Editor’s note: This is the first installment in a multi-part analysis BNG will publish over the coming weeks about the work of the SBC Executive Committee.
After resisting messenger directives for more than 15 years, the 86-member Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee voted last month in Nashville to recommend a 51% annual Cooperative Program allocation for the International Mission Board. In a stroke of fiscal irony, the total 2026-27 CP Allocation Budget drops to the same baseline level ($186 million) that it was 15 years ago.
The major difference: When adjusted for inflation, the Cooperative Program’s current buying power is down more than 30% over the last 15 years. Put in real dollars, the SBC’s flatline $186 million budget is only worth $128.5 million today, what it was back in 2011. And the trend of declining church support doesn’t seem to be slowing down. Days after the Executive Committee meeting last month, Baptist Press reported February’s Cooperative Program receipts were 8.4% under budget.
“After as many years as it took the Apostle Paul to complete all three of his missionary journeys, the Executive Committee has made good on the convention mandate to give 51% of CP money to the IMB.”
For starters, we should acknowledge that 15 years in Southern Baptist life is a very long time, especially when the average pastoral tenure is less than four years. Consider also that it only took 11 years (1979 to 1990) for resurgent conservatives to take control of trustee boards for all convention entities, boards, commissions and seminaries. Or that it took a mere 12 years for Al Mohler to go from a college dormitory at Samford University (1981) to taking up residence at the presidential mansion on the campus of Southern Seminary (1993).
Even more telling, a short 18 months in the mid-1990s is all that was required for the Executive Committee to restructure the entire convention and reduce the number of its agencies from 19 to 12. After that, it was a quick two years while the convention implemented those sweeping changes, including numerous entity charter changes, amended governing documents, revised ministry assignments, hundreds of staff relocations and reductions, and changes to Cooperative Program apportionments.
But now, after as many years as it took the Apostle Paul to complete all three of his missionary journeys, the Executive Committee has made good on the convention mandate to give 51% of CP money to the IMB. Are we supposed to celebrate this overdue compliance? Just wait until you hear the platform self-congratulations offered during the Executive Committee report this coming June.
Simply asked, what good reasons can be offered for why it has taken so long for the Executive Committee to make a simple one percent adjustment in Cooperative Program allocations? And what are the real-world missionary consequences of the 15-year foot-dragging? The facts reveal a disturbing trend.
Starting in 2011, the Executive Committee proposed a combined CP allocation budget of $186 million, the same as this year’s recommendation. When adjusted for inflation since 2011, however, the IMB’s CP allocation share (which has climbed from 50.2% to 50.41% and now at 51%) has declined in real dollars by more than 30%.
In other words, even though the Executive Committee has finally recommended a 51% IMB allocation in 2026, the real dollar impacts of CP for the mission board have declined by nearly $30 million since 2011. And while the CP budget has held mostly flat over the last 15 years, the IMB’s CP buying power has plummeted to the lowest point in 40 years (1987-88 IMB CP allocation was $66 million).
Yet astoundingly, the Executive Committee now heralds its recent actions as “prioritizing” the Cooperative Program in a way that is “consequential.” This kind of denominational propaganda would be humorous if it wasn’t so blatantly dishonest.
What the Executive Committee doesn’t want to report is how much money their now 15-year delayed implementation of the messengers‘ 51% goal for IMB’s allocation has cost. The math is brutal.
Beginning in 2011, the Executive Committee recommended a 50.20% allocation for the IMB. Two years later and every year since 2013, the Executive Committee has recommended a 50.41% allocation. These shortfalls have resulted in between $1.08 million and $1.9 million in lost CP distributions to IMB every year. Added up, the Executive Committee’s failure to recommend an allocation budget that complied with messenger directives has cost the IMB nearly $18.5 million since 2010.
At the same time — according to convention annuals — the IMB mission force has been reduced from more than 5,000 field personnel in 2010 to just more than 3,600 today. This includes normal retirements and attrition rates plus the more than 1,100 layoffs, terminations and staffing reductions implemented by former IMB President David Platt during the 2016 downsizing.
(Note: The year the IMB was downsizing due to budget cuts, the Executive Committee’s combined assets, including cash on hand and unrestricted investments, were reaching an all-time high. See chart below.)
In terms of mission impacts, this lost $18.5 million translates to IMB’s inability to send critically needed missionary personnel, assuming the numbers current IMB President Paul Chitwood reports are accurate. Apparently, the Executive Committee thinks sending missionaries is less important than paying lawyers and rebuilding its own reserve accounts.
Since 2010, the Executive Committee’s total assets have fluctuated between a low of $17.84 million in 2023 and a high of $26.5 million in 2017. According to the latest financial audit, the recent fluctuations are primarily due to ongoing legal costs associated with the convention’s sex abuse investigation.
“There really is no good excuse for why the Executive Committee has failed to honor the convention’s long stated goal.”
In 2024, for instance, the Executive Committee spent $457,000 directly on lawsuits related to sex abuse, another $2.37 million for costs associated with the indemnification of Guidepost Solutions, and an additional $211,000 on a Department of Justice Investigation. In 2025, the expenditures were $746,000, $1.48 million and $5,000, respectively. Since 2021, total costs associated with the Executive Committee’s handling of sex abuse have surpassed $13 million.
And what did Jeff Iorg and the Executive Committee recommend to meet the cash demand for lawyers’ fees? Last year, they requested a $3 million “priority” allocation of Cooperative Program funds to replenish the Executive Committee’s depleted assets. The lesson is clear: When the Executive Committee needs millions more to fight the frivolous lawsuits filed by former SBC President Johnny Hunt and other malefactors, denominational workers come to the convention churches hat-in-hand.
Yet when the convention churches demand a single percent increase in foreign mission funds, the bureaucrats in Nashville take more than 15 years to adjust the budget in line with the convention’s most enduring priorities.
There really is no good excuse for why the Executive Committee has failed to honor the convention’s long stated goal for a 51% IMB share increase. Frank Page didn’t do it. Ronnie Floyd didn’t do it. God knows Willie McLaurin didn’t do it. Apparently, Jeff Iorg is the one we’ve been waiting for?
To be fair, neither did any of the Executive Committee chairmen or trustee budget leaders over the last 15 years. Neither Roger Spradlin, nor Ernest Easley, nor Stephen Rummage, nor Mike Stone, nor Rolland Slade, nor Jared Wellman, nor Phil Robertson implemented the messengers‘ directive.
So one wonders: Just what has the Executive Committee been doing all these years instead of fulfilling its primary responsibility to administer Cooperative Program allocations on behalf of and as directed by the convention’s churches? Good question.
Over the coming weeks, I will dig into the epic failures of the SBC Executive Committee to perform its primary ministry assignment, the perennial self-aggrandizement of its extra-constitutional authority, its disastrous staffing missteps, and the many ways the ad-interim governing body of the SBC has possibly breached its fiduciary duties, compromised trust and misdirected the energies and resources of 47,000 Southern Baptist churches.
Churches, I should add, who are inundated with requests from denominational bureaucrats every year to give more and more money while being told less and less about their stewardship of billions in convention assets.
Benjamin Cole is a crisis communications consultant who also is a former Southern Baptist pastor. He writes online as The Baptist Blogger and is co-host with Mark Wingfield of BNG’s podcast “Stuck in the Middle with You.”