Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) messengers turned back a grassroots attempt to strengthen language in a report that encouraged the convention to elect leaders from churches that give generously to the denomination’s budget, but they rebuffed an attempt by the convention’s leadership to rein in the national Woman’s Missionary Union (WMU), an auxiliary to the SBC.
Mike Stone, pastor of Emmanuel Baptist Church, Blackshear, Ga., attempted to amend a recommendation from the SBC Executive Committee regarding an ad hoc committee’s report on promotion of the Cooperative Program (CP), the denomination’s unified giving plan.
The ad hoc committee originally recommended that churches be encouraged to give 10 percent of their annual undesignated receipts through the program, and it urged the election of state and national convention officers whose churches give at least 10 percent through the CP.
But on the eve of the convention, the larger Executive Committee revised the report to remove explicit references to a 10-percent standard. Stone’s amendment attempted to restore that language, but it failed by about a 2–1 margin on a show-of-ballots vote.
“To stand at the platform … year after year after year and to urge our pastors and churches to be exemplary in the area of CP giving and then to fail to have the courage to at least encourage churches to give at the level of 10 percent is an inconsistency of the highest order,” Stone said, to applause.
The percentage of annual revenues that many prominent SBC leaders’ churches forward to the budget has been a hot topic in recent months.
Anthony Jordan, executive director of the Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma and a member of the ad hoc committee, said that the committee realized a problem when it studied the history of CP giving.
“In 1980, the Southern Baptist Convention gave [an average of] 10.7 percent per church in undesignated receipts [through] the Cooperative Program. Today that is 6.6 percent,” he said. “We’re walking away from our responsibility to fund the greatest missionary force in the evangelical history of Christendom.”
But Executive Committee officials backed off after the report was publicized.
Rob Zinn, outgoing chairman of the Executive Committee, said the committee decided it wanted to be careful not to appear that it was intruding on the autonomy of local churches to give to the denomination as they feel called.
“We believe by putting a percentage there, it will be misconstrued that we are mandating what to give,” he said.
Bob Cleveland, a messenger from First Baptist Church, Pelham, said he was concerned about infringing on local-church autonomy.
“It is up to the local church to decide what God wants them to give,” he said. “We need to remember that God is the source of funds for the CP, not the local church. And if the CP is lacking, they need to look to God for what to do.”
After Stone’s attempt to amend it failed, the recommendation to approve the report passed with little opposition.
Convention messengers turned back an attempt, however, to assert more control over national WMU.
Messengers defeated an Executive Committee recommendation to “extend an invitation to” WMU to tighten its ties with the SBC by becoming an official convention agency. For its 118-year history, the organization — which promotes the denomination’s missionary efforts and provides hands-on ministry opportunities — has elected its own leadership. It receives no funds from the SBC budget.
The measure also offered WMU the option of affirming in its governing documents its “historic, unique and exclusive promotion of Southern Baptist Convention missions and ministries” and asked the organization to explain to the Executive Committee its response to the invitation.
WMU Executive Director Wanda Lee told messengers becoming a convention agency — and thus no longer self-governing — would remove the agency from the grassroots missions supporters who animate it.
The messengers then defeated the measure on a show-of-ballots vote.
In other business, messengers approved revised articles of incorporation for Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary in California, recognized Nashville attorney Jim Guenther on 40 years of service as the SBC’s general counsel and approved a $195,948,423 CP budget for the 2006–2007 fiscal year. (Editors’ Network)
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