That’s the question posed in a DVD produced by the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention ahead of Cooperative Program (CP) Sunday on April 22. That’s the day SBTC churches are asked to remind their congregations—or perhaps explain for the first time—how the CP makes worldwide ministry possible for the church of 15 members and the megachurch of 15,000 members.

In the feature video on the DVD—accessible at sbtexas.com/cp—viewers are asked to imagine:

• More seminary students training to take the gospel farther and wider,

• More missionaries to engage the remaining 3,800 unengaged and unreached peoples,

• More church planters to evangelize and plant among the 300-plus language groups that make Texas home, and amid an increasingly secular English-speaking population in Texas and across North America,

• More disaster relief volunteers to respond to natural and manmade emergencies with Christian compassion and a gospel witness.

“When you give, your church gives, and that money is gathered with thousands of other church gifts, and that enables the work of the gospel everywhere,” SBTC President Terry Turner, pastor of Mesquite Friendship Baptist Church, said on camera in explaining how the CP is working to engage the world’s 7 billion people.

With every dollar given through the CP, “My church plants churches, sends students to seminary, funds disaster relief and so much more,” Turner said. “Just imagine as you give to your church how the gospel is empowered through that gift.”

Since 1925, the Cooperative Program has been the shared funding mechanism of Southern Baptists, replacing a “societal” method of fund-raising that pitted otherwise kindred institutions against each other. While independently funded missionaries spend considerable time in fund-raising, SBC missionaries are able to focus on the gospel task exclusively.

With a brief narration by Turner and testimonies by church planters, pastors and seminarians, the four-minute video states the benefits of shared giving and funding.

Along with Turner, the video features brief messages from Rowlett church planter Shane Pruitt, Southwestern Seminary student Quincy Jones, SBTC Disaster Relief volunteer Dewey Watson, and pastors Joe Rivera of Grand Prairie, Tony Mathews of Garland, Walter Jackson from DeKalb and Jim Pritchard from Forney.

Jones, explaining that he came from an independent Bible church background, said he was amazed to learn that a seminary education for Southern Baptist students is roughly 50-60 percent lower than comparable schools because much of the cost is underwritten through CP.

In another video on the same DVD, Jones heaped further praise on the CP mechanism.

“And considering church planters and missionaries, that they don’t have to raise their own funding, they can go right to the field and they can go right to the business of reaching people for the sake of Christ, [it] is just awesome,” Jones said.

Pruitt, pastor of Connection Church, a 14-month-old congregation in Rowlett, lauds the SBTC for helping support 59 church plants in Texas last year, aided by CP.

“Imagine more churches being planted in the state of Texas, sufficient to preach the gospel in every community and every language in our state,” Pruitt said.

Pruitt, also featured in a separate video on the DVD, tells how Connection Church began 14 months ago with 31 people and now is averaging 350 attenders and preparing to move to three services. They have baptized 30 people.

“Your giving towards us and the support that we receive on a monthly basis has helped us to do great things here in our community,” Pruitt said. “We’ve been on three mission trips and we also give in to the Cooperative Program—mainly because we believe in it so much.

“So I just wanted to share with you the seed that you’re planting—we are seeing kingdom growth here in Rowlett, so thank you so much.”

Minister-Church Relations Director Tom Campbell added: “Cooperative Program Day gives churches an opportunity to help their members understand how they can literally be a part of reaching the world with the gospel. I encourage each church to take some time on April 22 to share about CP and how by giving through it, we can do so much more together. The SBTC can help with bulletin inserts, videos, and other resources.”

In addition to the DVD, Cooperative Program brochures are also available. To order materials, visit sbtexas.com/cp or contact Stephanie Harmon at sharmon@sbtexas.com or toll-free at 877-953-7282 (SBTC).

DEKALB—From the far corner of northeast Texas, First Baptist Church of DeKalb has been ministering to its community for 150 years. The 200-member congregation extends its reach beyond the local population of 1,700 to minister across Texas and around the world by giving through the Cooperative Program.

“The exciting thing to me about the Cooperative Program is that it allows churches—average churches and even smaller churches—to be a part of reaching the world,” said Walter Jackson, pastor of the church since 2001.

For many years the church faithfully gave 9 percent of undesignated receipts through the Cooperative Program (CP), and then voted last year to increase that amount to 10 percent after Jackson explained the significance of that decision.

“When the 1-percent challenge was issued to increase our giving to the Cooperative Program, I let them know we have the opportunity to join with other churches to add an additional $100 million to CP, send out 300 new missionary families, and support 16,000 seminary students” while supporting new churches across the nation, Jackson recalled. “It’s an opportunity to be a partner right here in the state of Texas where our Southern Baptists of Texas Convention cares so much about the world that we give away more money than we keep here in the state.”  

“We’re able to do so much work for the kingdom of God. When the challenge was given, they upped it 1 percent,” he said, praising the recommendation of the budget and finance committee.

Jackson takes every opportunity to keep CP before the congregation, showing video testimonies provided by the SBTC and distributing CP-related flyers in church bulletins.

Two groups of volunteers traveled from the church to help with recovery following Hurricane Rita, helping the Nehemiah’s Vision ministry funded partly by CP support from SBTC. Eleven members of the church completed Phase 1 disaster relief training last year in order to be available through a ministry made possible by the CP gifts of Southern Baptists.

“We talk about our mission offerings and consistently exceed our goals. We have personal friends serving as Southern Baptist missionaries and I tell our people, ‘If you give, you are helping support these efforts.’”

Among those friends are Ed and Linda Miller, career missionaries appointed by the International Mission Board to serve in Zambia for 31 years. Miller was ordained while serving as associate pastor of the DeKalb church. Their regular visits while home on stateside assignments, and since retiring to Grand Prairie, provided a personal connection when Jackson and earlier pastors encouraged CP giving.

Two students from the church, Calder White and Jade LaVergne, traveled to Suriname last year to serve alongside cousins Charles and Brittany Shirey, who serve with the IMB and are supported by Southern Baptists’ CP funding channel. As Jackson traveled with former SBC president Johnny Hunt on a mission trip to train pastors in Minsk, Belarus, and his wife helped distribute the “Jesus” film to Muslims in Paris, those journeys provided additional connections to the worldwide ministry funded by churches like First Baptist of DeKalb.

“I want our people to understand that we’re not just about this community. If we’re not going, we’re helping someone else go,” he told the TEXAN. “We’re able to multiply our gifts because it’s going through the Cooperative Program.”

HORN OF AFRICA—It used to be a brothel, the sandy house where Mike and Abbey Nettles* are raising their children in the Horn of Africa.

When they arrived, their first act was to make the place a home.

The second was to learn enough local language to tell people how to get there.

“I can’t tell someone how to make bread, but I can tell them how to get to my house, and when they get here, I can tell them about Jesus,” Abbey said. “We didn’t come to be masters of this language—we came to learn as fast as we could how to tell people about Jesus.”

And tell people they have.

Over the past two years, the gospel has swept through the formerly unreached and unengaged people group they live among.

“We don’t have time to waste—the need is urgent,” Mike said. “So we share as much as we can, and we spend our time investing in believers who want to learn how to make more disciples.”

Believers like Berhanu*. Though initially disowned by his family, he was later able to baptize one of his sisters—along with 25 more new believers.

“Since I have believed in Jesus, I know my role is to share my faith with other people,” Berhanu said. “Not everyone wants to hear, but it doesn’t matter—I just need to share.”

So he tells, and when he finds people to believe, they start meeting in groups to study together. He finds that his people are seeking truth—people like Sarah*, whose grandmother was a witch doctor and father was a Muslim sheik.

“In my house, there were always animal sacrifices,” Sarah said. My grandmother would kill the chickens to see what the guts said. Because of the Satanic worship, it was a bad environment to grow up in.”

But one day someone shared Jesus with Sarah, and she started to read what her holy book said about him side by side with what the New Testament said.

“What the Bible said is true—I know this now,” she said. “In the past, I was afraid and had trouble sleeping. Now I have peace in my heart.”

But for a while, the decision didn’t bring peace in her home. Her father beat her, knocking out some of her teeth and breaking her leg.

She fled.

But after years of hearing the gospel, her father—the Muslim sheik—also came to faith in Jesus.

“Most Muslims think the story of Jesus is a lie, but more and more are coming to believe,” Sarah said. “When I tell people the story of Adam and the story of Jesus—that he healed people, died for our sin and was raised again—some say this is bad, that it is a lie.”

Those people, she said, have hard hearts. “But the ones with soft hearts—they listen.”

She has a goal to share Jesus with four people a week—she knows she is to be about sharing him no matter the cost.

“I feel I must tell others,” she said.

Mike and Abbey say they are amazed but not surprised.

“We know God called us here because he was already working in the hearts of these people, so we came expecting that he was going to do something,” Abbey said.

To learn more about how to pray for the people of the Horn and how to reach out to those same people groups living in your area, visit prayforthehorn.com.

*Names changed

Ever been in an older building where sections of it were impossible to heat or cool to a comfortable level? Many churches have areas that have been subdivided or added on to so that they irreparably alter the original HVAC scheme. Adding a wall here or a wing there sounds good, maybe easy, but unless it is done deliberately, the Mary-Martha class will be wearing parkas in June and July, and perhaps praying the imprecatory Psalms against the facility manager. Freezing the ladies’ class was never part of the plan and yet many churches have rooms that do just that.    

The structure of organizations can accumulate the same sort of problems. The opportunities of today suggest answers that become the crises of tomorrow, world without end. Look at the discernible layers in church policies or bylaws and you might see an example. In that place where the typeface changes, you’ll often find newer rules spawned by a need from long ago but that don’t exactly jibe with earlier or later regulations. No one intended the confusion, but still…

So we shouldn’t be surprised to see it happen in the SBC. Convention messengers adopted a report in 2010 that was intended to place greater focus on missions. The Great Commission Resurgence Task Force report contained suggestions of great import to all levels of our denomination but particularly the state conventions. And all this was done in the hope that more emphasis would be placed on church planting and overseas missions. Of course that would require more money allocated for those purposes. And since teaching stewardship to our church members is a long-term solution, reallocating existing funds has been the primary focus of our discussion since 2010.  

I’m hopeful that some of these changes will bear good fruit. In the midst of them, I’d caution against unintentionally damaging tools or systems that undergird every cooperative thing we do.  Mostly because of the changes being made by NAMB, every single state convention is being affected by the attempt to focus more resources on church planting and overseas missions. A few conventions are cutting staff to facilitate missions work beyond their boundaries. Others are responding to their own task forces by incrementally raising the percentage of CP giving they send out of state. In some cases these increases are more apparent than real but overall our funding emphasis is moving toward the ends of the earth. One state convention has cut its allocation to affiliated institutions within the state so they can designate money to the International Mission Board. As an additional part of their reprioritizing, they asked in February for the SBC Executive Committee to shift money from the SBC seminaries to the IMB. That suggestion was politely and appropriately tabled.

I have some concerns that the urgency of shifting our resources along with the urgency of maintaining some portion of the state conventions’ ministries within their own “Judeas” will result in a version of our Cooperative Program that won’t work anymore. Some state conventions can, for example, exempt part of their undesignated receipts from the amount eligible for sharing with the remainder of the SBC. This exemption makes it appear that they’ve increased their giving when they haven’t actually done so. Money used for the state paper or missions education or CP/stewardship promotion might come off the top so that instead of giving 40 percent of a larger amount, the convention is giving 50 percent of a smaller amount. The idea, which isn’t new, is that some state convention ministries are already of benefit to both the national and state denomination. The point is arguably true and appealing to more conventions as pastors clamor for conventions to approach a 50/50 split with the SBC. The way the story may be understood among the constituent churches is that the convention has increased something it hasn’t. Where that happens, the definition of the Cooperative Program has subtly shifted and its credibility has been degraded.  

A second concern is that we would impulsively defund crucial aspects of our ministry, the seminaries, for example, in favor of quick increases in church planting or overseas missions. This is a shortcut that will only work for a little while. If Jesus tarries for a decade or two after we make such a move, we’ll be faced with a shortage of trained Southern Baptist church planters and missionaries. Maybe we’ll have trained people and maybe we’ll have people who understand Southern Baptists ready to go, but we’ll have fewer who are both. Cut 10 or 20 percent from the money available to the seminaries and you’ll have fewer trained graduates because you’ll have between one and three fewer SBC seminaries. The smaller of these very CP-dependent institutions have very little margin to allow for funding cuts.

Whether it is through increased designations, redirecting funds, or any other action that protects one institution at the expense of our whole missionary enterprise, we’ll regret weakening the Cooperative Program. It’s no comfort to think that we’ll only regret it after it is too late to rebuild it.

The Cooperative Program is nothing special unless it is an undesignated distribution to a unified budget. Efforts to change this definition have been around for 20 years or so, but where that view has prevailed, the result has been something not actually the Cooperative Program and something less Southern Baptist.

We’re Baptists because of what we believe about God and his gospel. We’re Southern Baptist because of how we’ve committed to cooperate for world evangelism. I once saw a sign for a fine and successful Independent Baptist church that included what looked like the SBC logo (globe with a cross superimposed on it and resting on an open Bible) except the globe was deleted. It was the Word and the gospel but without a global vision. For my church, the global vision is addressed somewhat by church members who go and more thoroughly by our support of the Cooperative Program. There aren’t many benefits to being a Southern Baptist unless you address the Great Commission through partnership with other Southern Baptist churches—the Cooperative Program in other words.

Easter used to be one of the most attended worship days of all the holiday Sundays. In my observation over the last decade, there has been a marked decline in Easter worship attendance. Easter is sort of an inside ballgame event for Christians. Unless you are into bunny rabbits and egg hunting, there is not much of a national appeal to this holiday.

There are a couple of reasons why I think Easter attendance may have fallen on hard times. First of all is the decline of the church culture. When I was a child, it was expected of almost everyone in the community to attend some type of church on Easter. It seemed only the hardened sinners and reprobates stayed at home. Most people had a church identification and usually Easter was the time annual attenders would show up. Reflecting on how times have changed in regard to the unchurched, I remember my pastor deridingly chide the Easter-lily Christians. He would dismiss the service by saying, “Merry Christmas, because some of you I won’t see again until next Easter.” Cultural pressure was on people to attend church whether they had a real relationship with Jesus as Lord and Savior or not. You can see there are actually positives about the decline of a church culture. At least people attend more out of a sincere interest rather than an obligation to satisfy societal expectations.

Perhaps as a corollary to the loss of church culture in the de-emphasis on Easter is the uncomfortable presence of the Risen Lord. Jesus lays claim that He is the King of everyone’s life. He demands submission to His will. Jesus is seen as a helpless baby at Christmas. In our current culture Christmas is an opportune time to reach people. Christmas is less threatening to those who do not know Jesus as Lord and Savior. Christmas is now the most church-attended event for those who are unchurched. Let’s take advantage of it by putting forth quality appeal and establishing gracious relationships with those who need our Savior.

Easter is not the premier front door to believers as it once was, but it still provides tremendous opportunities to touch lives. Relationships still bring people inside the walls of the church building. Unbelievers will come if believers will invite them. It works! Events done with excellence continue to draw people. Service evangelism is much needed to show the community that Jesus is alive. Doing acts of mercy or service turns heads. People recognize genuine care when they see it. But all of the “do good” activities like painting a house or providing a food pantry fall short if the gospel is not presented to the recipients of the benefits. Show the love of Jesus during Easter by ministering in a tangible way.

Above everything, proclaim the gospel of the Risen Lord during public worship on Easter. Be sure Jesus is the focus of whatever is done. Jesus bodily, physically resurrected from the dead. The gospel is empty without the resurrection of Jesus. Tell people the Good News that He is alive! A special “thank you” to all the faithful pastors, church staff and church members who stay with the message of the gospel.

SOUTHLAKE—While convention messengers will determine if the term “Great Commission Baptists” is adopted as an alternate name for Southern Baptists, it will be grassroots Southern Baptists who ultimately decide if it’s a term worth using, says Jimmy Draper of Southlake, who chaired the task force appointed by SBC President Bryant Wright last fall to consider a denominational name change.

Whatever messengers to the SBC annual meeting June 19-20 in New Orleans decide, the legal name Southern Baptist Convention appears set in stone.

“Virtually all of the feedback I’ve gotten has been very positive,” Draper, a former Texas pastor and president emeritus of LifeWay Christian Resources, told the TEXAN. “All of the people I’ve heard from are very happy we are not recommending a legal name change, but they’re also pleased we are offering an alternative for those who feel like it’s necessary.”

He also hopes this will lay to rest the matter of changing the name of the denomination. The question of a name change has been raised and rejected seven times since 1965.

“Our hope was that we could at least present it in a way that when the decision is made it would not need to come up again for perhaps a generation. People could refer back to this and say it was decided and the convention had full knowledge, and basically discourage any kind of pursuit of a name change,” Draper said.

“I would envision the Executive Committee website, which is now using the phrase ‘Southern Baptist Convention, reaching the world for Christ,’ changing to ‘Great Commission Baptists, reaching the world for Christ,’” he said. “The strength of it is if it catches on, great. If it doesn’t, we haven’t lost anything and we would see that we certainly made the right decision not changing our legal name.”

The SBC Executive Committee approved Wright’s request to forward the recommendation to messengers—a change from Wright’s earlier position of supporting a legal name change.

“This allows us to keep our legal name but gives freedom and encouragement to all churches and entities to focus on “Great Commission Baptists,” because it so clearly describes who we are and want to be—from our origin to the present and into the future,” Wright told SBC Life.

At the first meeting of the task force, Draper provided members with extensive background on earlier proposals for a name change, including a 1999 opinion by the SBC’s attorney which warned that amending the denomination’s charter to change its name could make the convention subject to laws requiring changes in its “instruments and practices, its governance structure, and perhaps polity.”

There was never any movement toward removing the word Baptist from the denomination’s name, Draper added, calling it a non-negotiable idea.

“It came as a surprise to me that everyone agreed with that, including the church planters, African Americans, Hispanics, Koreans,” Draper said. “That probably put us way down the road because we didn’t have to debate some of those things.”

“Baptist is a name that represented too much of our theology. The things that distinguish us from other denominations are wrapped up in the name Baptist,” he said.

“There was such a consensus as we moved through it that we would not change the legal name,” he added. “Almost immediately we felt we did need to give some type of descriptor to those who felt they needed some other type of name.”

For some groups and regions, the reference to “Southern” has interfered with ministry, particularly among African-American congregations, he explained.

Draper recalled Maryland pastor Ken Fentress sharing that “every one of those pastors have paid a real price with their peers because there’s such a strong feeling that the name Southern is identified with the Confederacy and pro-slavery.”

The SBC began in 1845 after a split with Northern Baptists over slavery.

At the Feb. 20 EC meeting, Draper said adopting a new label would say to the SBC’s African-American churches and church members, “We understand your struggle, and we are sensitive to your concerns. And we are doing this as a way to let you know we value you and we want you to be a part of what we’re doing. If this will help you, we ask you to consider using it,” he said.

Furthermore, church planters and congregations in areas outside the South may prefer the identification as “Great Commission Baptists,” Draper said, adding that an affirmative vote at the annual meeting would add the denomination’s blessing.

Draper told the TEXAN, “We deliberately didn’t strategize how it might be used because we felt like it would be too restrictive. Each church or entity would determine how they would use it,” he said. No one would be compelled to use the new label or expected to abandon the terms “SBC” or “Southern Baptists.”