JEFFERSON CITY—Faced with the prospect of nearly 300 non-complying churches who do not meet membership requirements after a four-year period of grace, the Missouri Baptist Convention (MBC) Credentials Committee has established a compliance deadline of June 30 while emphasizing there will be a strong and intentional effort to retain as many of these churches as possible.
With 298 churches in jeopardy due to their non-giving through the Cooperative Program (CP), leaders meeting Feb. 2 at the Baptist Building committed to make another round of calls in a loving and patient manner. Each committee member agreed to contact about 50 churches in the context of educating church officials about the CP, hoping to restore individual churches to the MBC.
“What you’re doing is very strategic and very important,” said MBC Executive Director John Yeats. “The focus needs to be on redemptive measures.”
There was a strong sense in the room that June 30 is a needed deadline. Letters have already gone out to the churches and to the directors of missions on this matter, which Yeats called “historic.”
“We need to be clear to the churches that this is it,” said Chairman Gary Mathes, pastor of Christian maturity, Green Valley Baptist Church, St. Joseph.
Mathes set an April 1 deadline for the contact work to be done. That would allow time for churches to possibly vote on the matter in their business meetings.
One statistic that illustrates the difficulty of these delinquent churches was provided by MBC Associate Executive Director Jay Hughes, who said according to a report he compiled, 114 churches had not given to the MBC through the CP for the previous five years.
“Some of these churches have been repeatedly contacted and just said no,” said Terry Buster, pastor, First Baptist Church, Palmyra, who is a three-year member of the Credentials Committee.
A reform move through the Great Commission Resurgence at the Southern Baptist Convention in 2010 has resulted in a new category of giving called “Great Commission Giving” which is being implemented through the SBC Executive Committee. While this new designation is in addition to giving through the CP, Yeats noted that the primary way for a Southern Baptist church to give remains through the CP. In Missouri, that way to give is directly tied to membership.
All that a church needs to do to comply with MBC membership requirements is give $1 a year through the CP.
Committee members agreed that there will be a way in this 2012 process for a church, by letter, to formally withdraw from the MBC. The committee also reaffirmed its right in MBC polity to make the final determination on membership.
“If they want out, it’s OK—no condemnation,” Yeats said.
But the bottom line is retention.
“We want to bring back as many as we can back into the fold,” Mathes said.