“SBCV outgives BGAV!” A Reprise
by T. C. Pinckney Vol. XVI, No. 3, March 2003
The Nov/Dec 2002 Baptist Banner carried a brief article with the title in quotes above which noted that in the first eight months of their respective fiscal years the SBCV “with some 370 churches affiliated actually sent more money to the Southern Baptist Cooperative Program than did the Baptist General Association of Virginia which has about 1,400 churches.” And the article cited the SBCV having sent $2,309,730.47 compared to the BGAV’s $2,081,416.76 in those eight month periods.
Obviously, that article touched a raw nerve, for the 30 January Religious Herald carried a caustic response by Eddie Stratton, Treasurer of the BGAV and the Virginia Baptist Mission Board. In his article Mr. Stratton states, “Obviously, Mr. Pinckney was misinformed and falsely colors the facts to our disadvantage.” He later twice refers to my misrepresenting the facts.
We will take a look at the facts, but first a couple of qualifications, starting with a mea culpa. In reviewing the Banner article, it would have been clearer had I captioned it, “SBCV outgives BGAV to the CP!” Gifts to the SBC Cooperative Program is what the article addresses and says that it addresses, but I should have also stated it in the headline. Because I did not, some readers may have mistakenly thought I was writing about ALL funds sent to SBC causes by the two state conventions. No excuse. I’m the editor ... my fault.
Second prefatory remark: Numbers are notoriously hard to get right, probably because there is no inherent logic to the sequence of digits in a large number. In a written word you can glance at it and see if it is misspelled. Not so with a number. Look at a number and you have no idea whether it is correct or not. To decide whether it is right you have to check out its background and consider the overall context. Here is an immediate example:
The keeper of official SBC Cooperative Program giving records is the SBC Executive Committee. So, after reading Mr. Stratton’s article, I asked the EC staff to fax me their CP reports of funds sent from December 2001 through December 2002 to (1) the CP and (2) designated causes by (a) the BGAV and (b) the SBCV. Guess what I found out?
Mr. Stratton’s very first figure – the funds sent by the BGAV to the SBC CP in December 2001 – is wrong, and wrong by a factor of ten! The figure cited in the Religious Herald article is $955,369.30. But the correct amount is $95,536.53.
Now, should I accuse Stratton of misrepresentation? No, for two reasons: First, it has all the hallmarks of a typo. Somewhere along the line there was a typo and the decimal was moved one spot to the right. Second and more compelling, his total for that column is far too low if the $955,369 figure were correct but exactly right if the $95,537 amount is accurate.
Next, read this sentence from Stratton’s article, “Mr. Pinckney also misrepresents the facts by saying that the BGAV sent only 11.3% of Cooperative Program gifts to the SBC in 2002 (7.85% in 2003).” Here are the sentences in question from my original article: “As surprising as this appears at first, there is a very simple reason. Whereas the SBCV budget sends 50% of all undesignated funds to the SBC Cooperative Program, the BGAV only sends 11.3%.
“Note: the BGAV 11.3% figure is what was given in 2002 ‘default’ WM-2 budget track. (“Default” simply means that if your church does not select or design a different track, your church’s money is automatically distributed under WM-2. So WM-2 is the budget track preferred by the BGAV.) Moreover, in the recently approved 2003 budget, the WM-2 track will only send 7.85% to the SBC!”
Mr. Stratton acknowledges these percentages, but adds, “those churches giving through the WM-1 giving plan continue to give 34% of their CP gifts to the SBC.” True, but he did NOT mention that those churches which have chosen WM-3 send NOTHING to the SBC, which tends to offset at least to some degree the 34% from the WM-1 churches. (More churches have chosen WM-1 than WM-3, so the offset is not complete.)
However, the salient point is that a church which has not chosen WM-1, WM-3, or to design its own giving plan is automatically placed in WM-2 thus giving 11.3% to the SBC CP in 2002, only 7.85% in 2003. The key point here is that WM-1, WM-3, & self-designed plans are routes the BGAV makes available, but NOT what BGAV prefers. Clearly, that preference is WM-2 because WM-2 is what the BGAV has made the automatic plan for any church that does not opt out.
Mr. Stratton also offers the following sentence, “I know it to be a fact that SBCV churches are not allowed the same freedom of choice as BGAV churches are allowed.” It is unclear in his article what he has in mind at this point.
(1) If he is referring to freedom of choice regarding how a church’s donations are used, I simply note that SBCV churches are completely free to decide what percentage of their gifts will be retained by the SBCV and what percent will flow to the SBC Cooperative Program. Any SBCV church can design its own giving plan, just as a BGAV church can.
(2) If Mr. Stratton was referring to doctrine, he should read Article III of the SBCV constitution. Inter alia, it reads, “The doctrinal position of the Southern Baptist Conservatives of Virginia shall not be binding upon any local church; however, the Convention recognizes its right and responsibility to determine its identity, including doctrinal parameters, and to include within its affiliation those individual affiliates and churches who can freely agree with it, and to exclude those churches who do not.”
Note that the freedom of the SBCV to exclude churches that oppose its adopted biblical doctrine imposes no doctrinal stricture upon such a church. That church is completely free to follow whatever doctrine it chooses and to align with any group it selects. The SBCV simply claims the same freedom.
Now let us move back to Mr. Stratton’s CP numbers printed in his Religious Herald article for a second example of mistaken numbers. This one is considerably more complex. The November 2002 CP figure Stratton shows is $573,513.27 and the designated amount he cites for that month is $222,981.93. Those figures are both wrong.
To understand the confusion it will help the reader to know that when a state convention sends money to the SBC, it not only remits the check(s), it also sends a form indicating how much is sent for each category. If the checks and the forms do not agree, confusion can result. That is what happened in this instance.
The Executive Committee staff reports that the form sent with the November 2002 checks was in error, although the checks themselves were correct. Apparently, in preparing his article Mr. Stratton referred to record copies of the forms, and so this error was incorporated in his article.
Confusion #1: The BGAV CP figure of $573,513.27 is comprised of two amounts from the accompanying form: $117,769 (cents rounded) to the CP and $455,744 for designated causes.
Confusion #2: The $455,744 cited on the form is also in error. It is the total of another $222,982 the BGAV sent to the CP plus $232,763 in designations they sent.
Adjustments: (a) The actual amount that should have been cited in the Nov. 2002 CP line is $340,751 (the total of $117,769 + $222,982). (b) This correction plus that for the Dec. 2001 figure change the total for CP gifts to $2,370,754, rather than the $2,603,516 shown by Mr. Stratton. (c) The amount that should have been recorded in the designated column for Nov. 2002 is $232,763 (rounded) and the accurate total for the designated column is $5,284,870 ... some $9,781 more than Stratton’s figure.
It is my contention that designated funds by their very nature do NOT depend upon state convention decisions, but rather result from decisions made by individual Southern Baptists and local churches. Therefore, in conveying these funds to the SBC the state convention (any state convention) simply acts as a channel, not a decision-maker. Consequently, while the amount f designated money sent by a state reflects positively or negatively on local churches, it is not necessarily a plus or minus to the state.
Similarly, in the BGAV, funds that flow (or don’t flow) to the SBC from churches that decide to give through WM-1, WM-3, or self-designed plans reflect local church decisions, not BGAV preference; in the BGAV context only WM-2, the default plan, signifies BGAV wishes because it is the only one in which the BGAV has chosen to place all churches until and unless they opt for a different plan.
Although Mr. Stratton asserts that I “falsely color”, “misrepresent the facts”, and “misrepresent us”, nowhere in his article did Stratton say my figures were wrong, only that I should have included the amounts (or percentage) sent by churches in the WM-1 BGAV budget track. My article noted the 50% the SBCV sends to the SBC CP and stated “the BGAV only sends 11.3%”, it immediately explained that the 11.3% “is what was given in the 2002 ‘default’ WM-2 budget track”, and pointed out that in 2003 the percentage is slashed further to 7.85%.
In addition, now that we have full twelve month figures, we see that my basic point remains valid: In 2002 the SBCV with some 370 churches gave more to the SBC Cooperative Program ($2,585,669) than did the BGAV with approximately 1400 churches ($2,370,755) ... and that includes ALL BGAV funds sent to the Cooperative Program, not just those from WM-2.
In funds for designated causes, the BGAV did forward a good bit more from its churches than the SBCV, $5,284,870 compared to $2,343,998 ... but as noted above in the case of designations, a state convention is only a channel of transmittal, not the decision maker.
Conclusion: to borrow Mr. Stratton’s concluding statement, “Truth is told!” Yes, the SBCV with approximately 370 churches last year did, indeed, send more money ($214,914 more ... cents rounded) to the SBC Cooperative Program than did the BGAV with some 1,400 churches.