Do you ever grow weary of individual missionaries asking for your monetary support? Or have you ever wondered why you’ve never received an appeal for financial support from Cuyahoga Valley Church (CVC) connected missionaries?
It’s exciting to be a part of a church with a wide variety of missional activities where we give over $300,000 away to various missional causes outside of CVC. A lot of good work for Christ is done all around the world through the dollars we give as a body of Christ.
But I often find that some people at CVC don’t know some of the details about how we support missions and missionaries financially. Sometimes, CVCers are tempted to direct some of their giving away from CVC’s general fund because they want to support global missions and international missionaries.
In this post, I want to show you how giving to the CVC general fund actually helps us to give to the Cooperative Program (CP) of the Great Commission Baptist (GCB) churches. This, in turn, supports individual missionaries and impacts people for Christ all around the world.
Missionary support could be categorized into 2 primary methods:
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The societal approach
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The cooperative approach
The “societal” approach to missions happens when each missionary and agency is charged with the responsibility to generate financial support as individuals and as distinct agencies. This can result in competition among entities, overlapping pledge campaigns, and frequent emergency appeals which greatly hampers ministry opportunities.
In 1919, the leaders of the GCB developed a partnership – a cooperative approach of missions support called the Cooperative Program. Since its launch in 1925, individuals, churches, state conventions, and GCB entities have been cooperating, pooling resources and working toward a common goal of sharing the gospel with every person on the planet.
Because CVC gives to the CP, your mission dollars go a long, long way. The CP finances the Great Commission Baptist seminaries, the North American Mission Board, the International Mission Board, and other GCB mission efforts. The CP has enabled the GCB to do unparalleled things. For example, our tribe has put more missionaries on the field (5000+, currently) and provided a more affordable, higher quality theological education than any other denomination. That’s what happens when 42,000+ churches contribute to a collective pot.
What’s important for to know is that $30,000 of our overall budget goes to the CP. And over 50% of CP dollars given goes to support the International Mission Board and the 5000+ missionaries who serve through the IMB in over 100 countries around the world.
This is why our IMB missionaries don’t send fund-raising support letters or make donor appeals. They are sustained by the CP giving of CVC and over 42,000 other GCB churches.
Please know that when you give to the General Fund of CVC, a portion of your dollars goes to support global mission efforts through the IMB. That means that CVC-connected IMB missionaries like T&K who serve with the IMB in Indonesia, Emery/Clara Laszlo who serve with the IMB in Ukraine, and 5,000+ others like them in over 100 countries receive your support.
So, thank you, Thank You, THANK YOU for giving to the global cause of Christ by giving to the General Fund of CVC. Your giving is making a difference because you are supporting missionaries and your gifts are inviting people – all around the world – to new life in Christ.
