Prior to 1919, funding for missions in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) was done through something known as a “societal” method. Missionaries, either on their own or through mission societies, raised their own support. This meant they would have to leave the mission field to return home to raise support among churches. Because of the time and expense involved in fundraising, missionaries began to hire professional fundraisers to do the work for them. These fundraisers usually charged a fee of 25 percent of what they collected on behalf of the missionaries. In addition, the professionals would only visit large churches with the most amount of money. Smaller churches had little chance to be part of giving to mission endeavors.

To correct this, the $75 Million Campaign was unanimously approved by messengers to the SBC Annual Meeting in Atlanta. The campaign asked for members of all SBC churches to make five-year pledges to support missions and ministry in the SBC. The hope was to include all churches in supporting missions, allow our missionaries to stay on the field and not have to come home to fundraise and reduce administrative cost and duplication of efforts so that the maximum amount of money raised could find its way to the mission field. Even though the result of the campaign failed to reach $75 million, the $58.5 million that was given in the five years of the campaign exceeded the total amount of missions giving to the SBC in its entire 75-year history to that point!

Encouraged by the amount of money that could be raised for missions and ministry when the convention was united in its giving, messengers gathered in May of 1925 at the SBC Annual Meeting in Memphis approved another new missions funding strategy that would be more consistent than a pledge campaign. The name of this new strategy was called the Cooperative Program (CP). The strategy called for SBC churches to give a percentage of their undesignated receipts to a common pool through which SBC missions and ministries would be funded.

In the first year of the CP, over half of SBC churches gave an average of 11 percent of their undesignated receipts through the CP. In the year that followed many more churches followed suit. Now, through the CP, the local church became the fundraiser for missions and every church regardless of size could take part in Kingdom work that stretched far beyond their own communities.

This month we celebrate the 100th birthday of the CP. We have learned over these 100 years that we truly can do more for the Kingdom of God together than we can apart. The CP is the distinctive mark of Southern Baptists that enables us to fulfill the very reason we formed together as a convention in the first place: to reach the world with the Gospel of Jesus Christ!

Thank you, Oklahoma Baptists churches for your faithful, sacrificial giving through the CP. In these last 100 years, Oklahoma Baptists churches have given over $1 billion through the CP! I am grateful for our rich history of cooperatively supporting missions and ministry across the globe and look forward to a bright future of continuing to do the same through the Cooperative Program.

Serving Jesus with You,
Todd Fisher
Oklahoma Baptists
Executive Director-Treasurer