Austin Rammell,
pastor of Venture in Dallas, said unless priorities change in Cooperative
Program (CP) allocations, he sees a “massive decrease” coming in CP giving.
Rammell was
invited to address the Executive Committee meeting July 15 to explain issues
behind his May motion that the Board of Directors study the feasibility of
moving priority items funded through the North Carolina Missions Offering
(NCMO) into the budget, and moving “non-mission and non-high priority items”
out of the annual CP budget and into a “new statewide offering” that would
replace the NCMO.
Rammell said his
experience as a personal evangelism consultant on the Florida Baptist
Convention staff for four years prompted him to say, “This doesn’t make any
sense.” He said he drove the state, consuming lots of time and money to talk to
small groups of people about evangelism who were already excited about
evangelism.
Instead, he
said, with modern technology and young pastors adept at networking, churches
who seek information can find it among themselves, freeing missions funds
consumed in the current BSC structure for work overseas where Christians do not
have the “billions of dollars” in resources that North Carolina Baptist
churches enjoy.
“We’re too big,”
he said of state conventions. “We’re replicating the local church on a massive
level, and it costs a lot of money to do it. I’ve heard the same thing from
other pastors.”
That conviction
led him to recommend the elimination of many positions in Florida, he said,
including his own. He resigned and came to North Carolina to pastor a church.
Rammell said
marketing the Cooperative Program is not the issue, and that next generation
pastors understand it just fine. “The issue is what we then do with that money
and how we divide it up,” he said.
His
recommendation seeks to put “what we say are our priorities” into the budget
and let non-priority items fend for themselves in a special offering. If the
churches do not support some area financially, “You’ll give it its democratic
death,” he said.
Rammell said
this is “not a young people issue. Don’t make the mistake that this is a bald
headed and goateed guy issue.”
He said he’s
heard similar dissatisfactions voiced by pastors in very traditional churches.
Which items?
Budget committee
chairman Steve Hardy asked Rammell to identify “non-priority” items he would
move from the budget to such a special offering.
Rammell said he
would begin by identifying anything that replicates the local church, or could
be done better by “raising heroes and leaders out of local churches” who would
pull together the resources of several churches to produce something the state
convention now does.
He used as an
example an annual evangelism conference, and said First Baptist and Hickory
Grove churches in Charlotte “could combine with other local churches and put on
an evangelism conference the state convention couldn’t compete with.”
“One of the ways
you’re going to get guys like me excited about giving more to the CP is to get
more money out of the state,” Rammell said, “and then to use what money stays
in this state more effectively.
“That’s my
motive, where I’m coming from. That’s why I made the motion.”
Executive
Committee Chairman Bobby Blanton will name a committee to take up Rammell’s motion.