As noted in Part 1, today’s Great Commission Resurgence discussion in Baptist life has really been going in various forms at least since 1913 when the Southern Baptist Convention put together an “Efficiency Committee” to make recommendations to Southern Baptists about better ways to operate and cooperate. That discussion eventually led to the formation of the Cooperative Program that we know today and it is in the conversation surrounding the CP’s beginning that we see so many of the parallels with what is happening in Baptist life now.

One of the reasons for the formation of the Efficiency Committee was the recognition among Baptists that the societal method of giving was neither efficient nor effective in helping Baptists fulfill the Great Commission. Under that system, each Baptist organization essentially had to go hat in hand from church to church asking for support. This created a never-ending stream of speakers seeking access to church pulpits. The Western Recorder noted that the society system caused “an unfraternal competitive spirit” between the various causes.

Initial efforts to find a better way to fund missions led to the creation of the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering for Foreign Missions by the Woman’s Missionary Union in 1918. And an organization known as the Layman’s Missionary Movement worked to expand on an innovation introduced in Murray, Kentucky, of collecting funds for various causes all at once. This was accomplished by taking “duplex envelopes” to the homes of church members and allowing them to put the funds they wanted to give for the ministries of the local church and local causes in one pocket and gifts for designated national or international causes in a second pocket.

It was really in the aftermath of World War I, though, that Southern Baptists began to hit on the idea that would become our dominant funding mechanism for the rest of the century. Americans had come out of that conflict with a flourishing economy and an attitude that all things were possible. The result in Baptist life was the “75-Million Campaign” begun in 1919 to raise funds for the mission boards (Foreign, Home and Sunday School) and other entities.

The campaign was a hit that quickly attracted pledges of up to $90 million. Things didn’t quite work out as expected at the time, however, as overly confident mission boards began borrowing and spending money in anticipation of the $90 million to come. Unfortunately, however, only about $50 million was actually received.

Still, the Convention saw promise in the process and, spurred on by the need to pay off the debt that had been incurred by the mission boards, set up a “Future Program Commission” (another  forerunner of the Great Commission Task Force) to examine how Baptists might best leverage this idea of cooperative giving for maximum benefit for the Kingdom. It was the Future Program Commission’s 1925 report that initiated the Cooperative Program.

The great innovation of the Cooperative Program at the time was that it moved beyond collecting funds for a single program — such as international missions — to distribute funds to support all levels of Baptist life. This “unified budget” system had been in use by the state convention in Kentucky since 1915 but the approval by SBC messengers in 1925 brought the leverage of unified giving to bear convention-wide for the first time.

Through CP, state conventions would receive “agreed to” percentages of undesignated offerings from local churches, take an “agreed to” percentage for Baptist work in the state and then divide the remainder according to “agreed to” percentages among the various national organizations. The “agreed to” amounts at each stage were to be determined and voted on by the churches, state convention messengers and SBC messengers respectively.

Baptists agreed overwhelmingly with the new approach as indicated by a lack of controversy at both the SBC and state convention levels. After being approved by SBC messengers at the 1925 convention, nearly all of the state conventions affirmed CP later that same year. As C.E. Burts, the first CP director, put it, “our people, for the most part, recognize that the principles of the Cooperative Program are sound and have come to stay.”

Ah, but as with most plans, the difficulties lie in the details. While Baptists seemed to universally like the new program in general, there were a variety of views about its practical implementation. It’s in these different view that we see the parallels with today’s rhetoric which I’ll begin to outline in the next post.