I’m presently making last-minute travel arrangements to head to Dallas at the end of the week. This year marks my 11th year in a row attending the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting. It’s my 13th meeting in total. Yes, I go because of my work, but my wife and I believe we ought to be there. Frankly, we’d come even if we didn’t have to. We think it’s that important. And, this year is an exceptional year: it marks the 100th anniversary of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Cooperative Program (CP).
If you’re reading this and not a Southern Baptist, permit me to have a family conversation for just a moment. As we get ready for the annual meeting, I find myself reflecting on the importance of the CP, both historically and personally. I’m a missions history professor, after all, and it’s hard to overstate the significance of the CP for Southern Baptists (and evangelical missions broadly). But that’s just half the story, because my own story cannot be told without it.
As I reflect on my own life and ministry, it wouldn’t be possible without the CP. That is not just true now. The last two decades of my life are, in some way, indepted to the CP. This year, I paused to think deeply on this fact, and I cannot be more thankful for the investment in me, my family, and our Great Commission ministry.
But let’s start with the history stuff…
What makes the CP a big deal?
The Cooperative Program was established in Memphis, TN in 1925. For years, Southern Baptists utilized the older missions society model for funding its various missions and ministry efforts. Baptists were raising money for state conventions, missions entities, and seminaries separately. Instead, the CP is a unified budgeting system that allows local churches to send a percentage of their income into a cooperative pool of funds which then facilitates the missions and ministry spending for all of their entities, state conventions, and seminaries. The pool starts at the various state conventions across the country. Churches give a portion of their income to the conventions, which then send “upward” a percentage of that money to the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention. The money is dispersed to the mission boards, the seminaries, and other ministry causes.
It sounds complicated, perhaps, but it’s beautiful in its simplicity. It created one contribution channel that funds and fuels the work of dozens conventions, agencies, and ministry efforts. The results have been unprecedented among Protestants in ministry funding. The funding generated over the last hundred years through the stream has fully funded thousands of missionaries all over the world, thousands of church plants across North America, six separate seminaries that train thousands of ministry leaders (some of the largest seminaries in North America) at a significantly discounted rate for those students. That’s without getting into the support of state convention ministry, the Ethics and Religious Liberties Commission, and many other smaller initiatives.
Before the CP, Southern Baptists employed a variety of different methods to fund these missions and ministries. Sometimes, funding was solicited directly by deputized men who traveled around making appeals to all the various Southern Baptist churches. As you can imagine, this fragmented system caused perennial instability among the various mission boards and ministries. In 1919, the SBC decided it needed to do something different and began the 75 Million Campaign. This was a new campaign to raise money for all missions and ministries at state and national levels. The campaign ran until 1924, and while it didn’t raise the full $75 million, it demonstrated the potential of a cooperative giving model. The next year, the CP was adopted by the SBC at the annual meeting in Memphis.1
The approach was innovative. It allowed for the distinct Baptist commitment to local church autonomy while creating a unified means for raising missions dollars. Its adoption changed the face of Southern Baptist missions, which is now the largest Protestant denomination with the most substantial missions and ministry footprint globally. In the years since its founding, the CP has raised over $20 billion dollars to support untold ministry efforts for over 45,000 Southern Baptist churches and countless international efforts around the world. 2
My Benefits from the CP
The CP changed evangelical missions, but that is not the focus of my reflections this past week. You cannot write the story of the Southern Baptist Convention without the CP, but you also cannot write my story without it.
From the time I graduated high school, the CP supported most everything I have done. That sounds like an exageration. I thought so, too, at first.
My undergraduate institution, Union University, is a Tennessee Baptist school, a school supported by CP contributions through the Tennessee Baptist Mission Board. After college, I eventually went to serve with the IMB overseas, and the CP (alongside Lottie) completely funded my salary, housing, medical benefits, and all ministry needs necessary for me to be there. I left the mission field to continue my education and landed at one of our six Southern Baptist Seminaries where I received a tuition discount of 50% thanks to the CP.
I soon began working at Southeastern, which means CP giving once again supported my salary at some level. Shortly after arriving in the Raleigh area, I started serving as one of the pastors for a new church plant that received financial support from NAMB, thanks to the CP. My wife and I met on campus at Southeastern. We got engaged and married in Binkley Chapel. Our family started here.
Then our family moved to Houston, where I served as one of the associate directors for the Union Baptist Association. For the first time in a long time my salary was not paid, in some part, by the CP. Associations normally stand outside of the CP funding stream. However, the CP still fueled so much of our ministry. In Texas, we worked alongside (not one but) two state conventions both planting churches in the Houston area and using CP dollars to support that work.
Then there was disaster relief.
Six months after my family’s arrival in Houston, we experienced Hurricane Harvey. The damage was devastating to the Houston area. I watched firsthand as Southern Baptist disaster relief put its CP dollars to use aiding the churches in the city as they provided critical care and relief to the millions affected in the area. Frankly, coordinating with all the various churches, two state conventions, our association, NAMB, and the other parties involved was a confusing mess of logistics. But that mess is what made it remarkable. We had that many different means of engaging the problem, all propped up by the CP.
Almost four years ago, my family moved back to Wake Forest. My wife and I both began roles at Southeastern. I now direct the missions center and serve on the teaching faculty. She writes grants for the seminary.
The CP has literally kept the lights on and put food on my table for much of my last 15 years of ministry. It’s hard to articulate the kind of gratitude that realization creates. Millions of Southern Baptists support my family and ministry, the vast majority of which have no idea they do that.
That reality forces me to reflect on the ministry journey those funds have enabled. Along the way, I saw some of the first churches planted among an unreached people group in a Muslim part of the world. I got to train those first believers and develop pastors and leaders as those churches began to stand on their own.
I got to shepherd the people at a new church in Raleigh that has now seen hundreds of people come through its doors, has baptized many, and sent dozens to the international mission field — most of which were also supported by the CP.
In my role at this seminary, I watch hundreds of young men and women study and train for the work of gospel ministry. Many will be Christian counselors or educators. Even more will serve as pastors and local church leaders across our country. Literally hundreds of them at Southeastern tell my office they want to give their lives to the cause of Christ overseas where the gospel is not known.
My summer class started last week. I have 30 students learning about the mission of God and the role we, Christ’s church, play in that. This summer, I’ll take a different group of students overseas to an area of the world with little to no access to the gospel. They will serve alongside one of our IMB field teams. This trip is one of a dozen trips we’ve taken as a seminary this year all over the world. Both ends of this trip, those going and the field teams they are supporting, are made possible by the CP.
My Hopes for the CP
If you search for information about the CP online right now, it doesn’t take too many clicks to discover that giving is on a long, slow decline. It appears we peaked in 2007, and it’s been declining ever since.
My goal is not to pontificate on the present state of the CP, or to suggest a means of fixing the very complicated issues that surround its rehabilitation. I don’t know the future of the CP, and I don’t know how to get churches to once again resource it to the level they could.
May aim is meager: to marvel at what the CP has accomplished.
I talk about it a lot in my classes and other places from a historical perspective. Today, I wanted to tell it from another angle: my angle. This is what the CP has done for me.
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Keith Harper and Amy Whitfield, SBC FAQ’s: A Ready Reference (Nashville: B&H, 2018). ↩
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Scott Barkley, “Cooperative Program Crosses $20 Billion in Cumulative Giving,” Baptist Press, 1 October 2021. ↩