JEFFERSON CITY – During its meeting here, March 7, the Missouri Baptist Convention (MBC) Executive Board received a report and recommendations from its Cooperative Program (CP) Vision Task Force.
The CP Vision Task Force was appointed in March 2020 by then-MBC President Jeremy Muniz, with authorization from the executive board. Muniz named Wesley Vance, senior pastor of Fellowship Church, Kansas City, as chairman of the Task Force.
During his March 7th report to the Executive Board, Vance said, “The scope of the Task Force was broadly to identify trends that will impact the mission of Missouri Baptists for the next decade. …
“As the world attempted to sort out the new normal (amid the COVID-19 pandemic),” he added, “the Task Force utilized a process that began determining what is reality. What is going on within our Convention and why is it happening? Through multiple listening sessions, interviews, data collections, and financial evaluations, the Task Force identified what is really taking place.
Vance
“The Task Force also researched what others are doing and how we can learn from them. They looked at demographics and economic data county by county across our state. They looked at church attendance and giving trends. They looked at other state conventions, interviewed national Southern Baptist Convention leaders, experts in the field of Higher Education, and Sanctity of Life Entities so we could best accomplish the task.”
Original members to the Task Force, appointed by Muniz, were: Anthony Allen, then-president of Hannibal-LaGrange University (who resigned his post at HLGU earlier this year); Jeff Anderson, pastor of Calvary, Hannibal; Ron Crow, then-pastor of First, Diamond; Neil Franks, president of the Missouri Baptist Foundation; Roger Graham, associate director of missions of Cape Girardeau Baptist Association; Jennifer Hendrickson, member of Ridgecrest Baptist Church, Springfield; Brian Jump, pastor of First, Clever; Bob Parker, member of Immanuel, Hannibal; John Vernon, director of missions of Cape Girardeau Baptist Association; Richard Young, pastor of South Haven, Belton.
Report on ‘five realities’ of Missouri Baptist ministry
Vance reported to the MBC Executive Board “five realities” that Missouri Baptists face as they move into the future:
• First, Missouri Baptist church attendance is in decline.
“The average church member is absent from the church 50% of Sundays throughout the year,” Vance said. “From the rise of youth sports to normalizing Sunday Funday, church attendance is on the decline. Researchers identify that 1 million youth will leave the Church every year for the next 50 years. By 2050, 35 million youth in our nation who were raised in a Christian home will no longer attend church. While your church may not be in decline now, it will be the norm for many churches across our state in the years ahead.”
• Second, Southern Baptist life has been characterized by “strained relationships and tense tribalism.”
“From churches to associations within our state,” Vance said, “there is a frustration that church plants tip their hat to our Baptist family to gain access to our cooperative funds for three years only to depart when their tribe at Acts29 or ARC calls them to play. From church planting to partnering missions, churches are questioning why they should continue to support this cooperative work when all they are met with is tribal divide that doesn’t support Missouri Baptist churches in our state or send more missionaries internationally. They look across our state and see we have over 700 churches without pastors and many more that would not be identified as vibrant and healthy. We must recognize the strain partnerships that are beginning to bubble to the surface in our Baptist family even today.”
• Third, even if some churches had a strong financial year in 2021, Missouri Baptists are likely to see a decline in giving as time goes on.
“Researchers identified that we are in the greatest transition of wealth from one generation to the next; however, this transition is not going to continue to fund the ministry of the local church,” Vance said. “Many of the churches are receiving generous giving from an older generation while the younger generations are more prone to give to causes rather than to annual budgets. The data is consistent with what we have recognized through designated giving by churches. In the last few years, we have seen record offerings to Annie Armstrong, Lottie Moon, and our own MMO offering while CP giving has only minimally increased. Future trends will show that we will have to do more with less.”
• Fourth, Missouri Baptist entities continue to see a rise in the costs of maintaining their ministries.
“Beyond inflation, the cost to do business for each of our entities continues to significantly increase,” Vance said. “While each entity shared their tremendous gratitude for the support of the CP; the consistency of our CP allocation remains flat while their expenses continue to increase. This means that as we continue to contribute, the CP funds make a smaller and smaller percentage to each of their respective budgets. In most cases the CP dollar that we share is less than 3% of their operating income. …
Moreover, Vance warned, “the current business model for several entities is in jeopardy and without significant adjustment. Their long-term viability is in question. For example, in 2025, there will be a significant enrollment cliff that will not only affect our Christian Higher Education Entities, but Higher Education as a whole because of the birth rate decrease that occurred beginning in 2008. Simply put, there will not be enough students to keep all the tuition-based education institutions solvent. Across the board, educational institutions are trying to shore up their endowments for future revenue streams because of this encroaching demand. At the Baptist Home, they too have demands upon them that show why they are making aggressive moves to capitalize on the market. Even here with our State Staff, they have looked at the Springfield BSU Project as an additional funding source for future ministry (See story, page 3). Why? It’s because the financial demands are increasing.”
• Finally, potential legislative threats could make ministry in Missouri and across the nation more difficult.
“Simply put,” Vance said, “we are one legislative session away from our entities no longer being able to operate without violating our biblical convictions. Passage of the Equality Act would cut off access to federally funded Pell Grants and loans for our Education Entities. It would demand our Children Home operate according to the debauchery of the LGBTQ agenda. And if it were to pass, the decision of this body would be to look at how to close the mission work of one of our entities, not to expand it.”
Despite the challenge of these “five realities,” Vance said the CP Task Force “sees tremendous opportunities before us. We see that our state has the potential to not only leverage our churches to reach our neighbors, but the nations.”
Recommendations
The Task Force proposed five recommendations to the MBC Executive Board, three of which involved the employment of consultants to review various aspects of MBC ministry – namely:
1.) “strategy consultants for the purpose of evaluating and bringing recommendations by March 2023 regarding the relationship of Educational Entities to Missouri Baptists through trustee selection, ongoing financial demands and funding, and future institutional development that maintains historic doctrinal commitments to Missouri Baptist Churches”;
2.) “strategy consultants for the purpose of evaluating and bringing recommendations by March 2023 regarding the relationship of Sanctity of Life Entities to Missouri Baptists through trustee selection, ongoing financial demands and funding, and future institutional development that maintains historic doctrinal commitments to Missouri Baptist Churches”;
3.) and “Denominee Consultants for the purpose of guiding Missouri Baptist Convention leadership to develop and implement future missional strategies for greater Kingdom clarity and effectiveness.”
The Executive Board approved up to $100,000 from the MBC’s 2021 underspend for hiring these consultants.
In their other two recommendations, the CP Task Force:
• recommended “that the MBC Executive Board MBC Executive Board designate 2025 as a ‘Year of Cooperation’ by celebrating the historic work of Missouri Baptists over the last 100 years through the Cooperative Program”;
• and recommended that the Executive Board once again set the 2023 CP goal at $15 million, maintaining the same allocations approved in the previous year: “5% SBC/MBC Shared Administrative Costs, 38% to SBC missions and ministries, 35% to MBC missions and ministries, and 22% to Missouri Baptist Entities. It is also recommended that all Cooperative Program dollars received above the goal would receive a 50/50 allocation for the MBC/SBC.”