The Cooperative Program continues to impact eternities — 101 years after its establishment
FRANKLIN—For more than 100 years, the Cooperative Program has been the financial bedrock of the Baptist church.
Pastor M.E. Dodd — known as the “grandfather of the Cooperative Program” – is credited with creating the original CP model in 1925. It was his vision for churches to unify their giving in order to support Southern Baptist missions. This model is still effectively in use today, more than a century later.
Below are three first-hand testimonials of how giving through the Cooperative Program continues to enable Baptist churches to “do more, together.”
A missionary heart shapes a church’s giving Doug Elders, Fairfield Glade Baptist Church
Doug Elders came to pastoral ministry with firsthand knowledge of what Cooperative Program dollars make possible.
Before becoming senior pastor of Fairfield Glade Baptist Church in 2018, Elders served as a pastor and NAMB-supported missionary while in Wyoming. Then in 2015, he and his family spent two years in Central Asia through the International Mission Board’s masters program.
“The training with the IMB is top tier, and we could not have asked for anything better,” Elders said.
Those experiences gave him a ground-level view of how Southern Baptist cooperation works and why it matters. Today, he carries that conviction into his pulpit.
“The Cooperative Program is synonymous with Southern Baptists,” he said. “It helps us define the ministries and missions we’re able to do worldwide. It gives us significant presence literally around the world — and specifically here in the United States, through Baptist Collegiate Ministries on secular campuses across the country.”
That global reach resonates in an unexpected setting. Fairfield Glade is a retirement and resort community, and most of Elders’ congregation did not grow up Southern Baptist. He finds himself regularly introducing people to the denomination. Their reaction is telling.
“They’re just amazed when they find out how much Southern Baptists do all around the world,” he said.
Locally, the church benefits through its relationships with the Tennessee Baptist Mission Board and the Cumberland Plateau Baptist Association — including disaster relief training through the Southern Baptist network. But Elders is candid that the missions dimension drives his deepest passion.
“About 75% of Cooperative Program money goes toward international and North American missions. I’m just huge on that.”
That conviction led Fairfield Glade to set a concrete goal: reach 10% CP giving by 2025, increasing by a quarter percent each year until they got there.
“For churches that aren’t giving much, it comes down to pastoral leadership,” Elders said. “Pastors have to get behind it and encourage their churches — and sometimes churches need to make some sacrifice in order to do it.”
A seat at the table Allen James, Salem Baptist Church, Knoxville
For Allen James, the Cooperative Program is less about dollars and more about what churches can accomplish when they take the Great Commission seriously together.
“I do think we accomplish more together than we do separately,” said James, pastor of Salem Baptist Church in Knoxville. “It’s a great way to partner not only with other churches, but with the greater purpose of what God has called us to do.”
James has seen that partnership play out in tangible ways. Salem Baptist planted Hope Church three years ago, which has received CP gifts through the Tennessee Baptist Mission Board to help sustain its ministry. The church also leads a jail ministry in Anderson County, with the Cooperative Program helping provide resources there as well.
He often returns to a phrase from Harvest Field 1 leader Danny Sinquefield: the CP “allows the Lord to give you a seat at the table.”
James speaks from experience. He previously served on staff at NAMB, giving him an inside view of how cooperative giving funds kingdom work. That perspective shapes how he leads Salem today — including the church’s role as a sending church for an IMB missionary couple and its partnerships with several other IMB missionaries.
“I’ve seen the inner workings, and I still think we accomplish more together,” he said. “It’s a great way to lead our churches to understand a kingdom mentality rather than just an isolated local mentality. We don’t exist for ourselves — we exist for the kingdom.”
Salem also gives to the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering and the Annie Armstrong Easter Offering, but James sees consistent CP giving as equally essential.
“We want to be committed to those special offerings, but we also feel like we need to give consistently throughout the year. It’s just become part of the DNA of who we are as a church.”
Generosity is contagious Ben Cowell, Brownsville Baptist Church
Every Sunday at Brownsville Baptist Church in Haywood County, Ben Cowell does something simple that he calls one of the great joys of his ministry: he reminds his congregation exactly what their offering does.
As the ushers come forward, Cowell announces that a dime out of every dollar collected will educate the next generation of pastors through Southern Baptists’ six seminaries. That those dimes are planting and strengthening churches through North American Missions. That they are sustaining missionary families in foreign harvest fields through International Missions. And that they are reinforcing the work of local churches across Tennessee.
Brownsville gives 10% of annual undesignated receipts to the Cooperative Program — and Cowell has watched that commitment shape the culture of the congregation.
“There is something special about the way the Cooperative Program can galvanize giving,” he said. “Whether watching video testimonies of Tennessee Disaster Relief or reading the Baptist and Reflector in Sunday school, our members give cheerfully because they know they are contributing to Great Commission work far above what we could ever do by ourselves.”
The point came home in a fresh way last year. When the church called Jon Pate as pastor of music and families, a staff conversation about the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering took an unexpected turn. Pate asked what the church’s goal was. When Cowell told him $50,000, Pate was stunned — and moved to tears. He and his family had served with the IMB in Jordan for 10 years. Southern Baptist generosity, he told the staff, had been a lifeline for his family during those years.
The goal became personal. Brownsville didn’t just meet it — the church surpassed it, raising $64,641.
“Our congregation understands that each dollar in the Cooperative Program carries personal stories,” Cowell said. “When we approve a budget that includes 10% CP giving, we begin each year celebrating the reality that generosity is, indeed, contagious.”
