State conventions in steep decline

The latest state convention downsizing news comes from the Kentucky Baptist Convention where the Louisville Courier Journal story, Kentucky Baptists losing 27 staff, says,

The Kentucky Baptist Convention will lose nearly one-third of its full-time staff through early retirements and other departures in the second wave of cuts in less than a year at the state’s largest religious body.

The cuts leave the KBC with about fifty full time staff for a convention of 750,000 members and 2,400 churches.

The cuts follow the convention's vote to send more of their Cooperative Program receipts to SBC causes, mostly the two mission boards and six seminaries. The current KBC executive director also names the economic downturn and decline in churches giving as causes for the steep cuts.

KBC churches were giving an average of 9.2 percent of their offerings to the Cooperative Program in 2000. This had declined to 6.75 percent in 2011. That is a drop of almost 27% in a decade.

A few thoughts:

• The KBC is to be commended for pulling the trigger on the staff reductions rather than backtracking on their commitment to keep less of the churches contributions in their heavily churched state.

•  Those who want to point the finger at the Great Commission Resurgence recommendations will have to explain away the steep and steady decline of CP percentages that has been happening in Kentucky (and every other state) for decades. The fault here isn't the Great Commission Giving metric put into the Annual Church Profile recently.

• Our current SBC president Bryant Wright notably said that state conventions will have to learn to live with much less than they have. They are being forced to do so without any drastic, formal change in financial allocations. Churches are simply giving less. 

•  Some state conventions may roll back their commitments to keep less CP money in state, using the steep decline in giving as the rationale for doing so. This will not sell well with churches and pastors.

• State conventions have had their glory years of increasing budgets, additional staffing, new programs, and larger buildings. Those days are gone. I see nothing being said or done that will cause churches to increase their CP percentages from the SBC average of under six percent to anywhere near the 10-11 percent it was years ago.

The KBC leader, Paul Chitwood, said,

“It was time to re-evaluate our services to Kentucky Baptists, and to adjust our priorities to match current resources,” 

Indeed.

While the staff levels and budgets of many state conventions are in steep decline, there is no reason for them not to be successful in serving their churches and helping them reach North America and the world for Christ. It is absolutely the right strategy for the states to keep less of the churches dollars at home and devote more to national and international missions.