First Baptist Church, Springdale, Ark., operates on the fiscal year of what is historically known as the official church year, Oct.1–Sept. 30. Therefore any discussion we have is always around our fiscal year, which is also the fiscal year of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) Cooperative Program (CP) reporting and budget.
Therefore we know through all decisions and verifications from our audited records the following about our CP giving.
This is the way our church board of directors makes financial decisions. It is also the way our church makes decisions as related to the adoption of our annual budget.
The following represents those decisions and actualities toward our CP giving:
2007–08: $243,000
2008–09: $350,000
2009–10: $400,000
Our intention and commitment to giving through the CP has resulted in an increase of 64.60 percent over the past two years. This is what we have adopted and operated by as a church.
The $400,000 gift this present church year will place our church probably in the top 60, perhaps 50, churches in the SBC.
We are going in the right direction. Pray for us that we will be able to do that. It is our heart.
Pastor Ronnie Floyd
FBC Springdale, Ark.
EDITOR’S NOTE — In the May 13 editorial in The Alabama Baptist, “Needed: Worthy Examples of CP Support,” a reference was made to CP giving at First, Springdale, Ark., declining in 2009. The information indicating a decline came from the Southern Baptist Directory Services, which records the Annual Church Profile (ACP) for all churches that want to participate. But what Floyd has discovered since then is that the Arkansas Baptist State Convention records CP giving on the ACP based on a calendar year instead of the church’s fiscal year. Because First, Springdale, Ark., uses the Oct. 1–Sept. 30 fiscal year, a false impression of its CP giving is reflected in the ACP when looking at a specific year. When calculated on the church (fiscal) year, the percentage of undesignated receipts given through the CP at First, Springdale, Ark., increased from 1.65 percent in 2007–08 to 2.61 percent in 2008–09.
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