By Editor Bob Terry
We encourage the election of state and national convention officers whose churches systematically and enthusiastically lead by example in giving sacrificially and proportionally through the Cooperative Program (CP).”
That was the statement adopted by the messengers to the 2006 annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) concerning qualifications for convention officers.
It is a strong statement and may have played a part in the election of Frank Page as the new SBC president. Messengers may have been influenced by the fact that the church Page serves gave 12.4 percent through the CP, while the person who finished second in the race serves a church that gave 0.27 percent during the last year of record.
What the statement does not say is that state convention executive directors wanted a much stronger statement. The initial proposal, approved by state convention executives in February, included the statement “give at least 10 percent of their undesignated receipts through the Cooperative Program” as a condition for eligibility. State executives have seen the percentage of CP giving decline over a period of several years. In 1984, for example, the average church contributed 10.6 percent of its undesignated receipts to missions causes through the CP. In 2005, that percentage was 6.66 percent.
If SBC presidents come from churches with good CP giving records, then it might be a way of encouraging others to increase giving to missions through the CP, some executives publicly declared.
However, members of the SBC Executive Committee and messengers to the annual meeting declined to establish a minimum percentage of missions giving for SBC officers. The decision was not surprising. In 1985, the Executive Committee rejected a proposal that would have set a 6 percent CP giving requirement for SBC officers.
These may have been wise decisions. It is an accepted axiom that any member of an organization should be eligible to serve as an officer in that organization. Having one set of requirements for participation in the SBC and another set of requirements for leadership may not have been the wisest step, in this writer’s judgment.
The SBC places no minimum amount of financial support for participation in convention life. The SBC constitution says only that one has to be a “bona fide contributor to the Convention’s work.”
For each $250 a church contributes “to convention work in the fiscal year preceding the convention,” that church is entitled to an additional messenger, up to a maximum of 10. Those figures have not been changed since the SBC constitution was first drafted in 1845. Giving through the CP is not even mentioned because the CP did not exist until 1925.
Today cooperative giving is the financial backbone for the missionary, education and benevolent ministries of state conventions and the SBC alike. CP giving is widely viewed as an indication of a church’s commitment to what Baptists do together.
Perhaps it is time to re-examine the monetary threshold for a church to be considered in “friendly cooperation” with the SBC and eligible for participation in annual meetings. The SBC constitution has been amended several times through the years, but no one has tackled the issue of membership.
In the 1980s, the late Harold Bennett, then president of the SBC Executive Committee, prompted a thorough study of the financial threshold for SBC participation.
But the convention was in the throws of a deeply divisive political struggle, and no one wanted to change the qualifications of membership during a political struggle. To do so, it was feared, would be seen as an attempt to disenfranchise churches (and messengers) rather than to update membership criteria.
Today there is no major political struggle. The conservative roots of the SBC have been deeply planted. This may be the time to revisit the membership threshold for convention participation. To equate $250 in 1845 with the purchasing power of $250 today or with the sacrificial giving of Baptists of that day would be farcical. Perhaps the SBC constitution should call present-day churches to a similar level of financial commitment to Baptist work as was presented to the churches in 1845.
Since much has been said about the CP giving of SBC presidents during the conservative resurgence, a list of the presidents and the CP giving of their church is printed below. The giving records reflect the last year of record before that person’s election as SBC president.
The information comes from the Southern Baptist Directory Service or from the appropriate state convention offices. We hope this will be useful information.
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