DALLAS (BP) — As Southern Baptists prepare to observe the Cooperative Program’s (CP) 100th anniversary next month, a new book aims to help the celebration mean even more.
“A Unity of Purpose: 100 Years of the (Southern Baptist Convention) SBC Cooperative Program,” published by B&H, delves into the historical backdrop leading to CP’s adoption in 1925 as well as the ways God has worked around the world through the more than $20 billion donated by Southern Baptists through CP in the last 100 years. The book also looks at CP’s current challenges and how to meet them as well as how to promote biblical cooperation to future generations.
“Our story is not one moment or five or 10 moments. It’s a series of moments that compound,” said Tony Wolfe, one of the book’s editors, in an interview for the “SBC This Week” podcast. “… If the Cooperative Program dismantles in our generation or any generation, I think in successive generations, Baptists will rebuild something a lot like what we have. And we will have missed that in-between time because Baptists will cooperate. We will pool our funds and our relationships together to advance the Great Commission to the nations.”
Wolfe, executive director of the South Carolina Baptist Convention, coedited “A Unity of Purpose” with Madison Grace, provost, vice president for academic administration and dean of the School of Theology at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.
Grace said his work on the book made him more thankful for the Cooperative Program.
“… This is not a book about a funding mechanism,” he said. “This is a book about how we cooperate together. I think I walked away with a greater appreciation that it’s not just about where the funds go and who gets what …, but being able to recognize that there is a panoply of people God’s put together in the Southern Baptist Convention that are doing great and good work.”
The book is divided into three parts and 15 chapters written by authors with expertise in a particular area of CP’s reach. Each chapter closes with the authors’ personal reflections about the Cooperative Program.
Part 1, with chapters by Grace, Jason Duesing, Adam Harwood, Taffey Hall and Wolfe, deals with the historical and cultural developments — in the SBC as well as nationally and even internationally — that made conditions right for CP’s adoption. Hall, director of the Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives, will talk about some of that history, drawing from her chapter in the book, during the CP100 celebration at the 2025 SBC annual meeting Tuesday afternoon, June 10.
Part 2 covers the ways CP has made an impact in the U.S. and around the world and features chapters by Wolfe; Leo Endel and Pete Ramirez; Jamie Dew and Chris Shaffer; Richard Land and Brent Leatherwood; Kevin Ezell and Mike Ebert; and Paul Chitwood, Melanie Clinton and Julie McGowan.
Part 3 looks to the future, exploring how to confront CP’s current challenges and how to set it up for the next 100 years. Bart Barber, RaShan Frost, Scott McConnell and Daniel Dickard contribute chapters.
Members of Gen Z are not “Southern Baptists of the future,” Grace said. “They’re Southern Baptists today. … And just like in local churches where you hand down responsibility and ownership and excitement of the things that you value and you want to see continue in a local church, you do so together as a cooperating group of Baptists in a convention model.”
And though the book covers 100 years, it only scratches the surface of Baptist cooperation, Grace said.
“For 416 years now, Baptists in general have cooperated,” he said. “We’ve shared this moral and theological obligation to cooperate that goes along with our core doctrine of local Baptist autonomy.”
Wolfe said even those 100 years are impossible to fit into one volume.
“Southern Baptists cooperate on faith,” he said. “There’s no way that every single Southern Baptist or even the group of us collectively could ever possibly know or contain or record the impact of the Cooperative Program over the last hundred years, or God willing, over the next hundred.
“I think only the ledgers of heaven will record all that Southern Baptists have accomplished for the Great Commission through their Cooperative Program.”
The book can be purchased at Lifeway.com or at the Lifeway booth in the exhibit hall of the SBC annual meeting in Dallas.
(EDITOR’S NOTE — Laura Erlanson is managing editor of Baptist Press.)
