ATLANTA (ABP) — Some missions personnel might never have reached the field, while others might be at home now taking early retirement, if not for two large anonymous gifts that the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship received in the past two years.
“These gifts have been very important in strengthening the ministry of CBF,” said Daniel Vestal, the Fellowship's national coordinator. “They have made it possible for us to send missionaries that would not have been sent otherwise. They have provided the financial resources for mission projects, church planting and mission support.”
The Fellowship's global missions program received $8.2 million of the $9 million gifts, to be spent over several years. The rest went to church starts and the CBF Church Benefits Board. “The decision as to how the funds would be used was determined by the donors,” Vestal said.
The Fellowship's spends about $11 million a year on global missions in the United States and abroad.
Gary Baldridge, global missions co-coordinator, said the unbudgeted gifts were used to send 16 new mission personnel to Toronto, North Africa, China, Los Angeles, Athens, Southeast Asia and Detroit; provide supplementary college funds for children of field personnel; and provide stipends for student missions, among other personnel needs.
Additionally, the money funded field projects such as agricultural development, literature, assistance to orphans and street children, hunger and refugee relief, medical, water development and Bible distribution, he said. Other priorities, such as local-church partnerships, church planting and social ministries to neglected people groups, benefited as well.
“Gifts such as these enhance CBF's work by relieving the pressures of the relatively lean economic years, providing resources to boost a particular ministry, like the 600 percent increase in student missionaries, and giving the organization time to rebound from dips in normal revenues,” Baldridge said.
Anonymous gifts to the Fellowship of any size are unusual, said Jim Strawn, the Fellowship's coordinator for finance. “We don't get many of them of any size,” he said. “These gifts were mission driven, given by people who have a love and a heart for missions.”
Had CBF not received the special gifts, Baldridge said, it would have meant a moratorium on the commissioning and deployment of new mission personnel, early retirement of veteran personnel, elimination of dozens of field projects, potential layoff of staff, and possible return home of some field personnel.
“The next challenge will be to maintain and to increase these ministries beyond the life of the gifts,” Baldridge said. “At some point within the next two or three years, normal giving to CBF will need to have increased substantially for these works to continue.”
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