HOUSTON — Generous churches produce generous people.

It’s a sentiment Gregg Matte repeats often to his staff and congregation at Houston’s First Baptist Church, undergirding a culture that annually is one of the Southern Baptist Convention’s most enthusiastic supporters of the Cooperative Program (CP).

“A lot of times, we want our people to be generous, but we’re not showing them how the church as a whole is being generous,” said Matte, the church’s senior pastor since 2004.

When people see their church is generous in giving through the Cooperative Program and other means to support disaster relief, missions and seminary training, “that makes them want to be generous.

“If they feel like their generosity is just paying for the lights and the letterhead, then that’s not going to be enough,” Matte said. “But when they see their generosity promoting a generous church that’s making a difference, that changes things.”

Matte emphasizes that when the congregation gives tithes and offerings, it is giving through the church, not simply to it. 

“When you give to the church, you feel like you gave it and it just stopped,” he said. “When you’re giving through the church, it’s going on. … You’re giving through the church to places we’ll never go, we’ll never see, but we’re going to be able to help reach them for the gospel of Christ.”

Houston’s First feels a pull to foreign missions, Matte said, because the church was started in 1841 by a foreign missionary coming from Tennessee to Texas. The congregation, which began in the Republic of Texas, would not have existed without someone leaving home to share Christ, he noted.

With more than 8,000 attending worship on four campuses in Houston and a few thousand joining online, Houston’s First typically is the largest giver in the state to the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering for international missions, the Annie Armstrong Easter Offering for North American missions and the Reach Texas offering — in addition to CP giving.

One of Matte’s favorite parts of CP, he said, is mission trips made possible by partnerships.

“People will go on a mission trip, and when they go farther out than just their normal realm, they come back stronger church members, more excited about the gospel,” he said, adding that he loves to see God show them the great things He is doing throughout the world.

Among the places members from Houston’s First have gone frequently on mission trips are Boston, New York and Las Vegas, as well as Africa and India.

Houston’s First has been a faithful CP supporter for the giving plan’s entire 100-year history because the funding method remains relevant. 

“The core churches in our denomination are not large churches,” Matte said. “We have resources that maybe other churches don’t, but we want to utilize those resources to help other churches. We know that we cannot reach every community and every neighborhood. We want to partner and to help in that way with CP.”

The beauty of CP, he said, is that Houston’s First can be part of kingdom work “in every neighborhood, in every city, in every place, and not just our own church’s footprint. It expands the footprint of the gospel going out (to) all different places.”

Churches today may struggle with continuing to give through CP when they can directly support missionaries they know, but Matte said it’s a fallacy to think “either/or.”

“It’s both/and,” he said. “We as a church want to be raising up folks in our congregation that we know their names, we know their kids, we’ve seen their growth, and we can help send them out connected with the local body.

“At the same time, we want to see people raised up and sent out all throughout the denomination,” he said. “We’re able to have a farther reach by doing both/and. We see them as feeding each other and blessing each other more than we see them coming against each other. It’s not an antithesis. It’s a synergy.”

Every church, regardless of its size, needs to be involved in reaching the world, Matte said, pointing to Jesus’ mention of the widow’s mite. “She gave more than anyone,” he said. “It’s about the heart behind the giving.”

Matte himself is a beneficiary of CP when he considers the seminary education he received because faithful Southern Baptists gave generously. A bookshelf in his office holds folders from the classes he took while earning a master’s degree from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. 

“I will pull those notes out and look back over them when I’m preparing the message that then goes to the people,” Matte said. “I always wish I would have taken better notes than I did as a young man, but I have those, and I can look back on books. I have relationships that were formed at seminary I can call on. It gives me credibility in the city to have been educated in that way.”

The Cooperative Program has made Matte “proud as a Southern Baptist to see the ways that, when we join together, we’re able to make a huge difference.

“It’s affected me personally in my heart to know that other people have prospered from this partnership through all the different ministries that CP puts together.”

(EDITOR’S NOTE — October is Cooperative Program Month in the Southern Baptist Convention. This article originally appeared in the Southern Baptist TEXAN.)