In Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 of this series, I’ve focused on how similar the rhetoric surrounding the Great Commission Resurgence today is to the rhetoric regarding the newly formed Cooperative Program in the mid 1920s. In this final post in this series, I think you’ll see this to an even greater extent in the missions debates of the two eras.

Then, as now, the focus of discussion surrounding the Cooperative Program was on concerns about the best ways to carry out missions and evangelism. Once the Cooperative Program was adopted in 1925, promotion of the plan within the churches began in earnest. State papers and denominational leaders stressed that if church members would simply tithe one-tenth of their income to their churches, the resulting $150 million would establish CP gifts from the churches at a level that would provide for “all of our (Southern Baptist) activities with reasonable adequacy.”

This is certainly a message heard today as state convention executives point out that the declining percentage of church gifts to the Cooperative Program seems to be one of the drivers of the push to reallocate this funding. Here in Kentucky, for instance, the percentage of church undesignated gifts to support missions through the Cooperative Program has dropped from 10.1 percent in 1997 to 6.9 percent last year. The competitive pressure represented by GCR to reallocate may not even exist if churches were increasing or at least maintaining giving levels.

The Foreign Board (today’s International Mission Board) came out as a strong supporter of the Cooperative Program in 1925 as it was seen as a vital tool to help the Board get out of debt. The Foreign Board also continued promoting direct giving, however.

Supporters emphasized that there were missionaries ready to go to the field who were unable to go because of the lack of funds. “Scores of young people, feeling the leading of God, have prepared to go and carry the gospel to all the world” but are “compelled to remain at home,” one author wrote in questioning Baptists’ commitment to the foreign mission field.

Later in 1925, the Foreign Board sent out a request to state conventions to ask for a special offering “over and above” CP giving. The appeals implored “every one who loves the Lord Jesus, loves foreign missionaries and foreign mission work, to remember that the time has come for Southern Baptists to take care of their foreign mission work if they purpose ever to take care of it.”

One missionary wrote, “What in the world is the matter with Southern Baptists? Do they no longer believe in sending the Gospel to the lost souls in heathen lands?…Shame on us that we are spending many times as much for education at home as we are spending on preaching the gospel to millions of perishing lost souls in other lands!”

A writer to the Western Recorder newspaper accused Baptists of having “lost our vision—or perhaps we never had a vision–of a soul-hungering world. We are thinking of our own selves, of our interests; maybe we are thinking of the work at home.”

Here in Kentucky, messengers listened to the special offering request as well as to the argument from some that the Cooperative Program should be the primary support mechanism so that all Baptist causes could be helped equally. In the end, the Kentucky state convention opted, as did all the other state conventions, to support both the Cooperative Program and the special offering. The special offering was seen as an “emergency” measure to deal with the Foreign Board’s debt problem.

Echos of this debate were heard this summer as some advocated for a special “Christmas in August” offering for IMB. Supporters pointed to the need to help the IMB recover from its budget shortfall while others expressed concern that a special offering in August could both hurt receipts for state missions offerings and dilute the regular Lottie Moon Christmas Offering.

The intensity of the rhetoric in 1926 and 27 grew as pressure from the debt of the SBC mission boards mounted. Some were firm in saying that everyone needed to stick to and support the Cooperative Program whether they agreed with every funding decision within the unified budget or not. One even said that the SBC needed “folks who are willing to support a plan in which they themselves may not believe, just because brethren in whom they have confidence believe in the plan.”

Others, however, were calling for another special “debt-paying” campaign and bristling over suggestions that they should be hemmed in by the Cooperative Program. This seems strikingly similar to current SBC President Johnny Hunt’s statement earlier this summer that “if states are not willing to release greater percentages and greater dollars to the nations, they are going to find people like Johnny Hunt designating their dollars where they want it themselves instead to sending it to them when they’re not listening to us.”

Another important comparison in the rhetoric of past and present concerns the division of resources between state and national bodies. The original hope of the Future Program Commission was that there would be a 50-50 division of CP funds between state and national causes. Originally this meant a 50-50 split of all gifts — including special offerings — minus the expenses the states incurred in promoting and handling the offering funds.

Some in Baptist life even went as far as to say that it should be a 50-50-50 split. The Union Association’s vision, for instance, was that “out of every dollar the local church gets, it keeps fifty cents and gives fifty cents to our general causes; out of every dollar our general cause gets, the state keeps fifty cents and fifty cents goes to the whole South; and out of every dollar the whole South gets, it keeps fifty cents and sends fifty cents to the world beyond.” All seemed to recognize and accept the fact that each church and denominational body was autonomous in making the funding decisions, however.

Of course, that recognition of autonomy didn’t eliminate intense discussion on the matter. Some Baptists felt strongly that the states were retaining too much and thereby hurting missions efforts — especially international missions efforts.

“Can the denomination justify in the eyes of God and to a lost world the scale of our home expenditures in the face of such retrenchment as the denomination is forcing the Foreign Board to make?,” said a statement from the Foreign Board’s October 1926 meeting.

State leaders countered, however, that funds were also needed for the important work of state missions. They pointed out as well that state missions work  had sacrificed funding in order to implement the unified giving plan of the Cooperative Program.

The Western Recorder became particularly offended at statements that are remarkably similar to some made this past summer. In a 1927 editorial headlined “Extreme Statements Do Not Help,” the editor had the following to say:

Now to seek further [Foreign Missions funding] by exaggerated or even untrue statements is so foolish that no one but a tyro should be guilty of it. Yet we ran across this statement blazoned prominently on a printed placard the other day: ‘Southern Baptist churches spent in 1925 $36,700,000 at home and $2,200,000 for Foreign Missions — $18 each for self and $1 for the world.” … Foreign Missions is tremendously great beyond all cavil. To the end of helping Baptists more quickly to realize its greatness, it is to be hoped that the kind of advocacy we have here illustrated may not embarrass it in the house of its friends. We equally object to this method when it is used in appeals for Home Missions, State Missions, Education, Hospitals, or other causes.

We’ve seen a similar rhetorical flourish in 2009 through a report by David Palmer, a May master of divinity graduate and director of financial development at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, that concluded “Southern Baptists spend $1.31 per person for missions in North America” while only spending “$0.04 per person for missions to reach the world.” In both 1927 and 2009, the dramatic rhetoric seemed more designed to fan emotions than it was to truly enlighten.

One final interesting similarity between the  1920s and current discussion is the decision to use the term “Great Commission” in framing the conversation. In 1925, authors promoting the priority of international work tended to cite Matthew 28:19 — especially the phrase “all nations.” Those who emphasized the importance of all Baptist work tended to focus on Acts 1:8 and its attention to local, regional and national evangelism in addition to the international mandate. A 1926 Kentucky state convention advertisement promoting CP even said this explicitly in proclaiming “Kentucky Is Our Judea!”

We see the same choices in the use of scripture today. Those who are advocating a greater commitment to international missions causes have chosen “Great Commission Resurgence” as the brand name for their efforts. Meanwhile, even before GCR became public, the North American Mission Board and state convention publications were consistently using Acts 1:8 as a rallying verse. For instance, NAMB has an effort called the Acts 1:8 Challenge and the Kentucky Baptist Convention has a summer leadership program for college students called the “1:8 Leadership Experience.”

So what’s the takeaway from all this comparison of the past and the present? I think there are at least three that are instructive for us today:

1. Baptists absolutely love missions — especially international missions — and are very committed to fulfilling Jesus’ command as articulated in both the Matthew 28:19 and Acts 1:8. There has been a consistency to this for as long as we have existed as a denomination. This is good and healthy. It also means that we will probably always be questioning ourselves and striving to find the best way to implement this desire to obey our Lord.
2. Baptists tend to direct their passion for evangelism in multiple directions. For some, international missions must always be the greatest calling. Others see an overwhelming number of lost people close to home and feel strongly that efforts to strengthen the home base is vital in order to assure a steady stream of funds for international efforts. These passions create a tension that is generally healthy and is not likely to go away no matter what the current study committee ends up recommending.
3. Baptists value their autonomy but desire to cooperate. Since every church and denominational body is autonomous there is no mandate to cooperate. We could all just choose to operate independently and go on our merry way. But most of us value the synergy and appreciate the leverage that cooperation gives us. We Baptists can sometimes get intense and passionate in pressing our positions but in the end tend to choose to work together even if we don’t get everything we desire. That’s an encouragement for this current discussion because while everyone can pretty much get on board with the general statements that have been made so far about being better stewards and fulfilling the Great Commission, it is quite possible that there will be many opinions and little consensus when the Great Commission Task Force’s recommendations are initially released.

———————————–

Special Note: I want to offer a special word of thanks to my son, Mark Reeves, for conducting most of the research and developing many of the themes expressed in this series of posts. Mark, a History major at Western Kentucky University, spent several weeks this summer digging through the dusty archives of the Kentucky Baptist Convention to find relevant material from the Western Recorder, the annuals of the state and Southern Baptist conventions and the works of various Baptist historians to help me get up to speed on Kentucky’s Cooperative Program history. Click here to see Mark’s original paper and the citations for the material used in this series of posts.

Dr. A.T. Jamison

In looking at the current Great Commission Resurgence conversation and the original discussions surrounding the formation and implementation of the Cooperative Program, I’ve been amazed at the similarity of the rhetoric. As I said in Part 2, Baptists seemed to be pretty on board with the general concept of the Cooperative Program in 1925. The idea of pooling resources to meet the needs of a wide variety of Baptist causes rather than taking up a special offering for each really seemed to make sense. After the Southern Baptist Convention approved the Cooperative Program, messengers to most state conventions quickly followed suit.

However, it didn’t take long for differing ideas about the way to view CP to surface. One of the very first concerns expressed was that the Cooperative Program was moving Southern Baptists toward “centralization” and away from a model that truly valued the autonomy of the local church. In 1926, the president of the South Carolina Baptist Convention, Dr. A.T. Jamison, denounced “denominational machinery” in lamenting that that “the cause is always weakened when local people look to some general central agency and pass up responsibility to them.” The same week that sermon was reported on, Kentucky’s Western Recorder newspaper also decried that “the accepted voices of religious faith have seemed to speak in terms of expediency and ‘efficiency’ oftener than in those of spiritual power and devotion.”

The sentiment seems remarkably similar to some of those being expressed today. Whether in discussing the size, structure or relative power of various state and national denominational bodies or in defending the primacy of the local church, some Baptists are saying that too much energy is being put into the machinery that drives our mission and not enough into fulfilling the mission itself. This is certainly a valid concern to a point. It’s kind of like saying that we don’t want to spend so much effort doing maintenance on the car that we never take the trip to our destination. It’s also valid to say, though, that without putting in gas and oil and regularly maintaining the engine, we’re unlikely to get very far no matter how strong our focus is on the destination.

One of the things that is really interesting about this, both then and now, is that we as Baptists tend to couch our concerns in very nuanced language. For instance, even as Dr. Jamison lamented “denominational machinery,” he also said he wasn’t looking to make changes.

“Nor shall I even assert that certain changes should be made to our present plans,” he said. “My effort to is to call attention to certain principles.”

Likewise, the Western Recorder was very much a pro-CP newspaper that said “we have no quarrel to make on any organizational machinery now operative. We have no plan to propose to gear it differently.”

Again, this seems quite similar to much of what is being said today. On one hand, we see Baptists affirm current denominational structures even as they call for change. It’s not exactly a paradox but it does make me think of us as being people who want to eat our cake and have it too. We want to be autonomous at the same time we want to act as a cohesive unit for fulfilling the Great Commission. We want to call for change but we want those parts that we like, as individuals, to stay the same.

Maybe we should call that healthy tension because I’m not sure that it’s a bad thing. We all have our views but at the same time recognize that we may not have all the answers. We want to be heard but we also want to stay in the Lord’s will and are sensitive to how He may be speaking through other Christians.

The truth of this may be seen in what happened in 1927 when Baptists ended up expanding the powers of the Executive Committee in a move that was seen as both a way to streamline the Convention and decentralize power by creating a more efficient organizational structure that was more representative of Southern Baptists. The 1927 Convention was held, interestingly enough, in Louisville and this plan was seen as “not more plan but power; not more machinery but more steam.”

The discussion about big denominational structures isn’t the only rhetorical comparison to make between the mid-20s and today. The biggie — the conversation about missions and getting enough money to the international mission field — was as much a part of the discussion then as it is now. I’ll hit that topic in the next post and I think you’ll be amazed at how similar the rhetoric then and now really is.

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.

Yogi Berra in his playing days

Something tells me that Yogi Berra may not be following the Great Commission Resurgence discussion in Southern Baptist life these days but one of his oft quoted malapropisms is certainly an appropriate one for the current conversation –  “It’s deja vu all over again.”  Because of the strong involvement and encouragement of young leaders in this important conversation, many may think that the ideas being expressed and the rhetoric being used is fresh and new. A look at Baptist history surrounding the adoption of the Cooperative Program, however, shows that the current discussion is really the continuation of one that is now more than 90 years old.

I say ”more than 90″ because you can easily take the current conversation as far back as 1913 when the Southern Baptist Convention appointed an “Efficiency Committee” to take a look at how Southern Baptists were going about their work. The committee, which was the Great Commission Task Force of its day, reported back to the Convention in 1914 with recommendations on cooperation among the SBC’s three boards — Foreign, Home and Sunday School — and with the state conventions.  The committee also addressed the issues of the collection and division of funds and, in its final report in 1915, even dealt with the question of combining the Home and Foreign Boards. (The committee said this was a bad idea at that time, by the way.)

You might say that Southern Baptists just keep repeating themselves in revisiting the same issues and feel that is a bad thing.  I would make the argument, though, that rather than the length of this discussion being a discouraging sign, it is actually an encouraging one. I say this for two reasons. First, just because something was discussed nearly a century ago doesn’t mean we shouldn’t discuss it now. Circumstances, organizations and generations change and conclusions that made sense at an earlier time may not make sense today. Second, and more importantly, the history is showing that we keep having this conversation because Southern Baptists really love and are committed to missions. I am proud of that continuity. The fact that the reason we want to keep revisiting the way we do things is because we keep wanting to see if there are better ways to obey Jesus’ command to take the gospel everywhere. That’s a very good thing.

It is amazing, however, how similar the discussion then — and especially in the mid 1920s when the Cooperative Program was just getting going — is to the discussion today. I’m going to use the next few posts to revisit this history from a Kentucky context and after seeing some of the quotes from Baptist leaders of the past, I think you’ll agree that the similarities are almost eeriee…kind of like this has all happened before.