NASHVILLE, Tenn. (ABP) — The Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee is recommending $4.5 million in spending cuts next year in a Cooperative Program allocation budget to be voted on at the SBC's 2010 annual meeting June 15-16 in Orlando, Fla.
According to Baptist Press, the Executive Committee voted Feb. 23 to present a budget of $199,822,090 for the 2010-2011 fiscal year. That is 2 percent less than $204,385,592 in the current budget as reported in the 2009 SBC Annual.
It will mark the second consecutive year that messengers will vote on a reduced budget — the 2009-2010 budget adopted last summer is $1.3 million smaller than the 2008-2009 spending plan of $205.7 million.
If approved, as expected, next year's budget will be the first under $200 million adopted by the convention since 2006.
Roger "Sing" Oldham, the Executive Committee's vice president for convention relations, said the denomination "follows a fiscally prudent budgetary process" that projects income equal to the previous year's actual receipts.
"This plan seeks to minimize the financial fallout sustained when the nation experiences an economic crisis," Oldham said. "However, even given fiscal responsibility, no budget process could account for the size and the breadth of the economic meltdown of 2009."
According to an article in the February/March 2010 issue of SBC Life, nearly 45,000 Southern Baptist churches received tithes and offerings totaling more than $12 billion in 2008. Churches on average gave about 6 percent of those funds to 42 state and regional Baptist conventions. Roughly two-thirds of those monies were used to fund ministries at the state level.
The remaining third — or 2 percent of the total received by churches — is forwarded to national ministries of the SBC, which allocates funds to various denominational entities. The largest, the International Mission Board, gets 50 cents of every dollar received at the national level. Between 22 and 23 cents go to the North American Mission Board, and a roughly equal amount is divided among the six SBC seminaries.
Smaller percentages are allocated to the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, which receives 1.65 percent of the CP pie, and the Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives, which gets one quarter of 1 percent. The Executive Committee receives 3.4 percent of the budget, to be used for facilitating ministries like planning the SBC annual meeting and conducting day-to-day business on the convention's behalf.
According to SBC Life, Baptist state conventions expect to receive nearly $40 million less from local churches in 2010 than they received in the previous year. Some state groups have witnessed consecutive years of budget cuts and several have reduced staff.
Ed Stetzer, director of LifeWay Research, said while the economy is improving, churches — which become more volunteer-driven to help people in need — typically don't recover until unemployment goes down, which has not yet happened in the current recession.
Stetzer said more than half of pastors surveyed recently reported higher unemployment in their congregations and nearly a fourth said more people have moved away in search of work. Nearly half of churches (47 percent) reported freezing staff salaries for 2009, compared to one third (35 percent) in 2008.
In his report to the Executive Committee Feb. 22, President and CEO Morris Chapman, who retires this year, said in a little more than a decade the average amount of church offerings forwarded to state and national ministries through the Cooperative Program has declined from 10 percent to 6 percent.
"If our churches would raise their Cooperative Program gifts by an average of 1 percent, the Cooperative Program increase for all SBC entities would be $36 million in a given year," Chapman said. "The International Mission Board alone would receive half of that amount, or $18 million. The six seminaries would receive roughly $1 million, plus or minus."
Chapman said when all gifts are combined — Cooperative Program, two annual mission offerings and designated offerings — the International and North American mission boards receive about 86 cents out of every dollar received at the national level.
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Bob Allen is senior writer for Associated Baptist Press.