SBC Executive Committee endorses state executives’ new focus on CP

Southern Baptist pastors and church members may be entering a new season in their stewardship and global outreach.
  
“… [T]oday … we have the privilege of looking to a historic step forward as Southern Baptists in the work of the Cooperative Program (CP),” Anthony Jordan, executive director of the Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma, told the Southern Baptist Convention’s (SBC) Executive Committee Feb. 21.
   
Jordan reported to the Executive Committee that state convention executives during their annual meeting the previous week had adopted a set of recommendations, objectives and strategies to underscore the CP as vital to Southern Baptist efforts to carry the gospel to the ends of the earth.
   
The Executive Committee, in turn, voted to commend the state executives’ report “to all Southern Baptists” and to “respectfully request the state conventions act upon those recommendations” later this year during their respective annual meetings.
   
The recommendations note, for example, that a “commitment to biblical stewardship” must be promoted, including tithing by church members, CP gifts provided by churches to their state convention and CP gifts provided by the states to global SBC causes. 
   
Other recommendations include encouraging the election of state and national convention officers whose churches give at least 10 percent of their undesignated receipts through the CP and that each state convention have a plan for forwarding an increasing percentage of receipts to SBC missions causes through the CP.
   
Jordan said church allocations for the CP have fallen from an average of 10.6 percent of the offerings churches received in the mid-1980s to 6.64 percent today.
   
The Executive Committee, in addition to endorsing the state executives’ report, voted to add stewardship education to its ministry assignments, pending messengers’ approval during the SBC’s June 13–14 annual meeting in Greensboro, N.C.
   
The stewardship ministry — to “produce, develop, publish and distribute products that help Southern Baptists to grow in commitment to Jesus Christ by applying biblical principles of stewardship” — would be transferred to the Executive Committee from LifeWay Christian Resources, which fielded the assignment as part of the SBC’s restructuring in 1997.
   
Morris H. Chapman, president of the Executive Committee, also reported that the Executive Committee has leased the name of Convention Press from LifeWay for a five-year period for the publication of books on the CP and Baptist history, heritage and beliefs. 
   
In other business, the Executive Committee:
   
• approved a 2006–2007 CP Allocation budget of $195,948,423 for recommendation to the SBC during its annual meeting in June in North Carolina.
   
The proposed budget would continue to allocate 50 percent of receipts to the International Mission Board and 22.79 percent to the North American Mission Board (NAMB). The percentage allocated to the seminaries remains 21.4 percent.
   
• approved a $5 million fund-raising campaign by NAMB as part of its New Orleans Area Hope volunteer initiative to rebuild and rehabilitate homes and churches damaged by Hurricane Katrina. The fund-raising campaign will begin in March 2006 and continue through February 2008.
   
• approved a $13 million five-year fund-raising campaign by Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary in Mill Valley, Calif., named Partners for the Future, to enhance academic operations, improve facilities and to build its academic program through endowments of faculty chairs. 
   
Also during the meeting, The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission presented the Richard D. Land Distinguished Service Award to Paige Patterson, president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas. (BP)