I just began re-reading Letters of John Newton, and came across a brief confession of faith he drafted in a letter to Rev. Francis Okeley. In this confession Newton was attempting a hasty draft of those things "necessary to believe" (e.g. those doctrinal truths essential to Christian faith).
I like what Newton said. We are not impressing anyone with our many words and flowery language in statements of faith.
Also there is this post from Tom Ascol regarding how little funding from local Southern Baptist churches makes it out of their state conventions to the mission organizations.
In 2008 Southern Baptist churches gave $548,205,099 to finance gospel efforts through the Cooperative Program (CP). Of that amount, only $204,385,593 (37%) made it to offices in Nashville to be distributed to causes in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) Annual Budget. This means that state conventions of the SBC retained, on average, 63% (nearly $344,000,000) of all offerings that were designate from the churches for the Cooperative Program.
I would say that there needs to be a whole lot less bureaucracy eating up mission funding in the Southern Baptist Convention and that holds just as true in local SBC churches.
6 comments:
You do realize that the state conventions fund a lot of local (in state) missions efforts, right?
Debbie,
Of course. Keep in mind that in Michigan the state baptist convention is a pretty small group. In other states the state convention is pretty huge. The cooperative program is a great idea but when you start filtering the money between multiple bureaucracies before it even starts to get to the mission field, you lose a lot of the potential impact.
Ah, but you've said repeatedly that the USA is a mission field. So money that is used locally is going to the mission field, right? And using it in-state actually decreases the number of bureaucracies the money goes through.
Debbie,
What does the BSCM use their funds toward? Do you know? How many full time staffers do they have? How about other states? Kentucky has five staffers working in accounting. Six in administrative services. Three in financial benefits. And on and on. All probably serve a function. All cost lots of money. Tom Ascol is just advocating that more of the money being given to the Cooperative Program actually makes it to the mission field.
Arthur,
The quote was "Of that amount, only $204,385,593 (37%) made it to offices in Nashville to be distributed to causes in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) Annual Budget."
All I'm saying is that the amount of money that makes it to Nashville is not necessarity indicative of the amount of money that is used directly for missions.
The local church is where disciples are made. If a state convention has been successful and planting thriving local churches and helping existing local churches thrive, they should be able to send most of their $$ to places in America and around the world where there is little availablity of churches which proclaim the gospel. We must focus our missions giving on the work of making disciples. Disciples are made in thriving local churches. If a state is covered with thriving churches, why do they keep, on average, 62+ percent of the CP dollars. We spend $1.31 to reach every man, woman, and child in the U.S. and Canada and less than $0.04 to reach everyone else. Surely that is not our best foot forward in getting the gospel to the ends of the earth.
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