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Southern Baptist Convention mission work will be on display through interviews with international and North American missionaries and missions leaders at the Cooperative Program booth in the exhibit hall during this year’s annual meeting in Houston.
Other interviews will feature collegiate ministry, ministerial training through our seminaries, new Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission president Russell Moore, plus a host of pastors and state convention leaders.
The booth will also include interviews and panel discussions on such issues as the Calvinism advisory committee report, IMB’s report on Reaching the Nations, and NAMB’s Send North America and Send Cities initiative. It will feature conversations with Beth Moore and Greg Laurie about reaching cities and nations through SBC missions and ministries on Ed Stetzer’s online talk show, “The Exchange.”
The booth will be anchored by two high-definition video screens displaying the interviews and a live Twitter board for online participants.
For the second year, the CP booth reflects a partnership with the North American and International Mission Boards and is positioned alongside the NAMB and IMB booths. For the first time, interviews and panel discussions will be live-streamed through SBC.net.
[2]“This venue is designed to present SBC missions and ministries in a positive and holistic manner,” said Ashley Clayton, special assistant to the EC president for Cooperative Program and stewardship. “The tagline for each presentation, interview, and panel discussion is ‘ . . . fueled by the Cooperative Program.’
“The Cooperative Program exists to fuel missions and ministry. It’s just that simple,” he said. The CP booth is “about championing how the Cooperative Program funds NAMB, IMB, theological education, ERLC, state missions, and evangelism. . . . We’re partnering through CP to reach the world for Christ.”
The CP booth will also draw attention to the ethnic diversity within the SBC. Of ten thousand non-Anglo churches, about one-third each are predominantly African American and predominantly Hispanic, with the remainder representing at least twenty-five other ethnic groups.
“It is very exciting to see more ethnic churches involved the life of the Southern Baptist Convention,” Ken Weathersby, EC vice president for Convention advancement, said. “It is my hope and desire that the messengers would hear the heart and passion of these leaders for making disciples of all peoples and not just their cultural groups. Also, it is my desire to dispel the myth that ethnic churches are not participating and giving through the Cooperative Program.”
Clayton added, “We want everyone to see the Cooperative Program as a conduit for Gospel ministry. We don’t give to the CP; we give through the Cooperative Program to fuel our SBC missions and ministries.”
In conjunction with the booth, EC president Frank S. Page will be introducing Great Commission Advance, an initiative being developed in concert with state convention and SBC entity leaders for release at the 2014 SBC annual meeting in Baltimore. He will continue to emphasize the “1% CP Challenge” introduced in 2011. The “1% CP Challenge” encourages Southern Baptist churches to give an additional one percent of their undesignated receipts through CP.
As in the past two years, the CP booth will promote participation of younger Southern Baptists in the Convention’s unified method of funding missions and ministries.
“So grab a cup of coffee and let’s talk CP,” Clayton said. “We really want everyone who visits the booth to walk away with a new appreciation for the many ways Southern Baptists are working together to penetrate lostness and be encouraged toward greater faithfulness in their CP giving.”