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Baptists Abandoning Cooperative Program
By
Dr. Bruce Prescott
In 1925
Southern Baptists created a Cooperative Program for churches to give a
percentage of their receipts to do the Lord's work beyond the walls of local,
independent congregations.
Individually, few Baptist churches had the resources to support hospitals,
children's homes, colleges, seminaries or missionaries in foreign lands.
Together we could pool our resources to support a wide network of such
institutions and agencies, both in the United States and around the world. That
is what the Cooperative Program did. It was a system for giving and supporting
mission causes that was based on mutual trust and cooperation.
When moderate Baptists led the Southern Baptist Convention, they were careful to
involve Baptists from across the theological spectrum in positions of leadership
and responsibility. All Baptists felt a sense of ownership and had a stake in
the work being supported by the cooperative program. Most Baptist churches
believed they had a responsibility to send a tithe of their income to support
denominational work.
Fundamentalist mega-churches started a trend away from supporting the work of
the denomination. They started their own Bible Colleges and non-accredited
seminaries and justified it by saying that the denominational seminaries were
too liberal. Then they needed to find a way to place their graduates in
positions of service, so they began a few new churches and started sending out
their own missionaries. Then they decided to takeover the Southern Baptist
Convention and purge it of all the moderates and "liberals" who were supposedly
undermining the spread of the gospel.
Now, twenty years after they have had complete control of all the institutions
and agencies of the SBC, the Fundamentalist mega-church preachers are still
refusing to give a tithe of their multi-million dollar mega-church budgets to
support the Cooperative Program. Here's what
Baptist Press
quotes Morris Chapman, Executive Director of the SBC, as saying to SBC leaders
last week:
"Twenty years ago the
average church was giving 10.6 percent through CP," Chapman said. "That
percentage coming out of the local church has slipped to 6.99 percent. If that
trend continues, obviously our missions enterprise around the world is going to
be in a desperate condition."
Moderate churches are
leaving the SBC and taking their money with them. Moderate state conventions
like Texas and Virginia are creating new programs and shifting their funds to
more trustworthy partners. Fundamentalists can't count on moderate Baptists to
fund their fiefdoms any more.
It is past time for the Fundamentalist mega-churches to start carrying their
weight. They are definitively proving that it is Fundamentalism, not
moderation, that undermines the credibility of the gospel.
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