TAMPA, Fla. (ABP) — Sagging financial contributions remain a challenge for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, members of the group’s Coordinating Council were told June 22.
CBF moderator Christy McMillin-Goodwin (center), who presided at the group's Coordinating Council meeting, chats with moderator-elect Colleen Burroughs of Birmingham, Ala., and Keith Herron of Kansas City, Mo., who is to be nominated as moderator-elect.
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Current receipts are running at about 82 percent of the $14.5 million budget for 2010-2011, said Bill McConnell, a Knoxville, Tenn., businessman who chairs the council’s finance committee.
“We have to do something to raise revenue,” McConnell, a member of Knoxville’s Central Baptist Church in Bearden, told council members meeting the day before the CBF’s annual General Assembly kicked off. “We’re still flat. We’re still where we were last year.”
The 66-member council is recommending to the General Assembly this week a reduced operating budget of $12.3 million for 2011-2012, a $2.2 million drop from this year’s budget goal. But if projected trends continue, even that lower figure won’t be met, said McConnell.
Year-to-date receipts are “exactly on track to end up where we were last year,” he said, at around $11.9 million.
“The finance committee agreed on $12.3 million [as a 2011-2012 budget goal] but even that isn’t where we are going to be.”
McConnell said CBF staff is functioning on about 89 percent of its budget to compensate for reduced revenue.
Contributions to the CBF’s Global Missions Offering also are running behind, but CBF executive coordinator Daniel Vestal said an enhanced initiative to increase offering gifts has been “heartening.” The offering’s goal this year, which ends Sept. 30, is $5.5 million. So far about $3.4 million has been collected.
Vestal said he and Ben McDade, coordinator of Fellowship advancement, have had conference calls and meetings with more than 100 pastors and about 155 individual donors as part of a “Keeping the Promises” campaign to close the offering shortfall.
“Frankly, it’s been heartening,” said Vestal. “The pastors have heard our appeals.”
He encouraged the council to consider ways the offering can be adapted to increase support for it.
“People are engaged in missions, involved in missions, giving to CBF, but they are involved in a more designated way,” added Vestal. “The way we’re doing the offering now is not generating the passion we need. There are still a lot of people who want to contribute to an offering but not enough. We need to make some changes.”
Possible changes, he said, could include moving the primary promotion of the offering from Christmas and Easter to Pentecost, or naming the offering as a way of “personalizing” it.
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Robert Dilday is managing editor of the Religious Herald.