In the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), their leaders depend upon the flocks to donate lots of money to their Cooperative Program. Somehow, in the past decade those flocks have managed to just about maintain their level of giving despite their overall numbers plummeting.
I never thought that level of giving would last forever. Eventually, the flocks would be unable to keep up. And it looks like they have finally hit that point. Today, let me show you the situation their Dear Leaders are facing, what kind of wall they’ve finally hit, and how they tried their damndest to avoid their inevitable collision with reality—yet completely brought it on themselves through their own hypocrisy and greed.
(This post first went live on Patreon on 12/17/2024. Its audio ‘cast lives there too and is available now!)
The Cooperative Program is the SBC’s most important source of money
First, a brief word about how the SBC organizes itself. Member churches typically join state-level conventions. In the United States, these usually consist of a single state. Areas with sparser membership, like the Utah-Idaho Southern Baptist Convention, might share an organization. Others, like Texas, contain two—one of which will be important to today’s story. However they divide up their turf, they sit beneath the mother ship itself on our organization chart. (That’s not its official name, of course.)
Also typically, SBC members donate money to their churches in the form of tithes and special offerings. While the SBC holds a denomination-wide Annual Meeting each summer, the state-level conventions do the same. The voters at these smaller conventions decide what percentage of donations their state convention will keep and what will be sent upward. After taking their decided-upon percentage, the leaders at this level forward the rest to the mother ship for the Cooperative Program.
Of course, SBC members can also donate money directly to the mother ship. And some churches join only their area’s state-level convention. But in general, this is how it all works.
Founded in 1925, the SBC’s Cooperative Program funds all of its denomination-wide programs: Their six SBC-branded seminaries, the International Mission Board (IMB) and North American Mission Board (NAMB, and yes, ouch, that acronym), the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC), their publishing arm Lifeway, their historical library/archives, and its other recruitment functions operating on college campuses and at summer camps. As of 2023, most of it (72%-ish) goes to IMB and NAMB, while about 22% goes to the seminaries.
I can’t overstate how important this fund is to Southern Baptist leaders. Their more ambitious pastors even use their churches’ level of giving to advance politically within the mother ship’s ranks. Member churches’ leaders don’t even get to vote on how the SBC itself is run without qualifying for the privilege through Cooperative Program donations.
The denomination’s top-ranked Executive Committee (EC) decides how the money will be used. In a lot of ways, they are the day-to-day face of the SBC. This, too, will become important to today’s story.
I’ve kept track of Cooperative Program Giving since about 2017. As the denomination has suffered from a well-deserved decline, those numbers have been falling as well. For some years, the flocks managed to slightly increase their giving. But for the most part, I’m seeing small declines year after year. This past year, the donations dipped below USD$450M for the first time in ages.
Recently, one of its arguably strongest state conventions, the Tennessee Baptist Convention, voted to reduce the percentage of money they send to the mother ship.
SITUATION REPORT: The flocks are reconsidering how they donate to the Cooperative Program
Last week, Baptist Press reported that the Tennessee Baptist Convention voted to slightly reduce their giving to the Cooperative Program. It’s not a huge dip, just 45% from 47.5%, but what it represents is explosive. Apparently, it’s also not the only state-level convention mulling over a reduction. As that Baptist Press story tells us:
Tennessee isn’t the only state Baptist convention facing a funding dilemma. Multiple state and regional conventions this fall sought to cope with a stark reality: they cannot keep giving more to SBC causes when they are receiving less from churches.
Tennessee’s state convention joins five or six others doing much the same thing. The brand-new president of the Executive Committee, Jeff Iorg, tried to put a brave face on the SBC’s new normal:
“Giving to the Cooperative Program is impacted by many factors – including economic pressures on churches and conventions – as well as competing funding requests from many other Christian organizations,” said Jeff Iorg, president of the SBC Executive Committee. “Southern Baptists still believe in cooperation, and a new generation must decide how to prioritize Cooperative Program giving to assure the long-term stability and fiscal health of our global efforts.”
But economic reality is doing what it always does to pretty illusions:
[S]tate conventions have been forwarding more money to the SBC even as they receive less from churches. Twenty years ago, churches gave a total of just over $501 million through CP. It dropped to $482 million 10 years ago and $449 million last year. The bottom line: state conventions forwarded $12 million more to CP last year than they did two decades ago even though they received $52 million less.
Southern Baptist leaders have wondered for years how long that trajectory can be sustained. For some state conventions, the answer is not any longer.
Money isn’t infinite. I’ve been saying this for ages. These days, the SBC can’t even maintain its overall net number of active member churches. So like the denomination’s leaders, I’ve also wondered just how long their pretty illusions could last. Well, they can last about this long, it seems.
The infighting causing the Cooperative Program to shrink
Also for ages, I’ve watched Southern Baptists turn Cooperative Program giving into a political fight.
In the mid-2010s, Russell Moore led the ERLC. He very vocally opposed Donald Trump as the Republican presidential nominee, which pissed off a number of SBC church leaders. Rumors began circulating that some Trump-idolizing SBC churches were threatening to withhold their donations so the ERLC wouldn’t get a penny from them. Just the rumor of such a thing almost cost Moore his job.
Fast forward a few years, and Bob Smietana wrote for Religion News Service about a similar situation this past February. After noting that the decline in the overall number of churches donating anything to the Cooperative Program, he quotes another former SBC leader, Thom Rainer:
Rainer said the loss of confidence in denominations is part of a larger societal distrust of institutional leaders, which has an impact on denominational funding.
“If you don’t trust the leadership — you are not going to trust the funding model,” he said.
One cause for that erosion in confidence involves the SBC’s ongoing poor response to its sex abuse crisis, which journalists dubbed “Abuse of Faith” when the story broke in early 2019. After almost six years, the SBC has still not managed to do much at all to make churches safer for their members. The foot-dragging of leadership has alienated at least some churches, which have already pulled funding.
Let’s Watch: SBC Leaders Panicking About the Cooperative Program
I’ve pulled a number of posts and articles from Baptist Press for today’s story. I’ve done so because that site is the official mouthpiece of the SBC. It’s not an independent site. Every single page on the site presents the flocks with something an SBC leader wanted them to know or think or do—or buy.
Over the past year, I’ve noticed a growing number of posts devoted to getting Southern Baptists pumped up about the Cooperative Program.
Sometimes, as happened this past April, an article discusses a tiny increase in donations to the fund; I interpret these as hopeful in tone. Southern Baptist culture is dysfunctional-authoritarian in nature, which means that their members generally want to be members on the winning team. If an official site keeps admitting it’s failing, they’ll lose a lot more than just confidence.
That may be why a July article describes a Lifeway survey about the Cooperative Program. It found that overall, respondents liked most of what the fund does:
- 91% liked the missionary funding
- 84% liked the church planting funding (a church plant is a brand-new church)
- 68% liked that it “provides resources to address the social, moral, and ethical concerns of our faith and families”
That last bit is no accident. That’s the ERLC’s entire mandate. I’m sure the mother ship understands only too well how much the ERLC ruffled feathers in 2016 and beyond. Perhaps that ruffling explains why only 2/3 of congregations approved overall of the Cooperative Program. Moreover, only 2/3 of respondents strongly agreed that the fund was “the most effective and efficient way” to recruit new members. Considering how much of the fund goes to the IMB and NAMB, that’s downright damning.
Perhaps the worst news here involved the declines across the board in favorable opinions in the past 15 years.

That is simply amazing. This is the one fund that makes the SBC work, the one thing that is distinctly SBC over everything else, and 1/4-1/3 of the pastors surveyed were willing to say that they disagreed with its overall mission and goals.
A hilarious avalanche of Cooperative Program fluff pieces
Cue the fluff articles praising the Cooperative Program and what it funds. All of these come from Baptist Press unless otherwise noted.
September 17, 2024: Jeff Iorg announces that the Executive Committee is making a new department just to deal with the SBC’s sex abuse crisis.
Also on September 17, 2024: The Executive Committee’s crisis-related bills will top $12M between 2021 and 2024. See? See, Southern Baptists? No need to withdraw funds out of moral outrage over the sex abuse crisis! They’re totally working on it! Look how much they’ve spent!
September 18, 2024: Here’s how the SBC can “can win the war on global lostness!” It doesn’t specifically name the Cooperative Program, but it does dogwhistle a lot with stuff like “Our entire cooperative mechanism is built for this one worldwide initiative.” Its writer exhorts Southern Baptists to work together for their “common goal.” He’s very obviously talking about the Cooperative Program.
September 30-October 2, 2024: A three-part transcript post from Executive Committee president Jeff Iorg about Baptists being “a force for good” —thanks to their Cooperative Program. (Part 1; Part 2; and Part 3.) The rationalizations he offers around Southern Baptist hypocrisy in Part 3 are purely repulsive. Aw, guys, we’re all sinnnnnnerrrrrrrrs!
October 3, 2024: A listicle about how wonderful and effective IMB is. Considering that 50.41% of the Cooperative Program goes straight to the IMB, I can’t see this sort of article without thinking that SBC leaders want to push hard on how much the IMB matters to spur more donations.
Also October 3, 2024: A Biblical Recorder article comes out about Cooperative Program giving being 2% less than the mother ship expected and projected. Jeff Iorg expresses how “grateful” he is about what the fund actually pulled in. I wonder how happy he was to know this article was dropping in such a high-profile site.
And also on October 3, 2024: A weird puff piece talks about how some Annual Meeting attendees were “fascinated” by reports of the different projects the Cooperative Program keeps running. Guys, I get that October 6 was apparently Cooperative Program Day or something, but the Annual Meeting was in June. Here’s the weirdest part of the piece: A pastor read to a busload of other attendees from the Book of Reports, which apparently held the listeners’ “rapt attention.”
December 5, 2024: The president of IMB, Paul Chitwood, openly begs for donations during the upcoming Lottie Moon Christmas Offering. He uses advanced and very manipulative Christianese to do it, too, writing: “Now is the time to sacrificially support those we cooperatively send.” Sacrificially is extremely Jesus-flavored language meant to shame listeners into obedience. However, “Southern Baptists are not broke,” he assures them. Sure they aren’t. That’s why the mother ship’s pulled out the stops to squeeze them.
December 10, 2024: Mark Dance, a director at Guidestone (the SBC’s financial-planning group), uses similarly Jesus-flavored shame techniques aimed at increasing donations. This guy uses outright prosperity gospel talk in his post. “Your obedience triggers God’s blessings,” he writes, while disobedience “triggers God’s discipline.” Yes, and Job sure found that out (/s)! Interestingly, Guidestone might be one of the only SBC entities that doesn’t get Cooperative Program funding. It’s still a sickeningly manipulative post full of bad theology and faulty reasoning that should make this guy feel bad—but won’t, because “the ways of a man always seem right to him.” I hope he handles his Guidestone job better than he does Bible study.
Economic reality might finally be sinking in
As I mentioned, American churches continue to close like they’re trying to achieve a mission bonus for speed. The ones remaining must pony up more funds to keep up the façade of denominational growth, but with churches also bleeding members still, that gets harder every year.
(Related: Wait, HOW many churches close each year?)
Beyond the simple math of membership decline, it’s just getting more expensive to operate a church. In July, we learned that in some states, churches’ insurance costs have skyrocketed. Texas in particular has seen premiums rise to nosebleed levels. One pastor there notes:
The church has been able to continue with their insurance provider, to “rock along with increased pay [on premiums] over these years, but we received notice that this year [. . .] that we’ll be incurring an 85 percent increase for this next year,” [Jeff] Julian said.
The church received notice of the increase a month ago in June, with renewal set to occur in August. Julian said their premium has been about $49,800 a year.
“So, an 85 percent increase on that is going to be where we’re starting to have to take away from ministries, probably,” he said.
The same pastor says he’s “heard” that smaller churches just aren’t buying insurance. That sounds like a recipe for utter disaster to me, though Julian insists that “the Lord’s got this.” (When “the Lord” pays insurance claims in real money, I’ll care what he’s “got” or not got.)
In the case of dozens of Houston-area SBC churches, “the Lord” apparently allowed their insurance companies to simply drop them—even if they’d never even filed a claim.
Another similar bit of bad news came in October, when Baptist Press reported another Lifeway survey. This one involved pastors’ view of their churches’ financial health. Two-thirds of them said the economy was “very or somewhat negatively impacting their church.” However, as one might expect, Republican pastors generally perceived a worse financial situation than Democratic ones. The survey didn’t correct for the individual political leanings of the pastors.
Considering how important Southern Baptists think recruitment is, it seems like at least in America the Cooperative Program doesn’t do much there. In January, we learned that 72% of surveyed evangelicals said they converted in childhood.
In November, we learned that 82% of SBC churchgoers are members of those churches. Of the ones who aren’t members, 39% said they were too new to the church to join up yet, so that gives us 53% who had deliberately not joined and 8% who said their churches didn’t do membership at all.
It’s a good thing for humanity that the SBC can’t get out of their own way
While the SBC’s leaders frantically tried to remind the flocks of how wondrous and lovely the Cooperative Program totally is, though, infighting continued behind the scenes. Possibly the most glorious of these fights involves the SBC’s ongoing feud over women pastors.
(Related: Why evangelicals keep arguing about women pastors; Back when Al Mohler supported women pastors and why he changed his mind; They’re still not tired of this argument.)
Thirty to forty years ago, this exact feud sparked the Conservative Resurgence. It provoked the SBC’s misogynistic leaders and pastors to embrace literalism and inerrancy as doctrinal givens. It’s the entire reason why the fusion of fundamentalism and evangelicalism occurred in the first place.
With the issue rising again, the SBC mulled the passage of the so-called Law Amendment. This amendment would have seriously penalized any church that allowed or even spoke in favor of women pastors. It was a dumb amendment to make, considering their denominational rules already say only men can be pastors. But they took a formal vote on the amendment anyway this past summer at their Annual Meeting. The vote failed, but only barely (61.45% in favor; 38.38% against).
But still, a number of member churches were rattled by the very idea of voting on something like that.
If space aliens were watching the SBC’s antics, they’d be well forgiven for thinking that the SBC’s primary mission isn’t a “war on global lostness” but rather “the ongoing subjugation of women.”
This feud has now brought the politicization of the Cooperative Program and the SBC itself into sharp focus
As I mentioned earlier, Texas is so big and so full of Southern Baptists that it has two state-level conventions. One of these is the Baptist General Convention of Texas, or BGCT. This group finds itself at the center of a fight with one of the SBC’s top programs, NAMB.
See, BGCT wants to get NAMB money to help start churches. But NAMB’s leader, Kevin Ezell—who I personally think is as crooked as a three-dollar bill, just like most of the group’s past leaders—doesn’t want to give those funds to them until they affirm the Baptist Faith and Message 2000. This is like the Nicene Creed for SBC members. It contains everything a growing fundagelical needs to get into Heaven.
BGCT’s leaders refused to affirm the creed. So Ezell told them this, and I can easily imagine the simpering condescension in his voice while doing it:
Ezell said NAMB will not fund church starts within Texas in partnership with uniquely BGCT-affiliated congregations and suggested Texas Baptists change their statement of faith. He said NAMB’s “longstanding commitment” is to start churches in partnership with state conventions that affirm the 2000 version of the Baptist Faith and Message.
“I cannot and will not change that standard,” Ezell said. “But I would love for you to consider and for your state convention to adopt the Baptist Faith and Message 2000.”
I absolutely detest this guy, if you couldn’t tell. At least he makes it very easy to tell that the SBC is a totalitarian right-wing political movement with a bit of Jesus frosting to hide its ambitions!
One pastor rejecting the creed has noted that the SBC is “weaponizing” Cooperative Program funds to strong-arm compliance. Another said:
“I have PTSD from serving on a committee with God-fearing Southern Baptist missionaries who were fired 25 years ago because this document was used to fire them,” Webb said. “It was written by a group of partisan Baptists with the purpose to control and divide.”
Well, yes. That’s the entire point of the creed. It was designed to winnow out less-extremist, less-authoritarian sheep.
Why the SBC’s leaders are willing to weaponize the help they offer churches on the ground
Two things are going on with this story.
First and foremost, it should remind anyone seeing it that evangelism sells a product. That product is not belief in Jesus, nor even in any one particular package of beliefs about Jesusing. It’s really active membership in a particular flavor of Christianity.
NAMB doesn’t want to fund the creation of churches that aren’t in complete doctrinal lockstep with their ultraconservative masters. Churches created with NAMB money but not NAMB lockstep might end up leaving over women pastors—or whatever culture-war fight SBC ultraconservatives pick next. In such cases, there’s no use in having a church created at all if it isn’t an active and contributing part of the SBC.
I love how absolutely blatantly obvious this truth is in this story. Kevin Ezell is still far too big a coward to put it that blatantly, but that’s clearly what he means in his response to the Texas convention.
And faction warfare, as always and forever
Secondly, faction warfare is still a major problem for the SBC’s leaders. The ultraconservative faction, which I’ve called the Old Guard, wants another Conservative Resurgence-style schism. They want to drag the denomination even further to the right politically. They also say they want to focus like lasers on recruitment, which means ignoring “Abuse of Faith” and abandoning all reforms aimed at making churches safer.
The folks in the other faction, which I’ve called the Pretend Progressives, make lots of noise about doing something about sex abuse and racism and misogyny and all that other bad stuff. This faction has been winning elections at all levels for years—ever since “Abuse of Faith” dropped, in fact.
As you might guess, the Old Guard pushes hard for a formal denunciation of women pastors. They also control NAMB and—barely—the Executive Committee itself, as well as the seminaries. So I can’t imagine them not seeing BGCT’s disobedience as a battle in the factions’ war.
(Amazingly, the IMB seems to have generally separated themselves from the overall fighting. They’re the 600-pound gorilla in the room, though, so I doubt they feel compelled to do much for either side. They remind me of the not-really-a-joke Seth MacFarlane told in 2013 regarding five actresses nominated for Oscars that year: They no longer had to pretend to be sexually attracted to Harvey Weinstein. Similarly, the IMB doesn’t have to pretend to care about either faction. I don’t think anyone in the SBC would dare to screw with them.)
But it’s hard to believe the Old Guard really cares overmuch about recruitment when it holds church-planting funds hostage to ideological purity.
I hope the SBC’s rank-and-file pew-warmers are paying attention to this story, because their leaders’ real focus will only get more obvious from here as the funds keep slipping.
NEXT UP: As we get closer and closer to Christmas, evangelicals push hard on pseudo-archaeology to make their demands seem more reasonable. We’ll check out the past and present ghosts of false claims to see what’s changed—and maybe see what the ghost of future false claims has in store for them. See you soon! <3
Please support my work!
Thanks for reading, and thanks for being part of our community! Here are some ways you can support my work:
0 Comments