As we enter the year 2025, we enter a milestone for Southern Baptists. This year we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Cooperative Program. In the first 74 years of the existence of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), missions were funded by what is known as a “societal” method of fundraising where individuals and churches would separately make pledges to mission societies or directly to missionaries themselves. In the societal method, missionaries would leave the field spending large amounts of time speaking at churches to raise their support. In time, missionaries and mission societies hired solicitors to raise the funds for them.
The problem with this method is that it took missionaries off the field to raise funds, only the largest churches would be contacted since they could give the largest amounts of money, and much of the funds that were raised went to pay the solicitors. For example, in 1883 the Home Mission Board reported that 53 cents of every dollar raised went to pay the salaries and expenses of the solicitors.
In 1919, SBC leaders sought to create a better way for its churches to fund missions and ministries. They
created the Seventy Five Million Campaign in which every SBC church was challenged to make a five year pledge to consistently give to kingdom work at the state and national level.
Although the pledges paid fell $17 million short of the goal, the result of the Campaign put millions of
dollars more to the work of missions and ministries. In its 74 years of existence prior to 1919, the International Mission Board (IMB) had received a total of $12.6 million. In just the five years of the Seventy Five Million Campaign, the IMB received almost that same amount!
As the Seventy Five Million Campaign came to a close, the SBC had learned the power of cooperation and the benefit of turning churches into the fundraisers for missions instead of solicitors. Through a cooperative, rather than societal, approach to raise funds for missions, every church of every size in every location was able to stand arm in arm in its support of the convention’s mission work.
In 1925, the SBC formed the Cooperative Program, which challenged every SBC church to give 10 percent of its undesignated receipts, rather than making pledges, to fund missions and ministries at the state, national and international level. As a result, in the 100 years since the founding of the Cooperative Program, SBC churches have given billions of dollars to the kingdom work of our convention.
Last year, Oklahoma Baptists churches surpassed the one billion dollar mark in their giving through the Cooperative Program since its inception. How grateful I am for the Cooperative Program! I have met countless missionaries, church planters, chaplains, seminary students, just to name a few, who are the beneficiaries of the generosity of SBC churches. Cooperation to fund missions and ministries is in the DNA of Southern Baptists—it’s who we are. The Cooperative Program is our distinctive feature as a convention. I look forward to celebrating the Cooperative Program this year, and I pray that our churches will continue to see its value and support it for many years to come.
Serving Jesus with You,
Todd Fisher
