When conservatives gained control of the Southern Baptist Convention in the early 1990s, leaders of state Baptist conventions paid their obeisance by upping the percentage of church offerings they sent to the national convention. Thirty years later, that well is going dry.
A mantra of the new conservative leadership was urging the 40 state and regional conventions to move toward a 50/50 split between state causes and SBC causes, which was said to be a return to the original 1925 vision. The larger state conventions located in the Deep South were most likely to follow through, while the smaller conventions in the West, Northwest and Northeast were least able to bear that burden.
Rather rapidly, this shift in percentages sent millions of dollars more to the SBC Executive Committee for disbursement to the dozen national agencies and institutions. All this happens through a complex formula known as the Cooperative Program. It’s sort of the United Way of denominational life.
In the SBC, people give offerings to their churches, and those churches send a percentage of undesignated offerings to their state Baptist convention. The ideal goal has been 10% but the average today is less than 5%.
Then in most cases — there are a few exceptions — those state conventions keep a portion of the offerings sent from the churches and send a fixed percentage to the SBC. Here’s where tweaking the levers advantaged the SBC and ultimately harmed the state conventions.
The result is that the national convention’s ministries grew at the expense of state convention ministries.
Even a 1% shift in giving from a state convention that takes in tens of millions of dollars amounts to significant money. The result is that the national convention’s ministries grew at the expense of state convention ministries.
And there’s another wrinkle: At the same time, the SBC North American Mission Board changed the way it cooperates with state conventions on its mission work, especially church planting, which is the majority of what it does. NAMB clawed back millions of dollars it previously distributed in partnership agreements with the states and used it to fund its own national church planting program.
So many state conventions felt a double whammy of reduced resources by giving a larger share of the Cooperative Program pie to the SBC while receiving less of the pie back from NAMB.
The pressure is so intense that the SBC’s in-house news service, Baptist Press, this week published an article explaining what is happening. That article questions the sustainability of the Cooperative Program, which will turn 100 next year.
Tennessee as example
As an example, it cites what recently happened at the Tennessee Baptist Convention, where messengers this fall voted to adjust their giving to the national budget downward, from 47.5% of receipts to 45%. That will allow the Tennessee convention to retain 55% of what churches send for use in the state. Tennessee is one of six state conventions that decreased percentage giving to the SBC this year.
Tennessee Baptists had been moving toward a 50/50 split with the SBC in Cooperative Program giving, but that no longer is sustainable, according to Randy Davis, president of the Tennessee Baptist Mission Board.
Giving from churches over the past decade has been flat, he said. “When you couple that with an inflation rate over the last decade of 24%, you can see the dilemma we’re in.”
The Tennessee mission board had recommended reducing the SBC allocation to 40% — a dramatic 7.5% cut — in order to send 5% designated directly to the SBC International Mission Board. The intent was for international missions not to suffer from the downturn. But messengers to the state annual meeting rejected that idea in favor of the overall reduction.
“They cannot keep giving more to SBC causes when they are receiving less from churches.”
The BP article cites Tennessee as part of a national pattern: “Tennessee isn’t the only state Baptist convention facing a funding dilemma. Multiple state and regional conventions this fall sought to cope with a stark reality: They cannot keep giving more to SBC causes when they are receiving less from churches.”
A fatal flaw in reasoning
The trend toward giving more money to the SBC carried one fatal flaw: It assumed giving from churches — the source of all funds — would continue to increase. But it has not.
BP explains: “State conventions have been forwarding more money to the SBC even as they receive less from churches. Twenty years ago, churches gave a total of just over $501 million through CP. It dropped to $482 million 10 years ago and $449 million last year. The bottom line: State conventions forwarded $12 million more to CP last year than they did two decades ago even though they received $52 million less.”
The California Southern Baptist Convention has been making staff cuts in order to keep money flowing to the SBC but this fall said they can’t keep doing that. The state convention adopted a tiered formula that prioritizes meeting in-state commitments first, followed by SBC needs second depending on how much money comes in.
“We are at a crossroads where the Cooperative Program might not be what it was in the past,” California Executive Director Pete Ramirez told BP. “The way this younger generation gives to missions is different than the previous generations. We’re going to have to figure out how do we do things different in our states to continue to do the great work we do as Southern Baptists.”
“We are at a crossroads where the Cooperative Program might not be what it was in the past.”
Even previous efforts to keep national ministries funded have fallen short, due to less money entering the Cooperative Program pipeline. For the fiscal year just ended Sept. 30, the national Cooperative Program received $191.24 million, about $4 million short of the $195.25 million goal.
According to data published by Lifeway Research for the fiscal year 2022–2023, SBC churches nationwide took in $10 billion in undesignated offerings. Of that money, $449 million made its way to state conventions, with $188.5 million of that forwarded to the SBC.
That means 4.48% of undesignated gifts in churches made it into the Cooperative Program pipeline and 1.9% made it to national SBC causes. Put another way, for every dollar put in a local church offering plate at an SBC church last year, less than 5 cents made it into the Cooperative Program and less than 2 cents funded national SBC causes.
Great Commission Giving
Only two SBC agencies — NAMB and IMB — benefit from special offerings on top of Cooperative Program giving. Those special offerings effectively double the income available to the two mission boards from the churches.
One way the SBC attempted to make the giving trends look better as churches became more selective about what they funded was to create a broad category called “Great Commission Giving.” This was to include all giving to the Cooperative Program and special missions offerings on the state and national levels, as well as designated giving to SBC entities.
This was tracked from 2011 through 2021 and showed a high of $777.5 million in 2013 that fell to $516.1 million by 2021.
Over the past dozen years, the amount of money entering the Cooperative Program pipeline at the state level has dropped from $487.9 million in 2010-2011 to $449.2 million in 2022-23.
Thus, as the SBC prepares to celebrate the centennial of what previous generations considered the “lifeblood” of SBC missions next year, more questions emerge about how sustainable an early 20th-century funding model will be in the 21st century.
Related articles:
From 1925 to 2024: Why the SBC’s funding formula is being questioned a century later | Analysis by Mark Wingfield
When a Baptist Press story tells you only part of the story | Analysis by Mark Wingfield
Here’s what’s wrong with the SBC’s trustee system | Opinion by Benjamin Cole