Malachi O’Brien – Pastor to Pastor: The Cooperative Program
JEFFERSON CITY – The MBC has produced a series of short videos featuring Missouri Baptist pastors to highlight Cooperative Program (CP)Month this October.
The series, called “Pastor2Pastor,” captures the personal testimonies of pastors across the state as they talk about how CP benefits their churches and enables their congregations to touch the world for Christ.
Featured pastors include Malachi O’Brien of Pleasant Ridge Baptist Church in Harrisonville; Eddie Bumpers of Crossway Baptist Church in Springfield; Lane Harrison of LifePoint Church in Ozark; and several others.
All of the videos are hosted on a featured MBC webpage (mobaptist.org/cp/p2p) and are easy to view, download, share via social media, and show during Sundays throughout the month.
Through the CP, the tithes and offerings of Missouri Baptists help start new churches, feed the hungry, advance Christian education, provide disaster relief, promote evangelism, keep nearly 10,000 full-time missionaries in the field … and much more.
October is CP Month for the 45,000 churches of the Southern Baptist Convention. It is a month to celebrate the unique funding process that Southern Baptists have used since 1925 to support missions and evangelism around the world, according to Rob Phillips, who coordinates CP promotion for the Missouri Baptist Convention.
“The CP is the envy of the evangelical world,” he said. “When Southern Baptists give through CP, our faithful stewardship has a global impact. By pooling financial resources, Southern Baptists are able to do so much more together than we ever could alone. CP is uniquely Southern Baptist. It’s smart. It’s effective. And it changes lives.”
Here’s how CP works:
It begins with you – your tithes and offerings to the local church.
Your church, in turn, gives a percentage of its annual budget to the MBC.
The MBC invests about 60 cents of each dollar in Missouri missions and sends the rest to the Southern Baptist Convention, where CP contributions from 45,000 other SBC churches are pooled to support nearly 10,000 missionaries, six seminaries, ethics and religious liberty, and other causes.
There are many ways MBC churches can celebrate CP Month and raise awareness of its value. See the sidebar, “Eight simple ways to promote CP in October,” for ideas.
Pastors may want to share a message on stewardship, missions, or evangelism – all enhanced through cooperative efforts of Missouri Baptists.