COOPERATIVE PROGRAM SUNDAY
This Sunday, Oct. 5, we will observe Cooperative Program (CP) Sunday. As we celebrate the establishment of the Cooperative Program in 1925 and all the Lord has done through this collective financial effort over the past century, it may be helpful to provide a brief overview of the Cooperative Program.
For the first 80 years of its existence, the Southern Baptist Convention supported its various missions and ministry entities through separate fundraising appeals that often saw these agencies in competition and underfunded. Since 1925, our churches and state conventions have worked together to pool our giving into the Cooperative Program, our “unified plan of giving through which cooperating Southern Baptist churches give a percentage of their undesignated receipts in support of their respective state convention and the Southern Baptist Convention missions and ministries.”
Southern Baptist churches participate in the Cooperative Program by sending a portion of their tithes and offerings to their state convention. The messengers for each state convention then designate a portion of those gifts received to retain for work within their state and the remainder to send along to the Southern Baptist Convention.
Within First Baptist Church, our annual church budget designates 4.5 percent of our undesignated tithes and offerings to go toward the Cooperative Program. We send this gift to the Florida Baptist Convention, where 49 percent remains in Florida to support planting, revitalizing, and strengthening churches, reaching and discipling the next generation, and many more ministries throughout our state.
The Florida Baptist Convention then forwards the remaining 51 percent to the Southern Baptist Convention, where messengers to the SBC Annual Meeting allocate the national giving to the Cooperative Program. Currently, just over 50 percent goes to our International Mission Board (where it supports four of our five missionary families from FBCTLH), almost 23 percent goes to the North American Mission Board (primarily for church planting), nearly 22 percent is divided among our six SBC seminaries (resulting in reduced tuition for students from our church), just under 3 percent funds our Executive Committee and our convention’s operating budget, and less than 2 percent supports the work of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission.
Local, state, national, and international evangelism, missions, and church planting, disaster relief, college campus outreach, Baptist university and seminary education, and so much more! And it all starts with your regular and faithful giving to First Baptist Church and the investment we make in the Cooperative Program. Because of this joint effort by nearly 47,000 Southern Baptist churches, we’re able to do infinitely more together than we could ever hope to do alone.
As we pause this Sunday to consider the Lord’s faithfulness to use our church and an effort such as the Cooperative Program for more than a century, may we also prayerfully reconsider the part that we each play in financially supporting the Great Commission through First Baptist Church and our partnership with thousands of fellow churches.
Josh Hall, Senior Pastor