NASHVILLE, Tenn. (BP) — Morris H. Chapman, president and chief executive officer of the Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee released a white paper May 7, “What’s in a name? The Cooperative Program and Great Commission Giving,” that expresses “grave concerns” about how the Great Commission Resurgence Task Force’s new category of giving, “Great Commission Giving,” will impact the Cooperative Program.
Chapman said the task force has given “lip service” in praising the Cooperative Program because its final report “takes away with the left hand what it affirms with the right.” The task force “elevates designated contributions” to mean the same in terms of cooperation as “contributions made to the whole” of Southern Baptist work through the Cooperative Program, he said.
Moreover, Chapman challenged those who agree with his concerns to attend the annual meeting “as a messenger from your church” and oppose the recommendation to create the new nomenclature and category of giving.
Chapman said the GCRTF proposal makes the Cooperative Program “just another component of a conglomerate category” and that this devalues the Cooperative Program and also leads to devaluation of the Cooperative Program name.
Cooperative missions and ministries are what define Southern Baptists, not what individual congregations do alone, Chapman said. Calling the Cooperative Program a “brand” known by Christians around the world, he said the Cooperative Program not only provides support for SBC missions and ministries, but that “the name and methodology historically have defined Southern Baptists as cooperating for the Great Commission.”
“Sadly, the ‘bait’ of ‘Great Commission Giving’ will lure unwary Southern Baptists to ‘switch’ from cooperating with the whole of our missions and ministries,” he wrote, adding that this would lead to “a revival of the old Independent Baptist model of societal giving.”
He also said the switch to the new terminology and emphasis would cause churches already giving low percentages through the Cooperative Program to give even less through CP.
“They certainly would not be motivated by the new giving category to give more through the Cooperative Program,” Chapman wrote. In effect, he said, the new category creates a new metric for measuring participation in the convention. “If the GCTF is as serious as it says it is about retaining the primacy of the Cooperative Program,” he wrote, “it would seem logical not to create any new category of support that would threaten to displace Cooperative Program as the metric of participation in the Convention.”
Chapman also cited what he called a “glaring omission.”
The final report “calls on individual donors to quadruple their average contributions … to their churches” … “state conventions to increase to 50 percent the percentage of Cooperative Program receipts they forward to the SBC” … “asks the Convention to set a goal of breaking the ‘50% barrier’ of the CP Allocation Budget to the IMB” … “But, amazingly, nowhere in the report are churches asked to set a giving goal for their contributions through the Cooperative Program,” he wrote.
Chapman named four other negative consequences he said would result:
• Devaluation of cooperative efforts (“It is a sad fact of human nature that when those who proportionally give small amounts to a collaborative enterprise try to control its processes, it undermines the willingness by those who proportionally give much to continue their giving at sacrificial levels.”)
• Unintended consequences of “budget shortfalls” caused by increased “special interest” giving.
• Instability for entities regarding funding projections.
• A fractured spirit (“Anything to lessen the effectiveness of the Cooperative Program … will endanger … the very spirit of cooperation by which we go about our work for God’s Kingdom.”)
Will Hall is vice president for convention news of the SBC’s Executive Committee.