MEMPHIS, Tenn. (BP) — Tony Wolfe hopes the 100th anniversary of the Southern Baptist Convention’s (SBC) Cooperative Program (CP) will remind members of the world’s largest protestant movement how interdependent they are. Wolfe is leading a celebration to mark the anniversary June 13.
“The event will be held exactly 100 years after and within a few hundred yards of the exact location as the presentation and adoption of the Cooperative Program by messengers to the 1925 convention,” Wolfe, South Carolina Baptist Convention executive director, told Baptist Press.
It was mid-afternoon May 13, 1925, when messengers adopted the Cooperative Program based on a recommendation from the SBC Committee on Future Program led by Louisiana pastor M.E. Dodd.
In the mid 1920s, Southern Baptists were deciding where to go after the $75 Million Campaign raised momentum but fell short of the finances needed for home and international mission efforts.
Dodd rallied messengers to adopt the Cooperative Program for sustained giving.
In a 2010 Baptist Press story, Dodd’s granddaughter Virginia Joyner recalled, “He would say, ‘Keep up the Cooperative Program. Do not let it break off and do missions out of part of it,’” Joyner said of her grandfather. “He would say, ‘Keep it all together. Do the missions. Do all of the work. Do the relief and everything out of the Cooperative Program.’”
Since 1925, Southern Baptists have given more than $20 billion through the Cooperative Program, which is the primary financial engine for missions, church planting, disaster relief, public policy work and more.
“The entire world lies open before us. We have never possessed more resources, more intelligence, more technology or more access than right now,” Wolfe said.
The event begins at 1:30 p.m. Central time and will be live streamed at sbc.net/cp100. During the service, 72 people are scheduled to sign a Declaration of Cooperation.
The declaration is “a public statement, both to ourselves and to the watching world, that we joyfully depend upon one another and commit ourselves to one another, as a Southern Baptist people on a global mission — and that our Cooperative Program is an effective and cherished resource to be celebrated and perpetuated.”
While event space limits the gathering to a small group, Wolfe hopes “that each cooperating Southern Baptist might see himself or herself in at least one of these signatures and that each cooperating Southern Baptist may feel so inclined to digitally sign the Declaration when the opportunity is presented.”
Among the signers will be representatives from every SBC entity, state convention and affinity group.
Jeff Iorg, SBC Executive Committee president, is scheduled to deliver the keynote address at Tuesday’s event. A time of worship through music and a season of prayer are also on the agenda.
The declaration is being shared with the SBC Committee on Resolutions for consideration to be presented to messengers at the SBC annual meeting in Dallas June 11-12.
“In our world that is deeply and desperately scarred by sin, many are the occasions for open displays of division; rare and special are those for open displays of unity,” Wolfe said.
“My prayer is that this Cooperative Program Centennial event might reawaken that ‘unity of purpose and consecration’ which has been evident among our Southern Baptist people in generations past, enlivening us toward a more joyfully sacrificial and missionally effective future.”
(EDITOR’S NOTE — Brandon Porter serves as Vice President for Communications at the SBC Executive Committee.)
