A pastor, a seminary student and Frank Page, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s (SBC) Executive Committee, delivered a challenge for renewed commitment to unified ministry through the SBC’s Cooperative Program (CP) by even a 1 percent-of-budget increase in 2012.
Kevin White, pastor of First Baptist Church, Longview, Wash., was 4 years old, living in a mining town of 80 people in northern Nevada, when a CP-funded missionary began visiting and repeatedly witnessing to his father.
“Through his devotion, my family came to Jesus Christ,” White said. “I watched a radical change in my father,” who five years later was pastor of a church the missionary planted in the remote town. He also planted several other churches, primarily among Native Americans, during the next 35 years.
White also became a church planter, as will his son, a recent seminary graduate who will soon engage in church planting among an unreached people group overseas.
Quincy Jones, a student at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, asked, “Is our vision of the Cooperative Program the Lord’s vision? … Could the Cooperative Program actually be about more than numbers and dollars, actually be about a special stewardship from God given to Southern Baptists?”
The questions — part of an initiative started at Southwestern by Jones — should “stimulate a greater awareness and appreciation … for … the Cooperative Program,” he said.
Page echoed that sentiment.
“What we do together, we do to the glory of God,” he said. “And He is using cooperative ministry, unified ministry, in a mighty way across this land.”
But the SBC has “been headed in the wrong direction in several ways,” he said. “Our convention is fracturing into various groups, some theological, most methodological.
“I believe our unity affects our evangelism,” Page said. “And it’s time to come together in a principle of unified ministry.
“We’re challenging you; would you please do more than you’ve done before?”
Page introduced a video showing that a 1 percent-of-budget increase in CP giving from all SBC churches would add $100 million to the CP.
This would allow hundreds of churches to be planted across the United States and 380 international missionaries to be commissioned and boost seminary student enrollment by 16,000 students. (BP)
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