NASHVILLE (BP) — Giving to Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) causes was about to experience a revolution. That was Albert Mohler’s conclusion at an August 2009 meeting of the Great Commission Resurgence Task Force (GCRTF) in Northwest Arkansas.

“I am a son of the Cooperative Program,” said Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. But “it isn’t going to last. … I’m not pointing fingers at anybody. I’m just telling you that a revolution is going to happen with or without us. And I hope God gives us the sight to get ahead of this rather than get run over by it.”

Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary President Danny Akin agreed. “It is a new day,” he said, according to GCRTF recordings unsealed this summer. “If we don’t respond to what the churches are telling us they want to do (by sending more money to international missions), they’re going to bypass us and do what they want to. Anyway, we will be on the sideline watching, wondering what happened.”

Those discussions yielded a GCRTF recommendation, approved by 2010 SBC messengers, that sought to unleash a wave of Southern Baptist giving. The convention should establish the term “Great Commission Giving” to describe all gifts made by churches to Baptist associations, state conventions and all SBC causes, according to the recommendation. At the same time, the SBC should “continue to honor and affirm the Cooperative Program (CP) as the most effective means of mobilizing our churches and extending our outreach.” Designated gifts “to special causes” were affirmed as a “supplement” to CP.

A wave of giving did follow the GCRTF’s 2010 recommendations — but not through increased CP giving from churches. Rather, Baptist state conventions began forwarding more money to SBC causes, and special offerings came to eclipse the national CP total each year. GCRTF recordings suggest task force members suspected that was the direction the SBC was heading.

Great Commission Giving

The GCRTF was appointed by then-SBC President Johnny Hunt in 2009 and issued its report at the 2010 SBC annual meeting in Orlando, Fla. Since then, the convention’s special offerings for North American and international missions have increased as CP gifts through state conventions decreased. The Annie Armstrong Easter Offering for North American missions increased from $56.6 million in 2008-09 to $74.7 million in 2023-24, a 32% increase. Over the same period, the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering for International missions increased from $141.3 million to $206.8 million, a more than 46% increase.

Fifteen years ago, the cumulative total of Lottie Moon and Annie Armstrong approximately equaled the total amount of CP funding for SBC causes. Today, the mission offering totals exceed national CP by nearly $100 million annually.

Did the GCRTF believe SBC missions and ministries were sustainable if churches shifted away from CP and increasingly to designated giving? The recordings suggest they did. Establishment of Great Commission Giving, the task force believed, was merely putting a label on an emerging trend.

“Praise God for the Cooperative Program,” then-IMB President Jerry Rankin told the task force when he met with it in 2009. But “we have got to cease making the Cooperative Program a golden calf. We have got to recreate the Cooperative Program for the 21st century if we want it to appeal to people. … What someone gives to the Cooperative Program is not synonymous to their heart for the Great Commission.”

Hunt said the convention should let churches take “ownership of what they want to do” by encouraging designated giving to specific SBC causes. “If the denomination would really begin to trust its churches … then watch, that CP would increase.”

Harry Lewis, then a senior strategist at the North American Mission Board, told his fellow GCRTF members, “As the generations shift, CP is going to be dramatically impacted. … Unless we do something to alter the trend,” CP “will continue to turn down.”

Then-SBC Executive Committee (EC) President Morris Chapman brought a different perspective to his January 2010 meeting with the GCRTF in San Antonio. He argued that encouraging designated giving through the establishment of Great Commission Giving would hurt CP. He made the same argument publicly and through the publication of numerous articles in Baptist Press (BP).

“I want to work with you,” Chapman told the task force. “But I cannot just do that without expressing my honest concerns. … I would have been distraught if you had invaded the Cooperative Program because of its great success. I am concerned about the other (designated giving) being called Great Commission Giving.”

GCRTF Chairman Ronnie Floyd told BP a few weeks ago that the task force was identifying a trend by elevating designated giving, not attempting to set a trend.

“The task force discussed that churches are going to do what they determine to do. Our heart was: What can we do to empower them to do that and also inspire them to do it together?” said Floyd, who went on to serve as SBC EC president from 2019-21. It “was obvious there was a real entrepreneurial spirit already occurring in our churches about the Great Commission.”

A task force appointed in 2023 to evaluate the results of the Great Commission Resurgence (GCR) — a label for the convention-wide Great Commission emphasis that included the GCRTF — concluded in its 2024 report that “the new giving mechanism of Great Commission Giving was poorly defined and never fully adopted by the broader Southern Baptist family.” In 2022, the SBC’s Annual Church Profile statistical report stopped reporting Great Commission Giving.

Fifteen years after the task force’s report, Floyd called CP trends troubling. “Many churches did come along,” he said. But CP trends are “a deeply concerning matter. I felt like we could turn those trends.”

Mission offerings

A brighter result of GCR has been the increase in mission offering totals. Floyd still remembers how the task force’s vision for those offerings developed.

“I was on a treadmill, and all of the sudden it all hit me,” Floyd told BP. “We need to try to get the North American mission offering up to $100 million, and we need to get Lottie Moon up to $200 million. And this will send more direct monies toward missions than anything we could do — which was our ultimate goal.”

He went downstairs and wrote the idea in an email to the GCRTF. He expressed a similar vision to the task force in January 2010, recounting a conference call he and Hunt had with a group of SBC leaders. The leaders told Floyd, “Why don’t you really challenge people regarding Lottie and Annie, because it gets money to the mission fields.”

Floyd then told the task force, “If we can see (the mission offerings) zoom up with a compelling vision, it’s going straight to where our heart is. And it doesn’t get bogged down in the bureaucratic matters of Southern Baptist life.”

In an August 2009 meeting of the task force, then-South Carolina pastor Frank Page said CP “has provided many great benefits, but it’s not the only way we see in the future that we’re going to be able to fund this Great Commission.” We “are not doing away with the Cooperative Program, but also we’re trying to open up another avenue.”

Eventually, the goals of $100 million for Annie Armstrong and $200 million for Lottie Moon made it into the GCRTF report.

Alongside reemphasis on the mission offerings, the GCRTF hoped reallocating more CP funds to the International Mission Board (IMB) would spur CP giving alongside the mission offerings. Floyd told the task force “every $2 million” reallocated to the IMB “is another 50 missionaries that we can find, and we can mobilize.”

Mohler knew a reallocation of CP funds would be challenging. “The attempt to reallocate the SBC budget is, I think, trivial if it’s not major. And if it is major, then it’s, I think, overly traumatic,” he told the task force.

In the end, the GCRTF recommended changing the IMB’s CP allocation from 50% to 51%. That extra 1 percentage point was to come from the Executive Committee by reducing its allocation from 3.4% to 2.4%. To date, the convention has allocated 50.41% of the CP allocation budget to the IMB.

State convention sacrifice

Another positive result of the GCRTF’s work was more giving from state conventions to SBC causes. Since the task force’s recommendations were adopted in 2010, total CP receipts by state conventions have declined by nearly $60 million annually, a drop of 11.3%. Yet, between 2014 and 2024, CP gifts forwarded by state conventions to SBC causes increased by more than $7 million (3.6%). In short, state conventions have forwarded more even though they have received less.

The task force’s final report challenged state conventions to “return to the historic ideal of a 50/50 Cooperative Program distribution between the state conventions and the SBC.” Task force members knew that would be difficult.

“When we talk about states moving to 50/50,” Hunt said in one GCRTF meeting, we “realize that will take some time, and some would like to see it even more, and some would like to see it more rapid(ly).”

The task force discussed state conventions amid heated debate about their role in Southern Baptist life. In an April 2009 chapel sermon at Southeastern Seminary, Akin said of state conventions: “Now the cry of the Great Commission Resurgence is, ‘We will not give our money to bloated bureaucracies.’”

Mohler recalled to BP this month that “there was significant tension, certainly among many conservative pastors” who “resented some of the spending decisions, often at the state level, related to the Cooperative Program, and they wanted a way around it. It was a conflict, in part, between Johnny Hunt and the Georgia Baptist Convention at the time that brought the whole thing about.”

In an effort to send more CP money to SBC causes, Hunt asked at one GCRTF meeting, “Do we have any state convention of the 42 that really gives 50/50?” The task force concluded that only two did.

One of those was the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention, where task force member Jim Richards was executive director.

“There was definitely an appeal” to state conventions, Richards told BP. “Many of them have upped their percentages as a direct result of the GCR task force. It did create an impetus from some state conventions to give more to the SBC.”

But state convention giving hit a snag in recent years. Several state conventions determined they cannot continue giving as large a percentage to SBC ministries if total CP giving from churches continues to decrease. Last fall, six state and regional conventions decreased the percentage of CP funds they forward to SBC causes. Only five states increased their percentages.

That was a vast change from a decade earlier, when 23 state conventions increased their percentage of CP receipts forwarded to SBC causes.

Fifteen years ago, Mohler noted a truth that persists: Sacrifice must increase at all levels for Southern Baptists to fulfill the Great Commission.

“If our people are only going to give 2% of income and our churches are only going to give 6% of their budgets” to CP, he said in a GCRTF meeting, “then there isn’t going to be a Great Commission Resurgence other than a tweaking. There will be no transformation.”

Today, Mohler says, sacrificial giving to SBC causes is even more challenging for churches than it was in 2010.

“The biggest issue in the decline of Cooperative Program giving is nothing that happens primarily at the state or national level,” Mohler said. “It’s the fact that the cost structure baked into so many churches these days really discounts what those churches can and do send to state and national causes.”

Expanding salaries, insurance costs, real estate costs and health care costs require more of every church’s money than in the past, he said. The situation is not “hopeless,” but “honesty compels us to understand it’s a far greater challenge.”

(EDITOR’S NOTE — David Roach is a writer in Mobile, Ala. Audio recordings of meetings held by the SBC’s Great Commission Resurgence Task Force in 2009 and 2010 were released earlier this year after being embargoed for 15 years. Baptist Press has spent the past few weeks listening to these recordings and talking with key task force members to get their thoughts on the task force’s effectiveness. This article is the first in a four-part series. Read additional installments here: Part 2. Part 3, Part 4.)