A Paradox

[William Thornton]

Sandy confuses big numbers with big percentages. No doubt about it, all SBC giving dropped by millions after the mortgage meltdown. The percentage drop is slight and likely is flattened out. The stats to be released next June may show dollars increasing slightly. The CP has ticked up slightly but my guess is that it will continue the long, slow trend downward as a percentage of total SBC offerings. My view is that the SBC, aside from a couple of bright spots, is a less attractive giving destination to churches and the folks in the pews than other options. The CP is as well but continues to be a massive cooperative funding scheme. It's not going to disappear but will fund less and less of the SBC entities. The big seminaries and mission boards are at roughly 1/3 of funding from CP these days.

Sometimes I get into a Joe Btfsplk mode myself over it all.

[Sandy]

Gee, William, you used to be the "dollars count, not percentages" guy on here when it came to CP giving.

I couldn't find an on-line page from the most recent annual, I'm guessing it's not been uploaded yet. If you look at what's happened to the total giving from the churches, which is the bottom line that's going to affect how much money is available for churches to give to the CP, you'll see that's not "flattened," that is in an accelerating decline, with almost half of the decline happening in the last three years of the current decade. There's a $600 million difference between 2009-2010 and 2013-14, a total deficit of $1.2 billion for that four year period. But there's almost a $300 million drop in just the past two years, and the 2015-16 figure, which isn't included in this report, is $355 million less than the previous year.

The percentage of CP giving isn't declining all that rapidly, because this year's percentage is based on last year's total, which was less than the previous year. In the five year period from 2009-10 to 2013-14, the decline in CP giving was 8.56%. From 2013-14 to 2014-15 it was 4.5%, declining by about half as much in one year, as in the previous five. And as William notes in his blog, there's a lot of alarm over the fact that the decline in giving is over 4% in a relatively short period of time, and that decline is against a total budget that was already reduced by 5% from the previous year, because of a high percentage decline last year. Some of the Baptist state papers are sounding the same alarm.
http://sbcvoices.com/not-good-news-coop ... ificantly/

So the membership, attendance and total giving is down 10% since the peak in 2006, about a decade ago, with 65% of the decline coming since 2014. I'm not good at calculus, but if the rate of decline is accelerating, and the bulk of it has occurred in the past three years of a ten year period of declining numbers, I don't think that can be considered "leveling off," especially if, as William pointed out, the first half of the current year represents the single largest percentage decline to date. Many people, including their own, talented, insightful Ed Stetzer, have tried to figure out why. Those who are genuine and honest, and aren't afraid to state the facts, even though they're unpleasant, eventually get ignored and fall victim to those who don't want to face reality, and use their power to get rid of them, such as what is happening to Russell Moore right now. The obvious root cause is that there are only a handful of people left in SBC churches who are between the ages of 18 and 40, not because they've become heathen, but because the way most SBC congregations do church, and the attitude they take toward that task, sends a message to most of them to run the other way as far and as fast as they can go. So the median age of most of the churches has climbed past 65, pastors preach more funerals than they do weddings or baby dedications combined, and the rate of people leaving the church roll by dying, which is the only way you can get off some SBC church memberships, and even that is questionable, is far greater than those being baptized or born into the cradle roll.

[Haruo]

[William Thornton]

CP revenues are up slightly, about the same after Q1 this fiscal year. I don't mind bad news. I am for accuracy. Clearly, one can pick the parameters and the time period and make it look better or worse.

SBC leaders on the payroll tend to be more alarmist. The XComm is fairly straightforward with the numbers.

Go to the CBF for lack of numbers.

[Sandy]

[Rvaughn]

[Sandy]

[Dave Roberts]

[Sandy]

When I moved to Missouri in 1990, about a fourth of the churches in the MBC were dually affiliated with either ABC-USA, or the National Baptist Convention. So was William Jewell College. I was at the convention meeting in 1992 where the bylaws were changed to cease allowing dual affiliation, a guy named Roger Moran was behind that move. The churches that were already dually affiliated with ABC and the NBC were grandfathered in, and it was a move mainly to prevent CBF from getting a foothold in Missouri. Eventually, Moran succeeded in getting rules put in place that more or less pushed dually affiliated churches to go one way or the other, and most of them went to ABC-USA. I still think that one of the reasons the MBC is much more conservative than the other non-Dixieland state conventions in the SBC is because much of their base of support was in the larger dually affiliated congregations, which simply dropped their SBC ties, and went with ABC-USA.