CBF cuts budget amid shortfall

by   Staff                                                                                                                                                         Vol. XII, No. 7, August 2009

The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, at its 19th annual meeting in Houston July 2-3, approved a $16.1 million budget, which is $400,000 less than the previous year's budget, following a 20% shortfall in income.

"Financial support for CBF continues to be disappointing. The Southern Baptist Convention's income is down a few percent for the year, and the North Carolina Baptist State Convention was down more than 15% through May, but CBF national's income has been about 20% below the approved budget," Tony Cartledge, contributing editor of Baptists Today, wrote on his blog July 5.

"Participants approved a $16.1 million budget that's $400,000 less than the previous year, but officials noted that they'll continue operating on 80 percent of approved expenditures unless income improves. For CBF supporters, that's depressing," Cartledge, a former editor of the Biblical Recorder in North Carolina, wrote.

Cartledge, expressing personal reflections on the meeting, went on to lament the state of giving toward missions within the fellowship.

"On a related note, I continue to be troubled by the lack of support for missions through CBF," he wrote. "In the early years, folks really rallied behind the missions program, in part because they saw it as a preferred alternate to the SBC's International Mission Board, which had switched to a less holistic strategy that focused almost entirely on direct evangelism and church planting.

"In recent years, however, it's been all CBF could do to support missionaries already on the field: almost all new appointees are either self-supporting or raise their own support directly," Cartledge wrote. "That was true of all six personnel appointed this year."

Attendance at the Houston meeting was just over 1,600 registered participants, down from 2,050 at last year's meeting in Memphis. Cartledge attributed that to the holiday weekend and said attendance will double next year when the meeting is in North Carolina, which he said "clearly has the strongest state CBF organization."

Elected as new CBF officers: Christy McMillin-Goodwin, associate minister for education and missions at Oakland Baptist Church in Rock Hill, S.C., moderator-elect, and Joanne Carr, a member of First Baptist Church in Augusta, Ga., recorder.

CBF moderator Jack Glasgow, pastor of Zebulon Baptist Church in Zebulon, N.C., begins a year of service as immediate past moderator, and Hal Bass, a professor at Ouachita Baptist University in Arkansas, assumes the role of CBF moderator.

Next year's meeting will be June 24-25 in Charlotte. [BP]