Pastor urges Baptist churches

to break 'the cycle of debt'

by   Carrie Brown                                                                                                                                                                         Vol. X, No. 3, March 1997

           The national debt. Credit card debt. Business loans. Car loans. Mortgages. Debt is common among people of all ages, races, economic backgrounds, and social classes across the

United States. Businesses are in debt. Families are in debt. And what worries pastor and author Rodney Culpepper is many churches are in debt.

           And the example churches are setting.

           Culpepper, pastor of Cloverdale Baptist Church, Dothan, AL, used his interest and experience in the area of debt reduction to write Breaking the Cycle of Debt: A Cutting Edge Approach to Church Stewardship.

"There are hundreds of books and articles and seminars about families going into debt, but there's very little about churches and why churches should operate with the same kind of standards," Culpepper said.

Culpepper cites data from the Baptist Sunday School Board showing Southern Baptist churches were more than $2 billion in debt at the end of the 1993 fiscal year. Based on average interest rates, Southern Baptist churches are paying more than $182 million a year in interest payments alone.

Culpepper has learned how to deal with church debt through his experiences at Verbena (AL) Baptist Church and now at Cloverdale.

When Culpepper became the pastor at Verbena in 1989, the church owed more than $35,000. "In February of 1992, I led the church to borrow another $40,000, increasing our debt to $75,000," Culpepper said. "After that experience, the Lord really convicted me, and we committed ourselves to debt reduction. Operating on a $69,000 budget, we paid off a $75,000 loan in three years."

Culpepper became Cloverdale's pastor in April 1995. At the time, the church owed just over $89,000. Although reducing the debt was on his mind from the beginning, Culpepper did not tackle the issue until November. By this time the debt had decreased to $63,000, and Culpepper challenged the congregation to "Defeat the $63,000 Giant" by May 5, 1996.

"We didn't pay off the $63,000 in six months on May 5. We paid off the $63,000 in three months on Feb. 5," Culpepper said.

Currently Cloverdale is promoting a building fund emphasis for a new fellowship hall. "We have committed ourselves to build it debt-free, and we are convinced that the Lord will enable us to do this," Culpepper said.

One of the main reasons Culpepper is concerned about church debt is it seems "to put more trust in what people can do than in what God can do."

Debt is not only a church problem, Culpepper said; he sees it as a convention-wide problem that needs to be examined. He cited an example from the 1995 annual meeting of the Alabama Baptist State Convention. "At the 1995 convention, we discussed (an issue relating to Samford University) for about 90 minutes, and the discussion resulted in three ballot votes," Culpepper said. "According to The Alabama Baptist, about 500 people left the conference after that issue was discussed."

What happened next disturbed Culpepper. "Within less than 15 minutes, we had three recommendations from the state convention to borrow $3.5 million for construction at Judson (College), to borrow $125,000 to buy some new property for the University of Mobile and to borrow $6 million to expand the state Baptist building," Culpepper said.

"We discussed the Samford issue for 90 minutes and then in 15 minutes voted to spend $10 million that we don't have," he said. "We've reached the point that debt has become our automatic first choice. I would love to see us explore a few more options rather than automatically borrowing money."

Culpepper said while the decision to go into debt varies from situation to situation and from church to church, there are some questions the church should ask, including:

--Has the church been in debt before?

--How long has the church known it needs or might need improvements or expansion?

--Has money been budgeted into savings to prepare for future building?

           By asking these questions and others, a church can determine whether it has adequately planned for a building project and is ready to proceed, said Culpepper, who also conducts workshops on debt reduction and serves as a building fund drive consultant. He noted by planning ahead, a church can minimize, if not eliminate, the amount of debt it has to take on to complete a project.

In the foreword to the book, Jim Henry, pastor of First Baptist Church, Orlando, Fla., and past president of the Southern Baptist Convention, calls Breaking the Cycle of Debt "arresting reading that embraces practical principles of Christian stewardship, firmly based on hundreds of verses from God's word." "This book, with its practical, biblical, no-nonsense approach, will help your church, regardless of its size, break the cycle of debt," Henry writes.

For more information about Culpepper's ministry or the book, Breaking the Cycle of Debt, contact Culpepper at 708 Mullins Drive, Dothan, AL 36301 or (334) 677-7598.