NASHVILLE — The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) ended its fiscal year 0.76 percent below last year’s contributions and missed its Cooperative Program (CP) allocation budgeted projection of $191.5 million by 2.58 percent, according to SBC Executive Committee President Frank S. Page.
The SBC received $186,567,610.63 in Cooperative Program Allocation Budget gifts during the fiscal year Oct. 1, 2013–Sept. 30, 2014, or $1,433,665.07 less than the $188,001,275.70 received during the last fiscal year ending Sept. 30, 2013.
“We have been monitoring CP gifts closely since the Great Recession and believe we may have reached the nadir, or lowest point, for national Cooperative Program gifts,” Page said. “Individual giving to churches continues to lag behind other sectors of charitable giving in the United States, but we remain prayerfully optimistic that through a combination of the ‘1% CP challenge’ and a renewed commitment of individual giving through churches, we will see an uptick in CP funding for our missions and ministries over the next several years.
“The Atlas of Giving forecasts that giving to religious organizations will decline by 2 percent year-to-year, so the fact that our national CP giving was down by less than 1 percent and overall giving was actually slightly up shows we are bucking the trend,” Page said. “The ‘1% CP Challenge’ coupled with focused prayer may have made all the difference for Southern Baptists over the past few years.” (TAB)
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