What wrong with CP (SBC's Only Please)

I served on a pastor search committee with a retired professor from one of our SBC seminaries a few years ago, and was absolutely shocked when I found out how much he made as a full professor, and how much his retirement amounted to, and I'm not talking about being shocked at how high it was. Add to that the fact that the SBC's Cooperative Program subsidizes the tuition for Southern Baptist students and makes them ridiculously inexpensive compared even to moderately priced schools and I don't think that the seminaries are where the problem is. In fact, if you look at the reports from this past year, our seminaries are hurting financially, and four of them are operating in the red. I was on the campus at Southern in Louisville about a year ago, and was pretty shocked at the condition and age of much of the facility, peeling paint, student housing (eek!) compared to Vanderbilt University where I went to law school, which is a palace in comparison (and ten times the cost).

I also don't have a problem with Lifeway, since their bills are paid out of the sale of their products, and they contribute anything above their costs to the CP. It is the salaries of the execs and the expense accounts that I object to. Those figures are hidden from view, as a previous post noted. That, and the perception that the people who occupy the powerful committee and trustee positions are more political than spiritual, and are not appearing to be accountable to the wishes of the convention, is what I perceive to be at least part of the problem.

I noticed something today, though, that I had seen before but hadn't paid much attention to until I saw this thread. We have a membership of over 16 million, but only a little more than 5 million count as the "average weekly worship attendance" in the report. So 11 million Southern Baptists are skipping church and Bible study every week? And if there are only a little more than 5 million "average" attendance in worship, and the Sunday School average is a bit less than that, how many tithers and givers are among that number? No wonder the CP is having difficulty.

 

I serve as Executive Director for one of our state Baptist foundations (District of Columbia). We are finding, as many charities are finding, that people prefer to give to specific projects, where they can see the results, rather than to institutions for general support. According to people like Lyle Schaller and other church life gurus, this is a generational thing; we are seeing the passing of dinosaurs like me, who give to "church budgets" and "Baptist work", and are feeling the values of a new generation, who want to know, "What did 'I' do with 'my' money?"

 

Jack's issue about the 11 million SBCers skipping church every Sunday made me think of something I'd tucked back in my mind.

When our current pastor came, we got a giving report. This little report listed the percentage of families who gave in certain monetary ranges.

I was appalled. The percentage of families who gave less than $100 a year was huge. The number giving less than $500 was almost as large. So even among those attending, giving to the church just ain't what it used to be. And when you throw in that little phenom Bro. Smith brought up -- Yikes, it's a wonder we've got anything left to give to the CP much less pay salaries.

 

Undesignated Cooperative Program receipts from the churches in the SBC have fallen off over the past 15 years. and the investment and endowment income of the seminaries, which collectively funds about 25% of the total operating costs, is suffering from low interest rates. In addition, the seminary enrolments have dropped off from where they were in the 80's, when the CP and endowments were able to cover all but a small amount of seminary tuition and fees. The programs instituted at Southeastern and Southern, which replace the traditional seminary student earning a master's degree for pastoral ministry, church staff or missionary service, do not generate the same kind of revenue and require additional costs to operate. Also, non-degreed and extension programs, which are pretty much necessary in order to attract students and keep the enrolment from further decline, are costly and don't generate the kind of revenue that traditional seminary degree programs did.

Do you know what a seminary professor actually earns at one of the six SBC schools? An assistant professor with a master's degree in his first year at an SBC seminary makes about 40% less than a colleague with similar qualifications at Belmont University, where I went to college, and about 65% less than a colleague with similar qualifications at Vanderbilt Divinity School. A full professor with a doctorate and ten years experience at Vandy makes three times as much as a similarly qualified professor at an SBC school. I don't see how they do it, but the SBC is blessed with professors who are willing to stick around and who obviously have a heart for doing their best as far as seminary costs go. The basic cost of attending an SBC seminary now, apart from living expenses, is, what, about $1,500 a semester for 12 hours? Belmont University is $6,000. Vandy is $8,000 depending on the program. Even one of the other Baptist schools outside the SBC, like Mid-America, or another evangelical school like DTS or Trinity Evangelical is twice that.

The issue with the CP isn't in the seminary salaries. It's in credibility of an insensitive leadership that is deaf to dissent, trustees and other leaders who do not lead by example in the support their own churches give to the CP, and a head-in-the-sand mentality about a very real decline in participation of people in our churches.

 

I don't see that as a real problem at all. Think about how hard it is to pay off debt working as a pastor. Now think of an IMB missionary trying to pay off that debt, it is a burden that they don't really need to deal with. It will be hard enough being 1000 miles from family in a country where you're an outsider. Financial hardships don't need to be factoring in as well.

Apart from that, I think it's ridiculous to say that in order to get through a Bachelors and master's you have to take on debt. For one thing, it is not required that your bachelor's be in Bible or theology. It is possible to get a degree in accounting or some other type degree and still be an IMB missionary. So the person could go get a degree which will help pay their way through their master's program.

It's a difficult struggle. On the one hand you don't want the education to be very expensive, so as to put undue presure on the students. But on the other hand, you don't want it to be so cheap that the prof's have to take a second job. They have families to feed just like I do. And several seminary profs have much larger families than I do.

 

I was on a pastor search committee where the chairman of the deacons said something to the effect of "I don't have a problem with a pastor wanting more money. His kids want new bikes just like mine do, his kids want to wear clothes and eat too."

I think part of the problem is that in churches the average person doesn't think that that pastor works as hard or something to that effect, or they took a vow of poverty, so why should I give money just to help them get rich :laugh: How many people have actually looked at it and put themselves in that position?