Selective giving to the Southern Baptist Convention Cooperative Program budget is like believing children can choose their gender, Jeff Iorg told members of the SBC Executive Committee Sept. 22.
Iorg, president of the Executive Committee, addressed the gathering on the opening night of its fall meeting in Nashville, Tenn. He lamented that the 100-year-old cooperative giving plan now has splintered into 33 alternate configurations this year. That’s because state Baptist conventions have created a number of giving options that allow churches to support various ministries at various levels — contrary to the founding ideal of the Cooperative Program.
When created in 1925, the plan was simple: Churches would send a percentage (ideally 10%) of their undesignated offerings to their state Baptist conventions, which in turn would keep a percentage for use in-state and send a percentage to the SBC for national and international ministries.
Over the last 30 years, that arrangement has taken on various forms across the nation, with each state convention allowing its own variations. The SBC itself has allowed churches to be considered “Great Commission” churches if they give to some SBC entities but not all.
“Expressive individualism is antithetical to cooperation.”
The result today is the SBC suffers from “expressive individualism,” Iorg said. He compared that to “obsessive sharing on social media to convincing children they can choose their gender.”
“It is the worldview which demands mass customization and, at the same time, fuels aggressive tribalism,” he said. “Southern Baptists live in this cultural milieu and are being influenced by it. This is troubling because expressive individualism is antithetical to cooperation — the theological and philosophical foundation of our combined efforts.”
The multitude of giving options is “more than an accounting challenge,” Iorg said. “It is redefining the Cooperative Program as a catch-all phrase masking a return to an old approach of societal giving. This approach has been rejected by previous generations of SBC leaders as inadequate to fund a vast global mission enterprise.”
His dream, he said, “is that Southern Baptists will recommit to cooperation in all its messy splendor and focus on our overarching mission of getting the gospel to the nations rather than being preoccupied with lesser issues.”