by Sandy » Sat Apr 28, 2012 9:53 pm
It is fairly easy to determine the overlap between the Alliance and CBF. The Alliance is a very small group, and has a list of all 125 churches on its website. It is very easy to go down the list of churches and find those that are dually affiliated with CBF, by comparing it with the CBF listing of churches, also on line. It takes a little more time to check the CBF list against the list of contributing churches found on the SBC website, but you can go state by state. CBF lists 21 churches in Alabama, 20 of whom are still affiliated with the Alabama Baptist Convention and the SBC. Georgia has 61 CBF supporting churches, out of which 57 still support the GBC and SBC. North Carolina has more CBF congregations than any other state, with a unique alignment that includes churches which contribute to the state organization, CBFNC, but don't contribute to the national organization, and vice-versa, but even out of that list of over 300 churches, with about 180 that contribute to the national CBF, there are only 22 that I can't find on any SBC or BSCNC contributing list, well under 10%. In fact, the states with the highest percentages of CBF churches not supporting the SBC are Virginia, with 10 churches out of 107 not on the SBC list, but still on the BGAV list, and Texas, with 8 out of 72 not on the SBC list, and 6 of those not on the BGCT list.
The giving will give you another clue as to the level of support for CBF among churches that dually support the SBC. The average gift to CBF from one of its partnering churches is $8,000. I get that by dividing their total receipts from churches by the total number of contributing churches they report. That's an average. So among "uniquely aligned" CBF congregations like South Main Houston, which gave $250,000, or FBC Asheville, NC which gave over $150,000, those kinds of amounts are common. With receipts running less than $14 million, that means that about 10% of the churches are giving 90% of the money. That's consistent with the number of churches which are uniquely affiliated with CBF as opposed to those which remain in the SBC.