Denominational Relations

Denominational Relations Pages

 

Budget proposal

Addendum: The budget proposal described here was adopted by College Park on April 19, 2006.

Please click on

http://www.collegeparkbaptist.org/ext/DR/CPBC2006MissionsResourcePlan6cols.pdf.

for the revised proposal for denominational giving presented by Denominational Relations to the church on January 4.

Key features of the proposal include:

  • No change in total giving to the Southern Baptist Convention, but focusing SBC giving on its missions boards. This increases funding to the International Missions Board and the North American Missions Board of the SBC.
  • Increases in giving to the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.
  • Continued full participation in the Baptist State Convention, including a full complement of ten messengers.
  • More direct giving to missions, agencies, and institutions, with reduced giving via the Cooperative Program of the Baptist State Convention. This results in more money to the retirement homes, children’s homes, and NC Baptist colleges and divinity schools.

The plan calls for more direct funding of agencies that we have supported in the recent past at either the state or national level, either via the Cooperative Program or through special offerings. The only items in the proposed budget that were not in our 2005 operating budget are

  • the Women's Missionary Union and Baptist Men, which we have never before supported within the operating budget, but only through special offerings,
  • CBF-NC, which in the past we only supported at the national level,
  • Meredith College, which we supported via the Cooperative Program until 2001,
  • the Poteat Scholarship Fund for Baptist students at Wake Forest, which we also funded until just a few years ago.

The proposal on the next page contains a very detailed breakdown of where our money will go, agency by agency. Most of these agencies will receive money via both the Cooperative Program and directly from College Park. This attached proposal reflects the net result of sending the money as follows:

  • 1.12% of the church budget to unrestricted Cooperative Program Plan C.
  • 0.3% of the church budget to a restricted Cooperative Program Plan C.
  • 10.18% of the church budget directly to missions, agencies, and institutions.
  • 0.5% of the church budget transferred from the responsibility of the Denominational Relations Committee to the Missions Council for distribution to non-denominational missions.

We have also prepared answers to frequently asked questions about this proposal that you can find below or at the information desk.

If you have more questions, you can share them with committee members or drop them in the question boxes that we will place at the information desk and in the areas near the sanctuary. You may also e-mail the entire committee at dr@collegeparkbaptist.org.

This is a dynamic document, so please check back regularly for updates.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. We see increases to the state missions and agencies. Where does the money come from?

When we send money directly to the agencies, we eliminate the large fraction of denominational giving that stays with General Board and other operations at the state convention offices in Cary. This frees up over $43,000 that we can now send directly to the agencies.

2. Are we cutting giving to the SBC?

No. The proposal calls for sending the same portion of our church budget to the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). It does, however, call for sending all the money directly to the International Missions Board and Home Missions Board, since the support we have heard expressed for SBC giving was almost exclusively focused on the missionaries and their work. This proposal results in a 37% increase in giving to the International Mission Board and the North American Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention.

3. The SBC portion of our denominational giving was 4.0% in the old budget but 4.17% of the new budget, but you say that SBC total giving is constant. It looks like we are giving more to SBC. Why the discrepancy?

The original budget gave 12.1% to all denominational missions, while the new budget gives only 11.6%, with the rest transferred to the Missions Council. To keep the dollars and per cent of the church budget to SBC from declining, we need to raise the SBC percentage of the denominational portion of the church budget from 4.00 to 4.17%. SBC giving was $3,645 in the original budget and is $3,645 in the proposed budget. No change.

4. Does the plan cut funding to SBC missionaries?

No. It substantially increases funding to SBC missionaries and substantially increases funding to CBF missionaries.

5. What prompted the proposed change in our giving plans?

The initial concerns were triggered by two important negative events in the Baptist State Convention in 2005.

  1. For the first time in memory, trustees nominated by the various agencies and institutions for their boards were rejected. In some cases, they were replaced by people unknown to the agencies they were now given the authority to govern. Agencies discovered that every nominee from a church that contributed to Plan C was rejected. (Plan C is the Cooperative Program plan by which College Park sends the majority of its denominational giving.)
  2. Moderate churches giving via Plan C had their number of messengers (representatives to the state convention) reduced. All but the largest Plan C churches lose messengers under the new formula.

These two actions mean that, while moderate churches are still welcome to give to the Cooperative Program, they are not allowed to fully participate in decisions of how those funds are used.

As the Denominational Relations Committee began to meet, we found a much more important positive reason to modify our giving plans. By sending more money directly to agencies instead of via the state convention, we could give much more money to the missions and ministries we support.

6. I support the proposal, but why can’t we just wait on this change until forced to do this by elimination of our giving plans?

Waiting is a choice we can make.

However, many members are asking a different question: why do we continue to send any money to a group that has said they do not want us? Changing our giving pattern is painful, but so is a decision to continue such generous funding of a state convention that has become so hostile to moderate churches.

Perhaps the best reason to change is that our agencies need our help now. Just this month, the Baptist Retirement Homes withdrew from control of the Baptist State Convention. In so doing, the agency will likely lose $938,500 per year from the state convention.

Other agencies and institutions plan to follow the lead of the retirement homes. After the state apponted trustees who had no previous relationship with the agencies over which they were placed in charge, the agencies feel that their very future is at risk if they do not remove themselves from convention control.

The agencies need our support now to help prepare for the loss of state support that is likely to come very soon.

Most importantly, these agencies are the very reason for the creation and the most important reason for the existence of the Baptist State Convention. If we can support them more generously through direct giving, then doesn’t good stewardship require that we do so? They are doing good work now, so why not increase their funding now?

7. If WMU and Baptist Men do not get money from the Cooperative Program, where have they gotten their money in the past?

WMU and Baptist Men receive no budgeted funds from College Park or from the Baptist State Convention, but they get a portion of the North Carolina Missions Offering, a special offering held each fall. This proposal marks the first time these groups have received any portion of our church’s budget.

8. Does this call for more (or less) spending on missions?

No. It merely reallocates the same dollars, with a larger fraction going directly to agencies. This means more money for these agencies.

9. These changes are in response to decisions by the state convention with which we disagree. By redirecting our giving away from the convention and toward the agencies, are we not modeling that church members should withhold or redirect giving when the church does something with which they disagree?

This is not the best analogy to the current situation at the state. We have often disagreed with decisions of the state convention over the years, yet we have continued to be one of the more generous churches in support of the convention. What happened this year was different. This year, agencies and institutions discovered that members of churches who contributed to Cooperative Program Plan C had been banned from membership on their boards.

A better analogy to what happened is the following: suppose our deacons were to decide, without a vote of the church, that only one of SBC or CBF was worthy of support. Further suppose that they decided that if they found any church member had contributed to the other organization, that member would no longer be allowed to serve on any church committee.

That is the equivalent of what the state leadership did this year. Persons from CBF-contributing churches who were nominated by agencies or institutions for their boards were rejected by the leadership of the state convention. This policy change happened without a vote of the convention.

If the deacons of our church were to do such a thing as described above, people would naturally feel excluded.

10. The budget document said that if there were any changes in the giving plans, then the church would be asked to refer the denominational giving back to the committee. All the plans are still in place, so this referral back to committee is not what we voted on.

The Denominational Relations Committee and church Budget Committee prepared their original budget recommendations prior to the November meeting of the Baptist State Convention. Two proposals had been announced prior to the convention: the first was to eliminate plans B, C, and D; the second was to no longer fully recognize Plan C for purposes of determining messengers. The committee was aware of both these proposals, and in its discussions in preparation for the original budget agreed that it wanted the opportunity to revisit the recommendation if there were a change in the budget plans or in the ways they were recognized. This was conveyed by the committee chair in his e-mail delivering our budget recommendation to the budget committee. His e-mail included the statement, “Note that we would like this section presented contingent upon current giving plans remaining unchanged and fully recognized.” The full wording was not included in the document prepared by the Budget Committee.

However, when the budget proposal was first presented to the church, Rick Matthews noted in the discussion time that if there were any change in the plans or in the way in which they were recognized, the committee would like an opportunity to revise its recommendation. (This was before the Baptist State Convention met.)

At the subsequent budget conference, as soon as the budget recommendation was moved by the budget committee, Rick Matthews moved to amend the budget referring the 12.1% denominational giving back to Denominational Relations to develop a new recommendation. After the motion received a second, he stated that since Plan C was no longer fully recognized for purposes of determining messenger count (the CBF portion of Plan C is now ignored), the Denominational Relations Committee would like an opportunity to bring forward a new recommendation for allocation of this portion of the budget.

The amendment passed on unanimous vote. The amended budget, which no longer included a plan for the 12.1% denominational giving, then passed in a unanimous vote.

11. Isn’t this a rather radical position for a church to take, sending only 1.42% of its budget to the Cooperative Program? Isn’t this just taking advantage of a loophole in the rules?

Many churches give a small percentage of their budgets to the Cooperative Program, preferring instead to choose which ministries they support with the greater part of their missions giving. These rules have been in place in more or less their present form for a long time, and many churches have and do qualify for messengers with budgets similar to ours. The state convention believes that it is appropriate for large churches who give one percent of their budget to have the maximum ten messengers. The Southern Baptist Convention elected at least one president in recent years whose church gave less than one percent to the Cooperative Program. So what we are proposing is consistent with what many churches, conservative or moderate, have been doing for many years.

Within our own church, this change is a continuation of a trend in our church budgets that started in the early eighties. At that time, almost all our budgeted missions giving went to the Cooperative Program. In recent years, a much smaller portion of our budgeted missions was sent to the Cooperative Program. For some years we have been sending substantial funds directly to missions and ministries we support and do.

While it is a change in the way we channel our funds, it is a much smaller change in where our funds end up. Every agency or institution on the list has received, at either the local or the national level, funds from College Park in many previous years. Under this proposal, more of our funds will go to them directly and less (but still some) of our funds will reach them via the Cooperative Program.

12. But isn’t this a move away from a unified giving plan, a unified budget?

Yes, it is, and one of our challenges is to find the proper balance between a unified giving plan and designated giving.

There are two very strong arguments for unified giving plans, both at the church level and at the denominational level. First, it means that those doing the work (such as missionaries) do not have to spend so much of their time away from the field justifying their costs. Second, when a focus is on designated giving, there are always some needs that suffer. At the local church level, it is easy to find people with a sense of call to support the Youth program or a new organ, but it is hard to find people with a sense of call to pay for heat. Ideally, we find a church to serve and contribute to whose values and priorities we generally trust and support, rather than having to decide where every penny we give should go. These are the reasons that we have historically spoken up for unified giving plans within our church, within our state, and nationally.

Still, we have never taken an absolutist approach to this. We have a van fund. We have a building fund. We collect the Lottie Moon, Annie Armstrong, and Global Missions offerings, and offerings for retirement homes, hospitals, and our children’s homes.

In a pure unified giving plan top to bottom, we would have one church budget, and all missions giving would come through the church budget to a single Cooperative Program. There would be no building fund, no van fund, no funding for the prison ministry, no Lottie Moon offering. Yet studies have found that people give more in total when designated offerings are among their choices.

Neither extreme (pure unified giving or only designated funds) is good. It is our committee’s belief that this recommendation represents the best balance for College Park between these two extremes.

13. Why does the Cooperative Program giving go to Plan C rather than to Plan B or a combination of B and C?

This is what allows us to send all of our SBC giving directly to the missions boards. By sending directly to the IMB and NAMB, we are able to increase giving to the missions boards by 37% even while keeping SBC giving constant. Sending our SBC money via the Cooperative Program Plan B would not allow us to do this. Sending our SBC giving via Plan B would mean less money for our SBC missionaries than under the proposed plan.

14. Why increase funding for divinity schools of state Baptist colleges while cutting funding to the SBC seminaries?

While Dr. Edwards and Rev. Smith both attended SBC seminaries, these seminaries are no longer likely to serve our church or its members. They train their students in a different leadership style – with considerable authority for the pastor – from what our church as supported and what our pastors have modeled. Since the mid-1980’s, five members and one very active college student from College Park have attended NC divinity schools. No College Park member has attended an SBC seminary in that time.

15. What if I find an agency doing important work that is not part of the proposed budget?

The purpose of this proposal is to enable the church to be the best stewards of its giving. If an important agency has been overlooked, then it is appropriate for any church member to offer an amendment to reallocate funds to support it. The amendment should identify the agency and the amount of increase, and it should specify from which agencies the proposed giving should be transferred.

16. What do the following agencies do?

These are all agencies that have been and continue to be supported by the Cooperative Program. Our proposal will fund these partly through the cooperative program and partly directly. The proposal calls for increases to the first two, with the remainder receiving essentially the same dollars as before.

  • Biblical Recorder. This is the state Baptist newspaper of North Carolina. It is the primary means by which we stay informed of what is happening among Baptists in North Carolina. http://www.biblicalrecorder.org. (You can read it online for free.)
  • Baptist Foundation of North Carolina. This agency advises churches and individuals on wills, trusts, and investments. If a church wants to educate members on how to contribute a portion of their estate in a way that best conserves assets, this is the group that provides such advice. http://www.ncbaptistfoundation.org/mission.html.
  • Baptist World Alliance. “The Baptist World Alliance is a fellowship of 214 Baptist unions and conventions comprising a membership of more than 34 million baptized believers. This represents a community of approximately 80 million Baptists ministering around the world. The BWA unites Baptists worldwide, leads in evangelism, responds to people in need and defends human rights.” – from http://www.bwanet.org/.
  • Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs. This organization is nearly seventy years old, and has worked on education and advocacy to protect religious freedom. http://www.bjcpa.org.
  • Baptist Center for Ethics. Provides Christ-centered resources and materials dealing with contemporary ethical issues and questions.
  • Associated Baptist Press. A very Baptist press covering national issues. http://www.abpnews.com/. (Sign up for their free electronic newsletter.)

 


College Park Baptist Church