Is Cooperation a Principle or a Convenience?

The expected answer to the question above is obvious. Baptists believe in cooperation. The Baptist Faith and Message declares in Article XIV that “Christ’s people should, as occasion requires, organize such associations and conventions as may best secure cooperation for the great objects of the Kingdom of God.” 

The 2010 Great Commission Resurgence report declares the preferred channel of funding missions, educational and benevolent causes at home and around the world is the Cooperative Program (CP). 

Cooperation is an axiom of Baptist life, a fundamental truth that serves as the foundation for our system of ministry. That is the expected answer, but is it the right answer? Is cooperation a principle of Baptist life or a convenience from the past that has outlived its usefulness?

About 100 years ago Southern Baptists experienced a schism when some church leaders concluded that calls for cooperation violated local church autonomy. Schism leaders objected to the national mission boards and demanded that missionaries be appointed by local churches. They also objected to state missions programs saying local churches should do state ministries. They demanded state corresponding secretaries (now known as state executive directors) be eliminated. 

While the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) rejected these demands in 1907, Baptists debated whether one should be a “Board Baptist” or a “Free Baptist” until the outbreak of World War II. Those who chose to cooperate through state and national convention structures were derided for abandoning the faith once delivered to the saints. Jesus commissioned the church to go into all the world, not some Baptist Board, they charged. 

A look at history

For those who left the SBC, church was only a local congregation and whenever churches worked together “for the great objects of the Kingdom of God” they were violating Scripture. 

A hundred years earlier Baptists fought a similar battle. In 1814 Baptists organized the Triennial Convention, the first national Baptist organization in America. Richard Furman, the first president of the Triennial Convention, and other Baptist leaders from the South led the group to form a convention-type organization based on cooperation. But in 1820, Francis Wayland, president of Brown College in Rhode Island, rallied Baptists from the North in a successful effort to overthrow convention-type cooperation in favor of individual participation. 

When the SBC was organized in 1845, messengers returned to an organization based on cooperation. Using careful wording the messengers said cooperative efforts were to “elicit, combine and direct the energies of our people in the most effective manner” and that “such organizations have no authority over one another or over the churches.” 

Baptists in the North continued to practice their individual or society model for another 100 years or more.

Today it seems Southern Baptists are again debating whether or not cooperation is a principle or a convenience. 

In 1907 most Southern Baptist churches had little choice but to cooperate if they wanted to be part of “great objects of the Kingdom of God.” Most churches were limited by resources. Transportation and communication were slow and difficult. Churches needed missions-sending agencies to help them be a part of reaching the world for Christ. They needed benevolent agencies to help them care for the hurting. They needed state conventions to help train workers for local church ministries. Few if any churches could do these things on their own. 

Cooperation worked. Southern Baptists developed massive ministries at home and abroad. Southern Baptists grew to have the largest and most varied Christian ministries of any Protestant denomination. Churches supported these works financially through the CP with the national average being above 10 percent of local church undesignated receipts going to cooperative causes. Special offerings were on top of what was considered the foundation piece of cooperation — financial support through the CP. 

It was the heyday of cooperation. 

Giving records show that by the 1980s cooperative giving began to wane. But giving reflected what was already happening in the churches. Cooperation was beginning to be seen as a convenience rather than a principle. 

Some churches grew large in size and resources. Megachurches did not need state conventions to train their leaders. These large churches could bring in the best resources in the nation and often sponsored events that competed and duplicated cooperative activities. 

Concentration of financial resources in megachurches meant local congregations could appoint and support their own church missionaries. Leaps in communication and transportation made it possible for local church missions teams to travel anywhere in the world.

Denominational identity became less important as churches established their own national media ministries while Southern Baptists abandoned cooperative efforts in radio and television. 

Today some churches have larger staffs than state conventions, and some of their leaders question the need for state conventions. There is nothing a state convention can do these churches cannot do for themselves, they say.

In fact, there is nothing the national denomination can offer some of these churches. They train their own workers, write their own material, appoint their own missionaries, do their own ministries and run their own schools. 

According to LifeWay Christian Resources, 51 percent of Southern Baptists now belong to 1 percent of SBC-related churches, most considered megachurches. 

Denominational shift

All the while cooperative giving declined. Now it is barely above 4 percent, according to the SBC Executive Committee. As a result the “great objects of the Kingdom of God” that Baptists have historically done together face difficult times. In the last few years, the denomination has turned to leaders from the 1 percent to guide Southern Baptists and the work we have always done together.  Not surprisingly denominational focus shifted. Now it seems Baptists have gone back to the future.

The new trend in missions is for churches to appoint and fund their own missionaries. Instead of a board to “elicit, combine and direct the energies” of Baptists, the International Mission Board may soon become a consulting service to local churches conducting their own missions programs. Once again the value of state mission boards is questioned by those championing that the work be left to local churches.

Other developments raise the question of cooperation being a principle or a convenience. Over-under relationships seem more prevalent than equal partners working together. Competing institutions vie for the same funding. Baptists even belittle one another in an apparent effort to gain more funding for a particular ministry.  

The issue is not church size because some megachurches are paragons of cooperation. The issue is not communication or technological developments. The issue is the basic question Baptists debated in each of the last two centuries. Is cooperation a principle of Baptist life or a convenience that served well in the past but whose day has passed? 

How that question is answered is important to who Baptists will become.