Arome May 4, 2012, 00:08:50

, there is so much money in the pot. So although I would be sutennd if the IMB or NAMB representatives exactly ASKED the pastors to REDIRECT the CP funds, it probably did have that impact functionally in some cases. That is not true in every case, of course John Marshall of Second Baptist Church in Springfield, MO is a great example to the contrary, i.e., leading his church to give sacrificially to CP and the mission offerings AND to send dozens of groups of international trips each year. But it is not always so.A couple of quick examples it’s not uncommon when you’re pushing the Lottie Moon or Annie Armstrong offerings in a local church, if you do so at those designated times of the year, that the regular offering of the church may suffer a bit. Functionally, people are giving the same; they’re just giving to the cause you’ve highlighted rather than their normal tithes or offerings to the storehouse. I think that redirection of funds might happen somewhat unintentially in some churches who increase supporting a particular mission directly and decrease general missions support through the CP. In their minds, it’s just another way of doing missions giving. The problem, of course, is that this pushes us back to the Society approach, in which each church is recruited by individual missionaries to support a particular mission or project, and there is no unified mission strategy or funding. Without a unified strategy, some get great financial support and others languish with minimal support.Another example at a church meeting I attended, there were some IMB missionaries from one of the stan former Soviet republics. The missionary went through his normal missionary report until he came to a particular point in his Powerpoint slide show, and then said, Perhaps you’re asking how you could help us do our work in -stan. Unfortunately, I’m not allowed to give you these details about how you can help unless you ask. But if you ask, then I can share some of them with you. He said this somewhat humorously, and of course, the congregation caught his drift, and said, How can we help? So then he went to the next few slides and showed what needs they had a Jeep, a radio station, a building, etc. What he was doing was going around the Lottie Moon offering and the Cooperative Program, indeed around the formally adopted CP agreement about not making direct appeal for funds (rather than through CP and missions offerings). This was an egregious violation of the business and financial plan of the SBC. Our NOBTS development officer would be fired if he went to a church and made a direct appeal for funds, or to put NOBTS in their budget. But this has unfortunately become rather commonplace by other entities in the convention. This direct appeal was no different than a missionary in a faith missions independent Baptist church would have given, or someone in the pre-Cooperative Program days of the Society method. Whoever has the best speaker gets the best offering. No central mission agency to do an overall assessment of needs and assignment of consistent and predictable funding, but every man (i.e., mission) for himself. Tim, I can share with you some specific examples of well-known megachurch pastors who were approached personally by mission agency heads asking for direct funding for cities or people groups, but since I wasn’t in the room, I would rather share this with you personally than in this forum. However, this practice was so common that it was foundational to the Megametro group being very resentful of imposing a CP only standard for evaluating qualifications for Conventio office when, in fact, mission agency heads were lobbying them directly and personally, and receiving from them hundreds of thousands of dollars in missions giving that did not count as missions support. Unfortunately, these mission agency heads did not stand up for them when these pastors were getting criticized later for minimal missions giving.