn that a full 21% of the people who live in the South identify themselves as Southern Baptists. In contrast, only 1.4% of the people living in the remaining thirty-six states identify themselves as Southern Baptists.

Conclusion

The demographics of the Southern Baptist Convention reveal that the label "Southern" does accurately describe the Southern Baptist Convention, which is preponderantly Southern. In every category, the fourteen states of the South dominate the demographics of the SBC.

Indeed, although I would not advance such an argument, one could make the case that it would be deceptive to call the Southern Baptist Convention anything other than the Southern Baptist Convention—the effect of the change would be to hide the demographic realities of the convention with a name that obscures our very real and inherent regionality.

One could argue with these statistics in a couple of different ways. First, one might assert that having only 10% of the membership of the convention living outside the South is enough to meet the threshold at which the convention should no longer be named the Southern Baptist Convention. This might make sense if the roughly 10% of Southern Baptists living outside the South were evenly distributed among the other states. The tables, however, reveal that a high proportion of Southern Baptists not living in the South live just across one state line from the South. The percentages become even more disproportional when one considers not only Southern Baptists living in the South but also Southern Baptists living clustered around the South.

Second, one might assert that the Southern Baptist Convention cannot be the Southern Baptist Convention if any SBC members or congregations live beyond the confines of the South. In other words, once one, single, solitary Southern Baptist relocates outside the South, we have ceased to be the Southern Baptist Convention according to this hypothetical logic. And there's a certain force of truth to this characterization—although the Southern Baptist Convention is preponderantly Southern, it is not entirely Southern.

Yet it is not uncommon to employ geographical terms in this general rather than precise manner. For example, one could accurately say that California is west of Nevada. And yet, portions of Nevada are actually west of portions of California. When each constituent city of Nevada is considered atomically against each constitutent city of California, one cannot say of California that it lies west of Nevada; when the two states are considered collectively and in general, then the geographical description makes sense. The same is true of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Evidence to Consider: Evangelistic Pragmatics

Preceding are the statistics. As I mentioned at the beginning, many of the factors involved in this topic are emotional rather than factual. The 10% of Southern Baptists might feel offended that the convention has not altered its name in consideration of the tiny minority of Southern Baptists who do not live in the South. A Southern Baptist living in the South might feel offended that anyone would even consider slighting the Southern preponderance of the convention by changing the name. These emotional factors do not easily submit themselves to analysis and are even more resistant to change.

Another argument is more complex, involving a mixture of feelings and ideas: Some suggest that we ought to remove the "Southern" from our name because the word poses a hindrance to evangelism. I say that this argument involves both feelings and ideas because we Southern Baptists feel passionately about the question of evangelism. Make Southern Baptists think about the Great Commission and you have (depending upon your motives and how you use the idea) the power either to make Southern Baptists stop and think or to make them stop thinking at all.

So, if we were setting aside the emotions for a moment and trying to be strictly cerebral, how would we test the thesis that our evangelistic efforts outside the South would be more effective if we were to rename the Southern Baptist Convention?

Comparative Denominational Demographics

One approach might be to go back to the same data source and compare the effectiveness of Southern Baptists outside the South to the effectiveness of other evangelical denominations in the same areas.

Looking at adherents, we find that there are two and only two states that break into the top fourteen when we consider evangelicals beyond the Southern Baptist Convention: California and Illinois. Otherwise, evangelicalism at large seems not to have any substantially different evangelistic effectiveness in seeing people converted beyond the South than do the Southern Baptists. The percentages do change substantially, however (again, largely because of California and Illinois), moving from 88/12 to 64/36 when we consider all evangelicals rather than only Southern Baptists.

Looking at congregations, the impact of non-Southern-Baptists congregations becomes a bit more significant, with Indiana joining Illinois and California in displacing Southern states from the top fourteen. The dramatic demotions of Mississippi (8th among Southern Baptists; 18th among evangelicals at large) and Virginia (11th among Southern Baptists; 16th among evangelicals at large) reveal that evangelical strength beyond the South is bolstered by a larger number of smaller congregations.

When we consider the rate of evangelical adherents in each state's population, we see that all evangelical groups, including all of those without any regional descriptor in their names, are far less effective outside the South than they are inside the South. Evangelicals comprise 30% of Southerners compared to a mere 8.5% of non-Southerners.

Overall, we see that other evangelicals do perform somewhat more consistently between Southern and non-Southern areas, and yet we observe that even those evangelical denominations without the word "Southern" in their names struggle to spread the gospel outside the South compared to what they achieve within the South.

Historical Examples

Beyond these statistical measurements that give us a snapshot of things as they existed in 2000, we can also pull out the home movies and see how things came to be that way.

A large number of denominations have preached the gospel and planted churches in the United States of America—most of them without the word "Southern" in their name. Perhaps the best example for Southern Baptists to consider in comparison would be the American Baptist Churches in the U. S. A. (formerly the Northern Baptist Convention). This denomination is worthy of consideration for two reasons. First, it is a sister denomination to Southern Baptists, being the group from which we separated in 1845. Second, in 1951 the Northern Baptist Convention did precisely what some people want the Southern Baptist Convention to do today—they changed the name of their convention to rid themselves of a regional name. In fact, they took the very name that some Southern Baptists were considering before the Yankees beat us to the punch (much to the consternation of some)!

It is no mystery that the ABC is smaller by an order of magnitude than is the SBC. What you might not have considered before is the geographic distribution of ABC churches. For that, we turn once again to ARDA. The distribution map reveals that the ABC is heavily clustered in the New England states and around the Great Lakes (one stand-alone state that is strong by ABC standards is California, where 170,000 American Baptists reside)

Someone doubtless will complain that American Baptists do not make for a good comparison with Southern Baptists became American Baptists have a different theology than do Southern Baptists. I agree that Southern Baptists and adherents of the American Baptist Churches in the U. S. A. could in fact be characterized differently in their theology. That fact, however, is immaterial to the comparison. Even if one completely accepts the presumption that American Baptist theology will fail where Southern Baptist theology will succeed, the fact remains that American Baptist churches do not fail or succeed with their theology equally across the geography of our country. Also inescapable is the conclusion that American Baptist geographical distribution has not changed substantially since 1951 when they discarded their regional name for a broader name.

Somebody has already done precisely what some people want the Southern Baptist Convention to do today, and the result was a dismal failure.

Another denomination worthy of consideration is the Presbyterian Church in America. Their denominational name is national in scope, but unlike the American Baptist Churches in the U. S. A., the Presbyterian Church in America is a conservative denomination. Yet the geographical distribution map for PCA churches and adherents, just like the map for the SBC, reveals a high population cluster in the Southeast with waning adherence the farther north or west one travels (with the exception of California).

Of course, I welcome the listing by the name-change proponents of all of the denominations who have abandoned a regional name and have then gone on to great and storied effectiveness in regions of the United States where beforehand they were anemic. Apart from hard data to demonstrate that this approach has worked in the renaming of other denominations before, we're left to conclude that other factors besides denominational names (or, alternatively, no factors within our control at all!) are the secret to religious success in the United States but outside the South.

Cultural Captivity Remedied by a Name Change?

On my previous post, a friend of mine and a thoughtful commenter on this site suggested a different, more internal reason for a name change. Perhaps the changing of the name "Southern Baptist Convention" in and of itself would not effect greater receptivity for the gospel when Southern Baptists proclaim it outside the South, but perhaps the changing of the name would change Southern Baptists by liberating us from our Southern parochialism. Andrew asked, "Are we not hidebound in our comfortable Southern (intending both geographic and denominational) ways in our familiar Southern areas that we are lacking the means to reach the lost in America, much less around the globe?"

In other words, maybe the removal of "Southern" from the name "Southern Baptist Convention" would change US, thereby making us do OTHER things that would make us more effective in evangelism and church planting to non-Southerners.

It is a complex question, and one that would be difficult to measure empirically. We can, however, (and did in the comment stream of the post) explore the premise that Southern Baptist churches are held captive by Southern culture.

I replied to Andrew's question in this fashion:

As a historian I would assert that the distinctiveness of Southern culture is at its lowest point since the Colonial period. Everything from media to chain restaurants and big box stores have made it more true than ever before that Boston = Atlanta = Houston = Los Angeles. Of course, these equations are not absolutely true, but they are more true than they have ever been before.

Moving from culture-at-large to church culture, a Cowboy Church movement has arisen largely because the standard Southern Baptist church culture has almost nothing Southern about it. The music is Rock, the marketing is Madison Avenue, the platform dress is Abercrombie & Fitch, and the A-V technology is Times Square.

What's Southern about that?

I did not (as one reader misunderstood) equate "Cowboy" with "Southern" in the comment. Rather, I stated that there was a lack of Southernness in Southern Baptist churches in general, and that the Cowboy churches were able to profit from that lack. To be more specific, of those who graduated with me from Riverside High School, I'd say that generally comparable percentages of the student body listened to country music on the one hand and pop music on the other hand. Southern Baptist churches in the South, on the other hand, have featured in addition to hymnody an almost exclusive selection of pop-sounding Christian music. Southern Gospel is not really representative of recent Southern culture, and no CCM equivalent of the immensely popular music group Alabama has ever been able to break through to prominence.

Country & Western music is more Southern than is pop music. Cowboy churches frequently utilize somewhat-baptized Country & Western music in their worship services. In doing so, they provide worship services that are more compatible with Southern culture as a whole (although Southern culture as a whole is different from Cowboy culture) than are the Bono-clone worship services that have been the vogue in many SBC churches in the South.

Hank Williams Jr. famously opined in a song, "If Heaven ain't a lot like Dixie, I don't want to go." Does the presence of the word "Southern" in the name "Southern Baptist Convention" indicate that SBC members and churches pretty much agree with Bocephus?

I certainly don't feel that way (nor have I ever really liked Hank that much). Do some people feel that way? I don't know. Maybe. But I'm certain of this much: Even if some people do hold that opinion, changing the name of the SBC won't do anything to solve that problem.

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.