Beyond Vision 2025: The Cooperative Program Is the Catalyst
Last week, I introduced Vision 2025 and our opportunity to cooperate as Baptists on five strategic actions to stand tall with a passionate vision of reaching every person for Jesus Christ in every town, every city, every state, and every nation.
Being all in on Vision 2025 begins now. I believe our five Strategic Actions are things in which every church of every size, every ethnicity, and every language can participate. These five Strategic Actions involve increasing our missionaries around the world, adding new churches in America, calling out the called, reaching and baptizing more teenagers, and funding this vision. You can read more detail on these actions here.
I’d like to go deeper on Strategic Action #5 today.
Strategic Action #5:
Increase our annual giving in successive years to establish a new pattern of growth that will lead us to reach and surpass $500 million through the Cooperative Program to achieve these Great Commission goals.
While this may be listed last, it is the one that allows all the others to take place. The Cooperative Program is the catalyst for our Great Commission vision. Without our work together through the Cooperative Program, none of this happens.
Please understand, we know we find ourselves in a different world than last year or any other time in our generation. Never before in most of our lifetimes have we walked through a global pandemic. Therefore, our goal of increasing annual giving in successive years to establish a new path of growth is imperative and may cause us to see a turnaround in Total Cooperative Program Giving.
When speaking of Total Cooperative Program giving, I am referring to the financial resources our churches give through the Cooperative Program. Those monies contribute to Great Commission work regionally, across your own state, our nation, and all the nations around the world. Let me show you what has been happening with our Cooperative Program giving over the past twenty years.
The image below shows something I believe is very important. The box in red shows the years of the Great Recession of 2008-2009. Do you see the decline after this and its lagging effect?
Since this decline began, Total Cooperative Program giving has not recovered to its pre-recession levels. In fact, it has not recovered as fast as other areas of philanthropy in the secular world. We typically trail the growth of the GDP, philanthropic giving, individual giving, and religious giving. While we are grateful God has provided, we are not at the level of the others since 2008-2009.
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