CHAMPAIGN, Ill. (ABP) — The Southern Baptist Convention has identified a missionary-sending goal big enough to accomplish the nearly 2,000-year-old task of the Great Commission — but lacks a clear fund-raising plan for meeting it, according to an upcoming annual report on Christian stewardship.
The State of Church Giving Through 2007 report, set for release Oct. 15 by empty tomb, inc., a Christian service and research organization based in Champaign, Ill., uses the nation's second-largest religious body as a case study to discuss money and the church.
Authors John and Sylvia Ronsvalle applaud the SBC for articulating a clear goal for engaging all unreached people groups on Earth. To do that, leaders say the SBC's International Mission Board would need to increase its present missionary force of 5,300 to about 8,000.
The Ronsvalles say Southern Baptists are not effectively meeting the goal, however, because there is no clear plan in place for raising additional money to support the new missionaries.
No cost estimate
When the Southern Baptist Convention announced 2,800 as "the number of additional IMB missionaries needed to engage the unreached people groups around the world with the gospel" in the September 2007 issue of the denominational magazine SBC Life, no cost estimate was included for those who might be interested in meeting the need.
Using a figure on the SBC website that it costs $40,931.64 a year to support each missionary, it would require another $114,608,592 annually to pay for 2,800 additional missionaries.
SBC Life did not use that cost estimate, however, because the bottom half of the full-page ad in which the goal appeared promoted the funding channel for meeting it as the Cooperative Program. CP is the SBC's unified funding plan that simultaneously funds state and national Baptist conventions. Half of CP funds collected at the national level go to the IMB; the rest fund other denominational causes such as theological seminaries and public-policy advocacy.
All denominations use international missions as a marketing tool to encourage general giving that supports the entire denominational structure, the Ronsvalles admit, but they contend that current funding practices of the SBC are failing to keep up with stated goals.
If the SBC is serious about its goal for global evangelism, the authors suggest it would be more effective to raise new money for missions through the annual Lottie Moon Christmas Offering, which is designated 100 percent for the IMB.
The Lottie Moon goal increased from $165 million in 2007 to $170 million in 2008, with no mention of the goal of expanding the mission force. The 2008 offering failed to reach even that goal, totaling $141 million, $9 million less than the final 2007 amount.
The shortfall prompted IMB trustees in June to suspend new appointments to both the International Service Corps and Masters programs — two-to-three-year missionary appointments geared for younger and older adults, respectively. They also approved reducing the number of new appointments to the career, apprentice, associate and journeyman missions-personnel programs.
Increasing IMB percentage of CP?
One proposal to remedy underfunding of the IMB is to strengthen the Cooperative Program by changing its percentage allocation. Traditionally the standards have been for congregations to forward 10 percent of their undesignated receipts to the state convention and for 50 percent of the money that comes into state conventions to be sent on to the SBC.
Even if that model were followed — the current average state conventions forward to the SBC is closer to 38 percent, and only a fraction of SBC-affilated churches give a full 10 percent to CP — congregations would need to direct $330 million more to the CP to generate an additional $114 million for international missions. State conventions and non-IMB entities at the national level would receive equal amounts.
The Ronsvalles say that seems unlikely with long-term trends showing smaller, not larger, percentages of congregational undesignated gifts being directed to the unified budget. A proposed benchmark of 10 percent for CP giving from the churches with which SBC leaders are affiliated — discussed at the SBC annual meeting in 2007 — prompted considerable debate within the denomination.
"The case study of the Southern Baptist Convention describes a denomination with a clearly stated goal that is not meeting that goal," the couple writes.
They say it would take "a relatively small amount of dollars" — about $7 for every member of a Southern Baptist church — to raise the $114 million needed annually to support 2,800 additional missionaries.
That could be done by mobilizing "retail billionaire philanthropists" — small donors who combine in large enough numbers to support multi-billion-dollar institutions — who have traditionally funded SBC mission work. The question, they say, is how to attract increased giving.
One scenario is to enlist one or more "wholesale billionaire philanthropists," large-capacity donors, to announce they would match every dollar of the 2009 Lottie Moon offering that exceeds the previous year's offering up to a specified amount.
The stated goal would be to increase the offering to a level adequate to fully fund current IMB operations, recover ground lost with the 2008 decline and, especially, to field the additional 2,800 missionaries needed to engage all unreached people groups.
The Ronsvalles calculate the new total at $265 million — an increase of $124 million over the most recent amount. Based on 2008 membership figures, the increased offering from congregations would cost each member an extra $3.82 to raise the $62 million to be matched by wealthy philanthropists.
Resistance from other SBC entities?
They say resistance would most likely come from agency heads fearing that churches would increase designated giving by reducing undesignated gifts — the notion of "robbing Peter to pay Paul."
The Ronsvalles contend, however that it is "not improbable" that the "money follows vision" formula would come into play, providing sufficient funds for other convention ministries as well.
They point out that church members are willing to support the general structure of the denomination, evidenced by the amounts of support they give to the Cooperative Program, but the percentage of donations leaving the local church has been declining since the 1980s.
"Denominational officials may take courage in the biblical affirmation that 'perfect love casts out fear' (I John 4:18), and choose to love those in desperate spiritual and physical need at the risk of the preservation of their own structures," they conclude.
"Current giving trends suggest that continuing in the same pattern will not protect those structures," they continue. "The perceived risks associated with expanding missions may be well worth taking."
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Bob Allen is senior writer for Associated Baptist Press.