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NASHVILLE?There’s no denying that Southern Baptists individually, corporately and as a denomination are lagging in their stewardship of God’s resources. While the Great Commission Resurgence Task Force recommends shifting primary responsibility for Cooperative Program and stewardship promotion to state conventions, task force chairman Ronnie Floyd is counting on local pastors to teach their members to honor God through tithing.
“Remember, the only people who ever get offended with the declaration of biblical stewardship are the ones who give little to nothing at all to your church,” Floyd said in the news conference that followed the release of the task force interim report.
“Christians need to repent of the sin of not honoring God with at least the first-tenth of their income,” Floyd reminded. “Can you imagine the spiritual revival that would consume our churches if God’s people would obey God in giving? Can you imagine the opportunities of advancing the gospel regionally, nationally, and globally if God’s people would obey God in giving?”
Seeking to discover “how Southern Baptists can work more faithfully and effectively together in serving Christ through the Great Commission,” the task force analyzed the means of funding that effort and reaffirmed the Cooperative Program as the preferred means of giving.
Early proponents of a Great Commission Resurgence called on Southern Baptists to cut a larger piece of the Cooperative Program pie for the International Mission Board in order to see more dollars sent overseas and appealed to state conventions to keep fewer dollars for in-state use. While recommending the IMB’s share increase by 1 percent, a move Floyd called “symbolic,” the task force chose to trust state conventions with more responsibility for stewardship and CP promotion.
Component 4 of the task force progress report states:
“We believe in order for us to work together more faithfully and effectively towards the fulfillment of the Great Commission, we will ask Southern Baptists to move the ministry assignments of Cooperative Program promotion and stewardship education from the Executive Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention and return them to being the work of each state convention since they are located closer to our churches. Our call is for the state conventions to reassume their primary role in the promotion of the Cooperative Program and stewardship education, while asking the Executive Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention to support these efforts with enthusiasm and a convention-wide perspective.”
The SBC’s Executive Committee did not welcome the recommendation. In a March 11 historical review of CP promotion, stewardship education and the SBC, EC Convention Relations Vice President Roger S. Oldham offered a 10-page rebuttal of verbiage he called “potentially misleading.” (Visit baptist2baptist.net/issues/gcr/rso-03-19-10.asp for the complete text of the white paper.)
Concerned that Southern Baptists could infer from the words “return” and “reassume” that CP promotion and stewardship education “were once ministry assignments entrusted to the states,” Oldham said CP promotion has been a joint venture of the SBC and state conventions since its inception in 1925 “with the responsibility for strategy development uniformly assigned to the SBC, and the ‘field’ responsibilities consistently shared with our state convention ministry partners.”
Based on his defense of the SBC’s “right and responsibility” to promote CP and engage in stewardship education (including the decade when LifeWay Christian Resources had the stewardship assignment), Oldham argued the adoption of Component 4 would be the first time in SBC history “that the Convention will have assigned away its rights, role, and responsibility to promote funding and support for its ministries of international missions, North American missions, theological education, and moral advocacy, each of which is rightly under its purview.”
In making the case for giving state conventions primary responsibility for both assignments, Floyd said in his Feb. 22 presentation, “History shows that we have struggled with where to place both of these assignments in order to serve our churches more effectively.” He expressed appreciation for the work of the Executive Committee, calling state conventions “Great Commission partners” of the SBC that could participate in a consortium involving the EC president.
“Together they can plan and execute an annual strategy that will promote the Cooperative Program to our churches as well as challenge our churches in biblical stewardship,” Floyd said. Calling it a return to the strategy offered in 1929 that gave state conventions responsibility for promoting CP “in the field and gathering funds from the churches,” Floyd said historic precedence permits such a move.
The EC’s Old
