Positive purpose

Without question, more of my time and passion is invested in encouraging churches to give to missions through the Cooperative Program than through any designated offering, including our own state missions offering. I believe that’s as it should be. Yet both the CP and designated offerings have vital, important purposes.

My conviction is that the Cooperative Program should be the strong foundation of both missions giving and missions strategy in every Southern Baptist church. Where else can every dollar support thousands of international missionaries around the world, thousands of North American church planters and compassion ministries, the strengthening and starting of missionary churches in one’s home state, and do all of this all year round?

Your church’s foundational CP giving also supports six top class seminaries in preparing pastors, missionaries, church staff members, and other church leaders, all from a conservative, biblical worldview and an unwavering commitment to The Baptist Faith and Message. The CP empowers other important ministries as well, such as the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission and the SBC Executive Committee, that play vital roles in our cooperative ecosystem.

In today’s climate, there may be times when churches develop questions or concerns about one or more of the ministries that receive CP support. When those grow serious enough, they should certainly be expressed, directly to the entity or its elected trustees.

But designated offerings are not primarily intended to be expressions of protest or concern, but rather positive opportunities for churches, and for each of us who give, to go above and beyond the year-round foundation of the Cooperative Program, and to express our heart for those specific Acts 1:8 mission fields. We do so by doubling down and giving sacrificially there.

In fact, many churches draw upon Acts 1:8 to structure their missions praying, giving, and going. They see their local association as their Jerusalem, their state or region as their Judea, their nation or our North American continent as their Samaria, and of course the ends of the earth as the vast international mission field.

That’s why at this time of year I also passionately urge churches to focus on and give generously to the needs of their state mission field. Much like Judea in the New Testament, this is where the believers in local churches are the primary resident witness, as well as the launching pad for missionaries to other fields. Our churches are our missionaries! And those churches’ sending power is dependent on their own health, growth, and missionary zeal.

We often refer to “tithes and offerings” in our churches, with tithes being the baseline of weekly giving and special offerings being above-and-beyond expressions of passion for ministry and mission. In a similar way, CP is the baseline that sustains your church’s state missions strategy year round.

Now, at this time of year, is when you are invited to express your passion for the eight million-plus lost people in our state, and for strengthening the hundreds of churches and church plants that are seeking to reach them.

In addition to starting new Baptist churches each year, your state missions offering enables your state staff and other leaders to provide a network of valuable ministries for your church and hundreds of others, ministries that include church revitalization, consulting, leader development, training, evangelism, missions, pastor search help, and many more.

Designated offerings like the Mission Illinois Offering give each of us opportunities to be generous above and beyond the baseline giving our church provides to all these ministries through the Cooperative Program. So if the vast lostness of Illinois still tugs at your heart, as it does mine, now is the time to give.

Nate Adams is executive director of the Illinois Baptist State Association. Respond at IllinoisBaptist@IBSA.org.

Continued from page 1 pending full trustee board approval,” EC Chair Phil Robertson said in a statement. “At that trustee meeting the full board of trustees will elect, without restrictions, a continuing interim president/CEO.”

The seasons of tumult date back to 2018, when Floyd’s predecessor, Frank Page resigned after revelations of an inappropriate relationship and the publication of numerous claims that EC leadership mishandled sexual abuse allegations in SBC churches.

McLaurin was the leading candidate to be nominated for the position permanently. McLaurin’s popularity as Interim President and CEO was discussed publicly when the first search team brought Texas pastor Jared Wellman for a vote that failed 50-31. The second search team announced in July that they had again interviewed McLaurin.

“The Search Team had a positive interview with Willie and his wife, Antonia, on Friday, July 14, followed by an extensive face-to-face discussion with fellow search team members,” chair Neal Hughes said in a letter to EC members on Aug. 17 that was shared with Baptist Press. Then the inflated credentials came to light. Three members of the search team confirmed with each of the three schools that McLaurin did not attend or did not complete the degree program.

McLaurin came to the EC as Vice President of Great Commission Relations and Mobilization in 2020. He was previously special assistant to the Tennessee Baptist Mission Board starting in 2005. If elected to the post, he would have become the first permanent African American leader of any of the SBC’s 12 entities.

“To the Southern Baptists who have placed their confidence in me and have encouraged me to pursue the role of President & CEO of the SBC Executive Committee, including pastors, state partners, entity servants, colleagues, and SBC African American friends, I offer my deepest apologies,” McLaurin wrote in his resignation letter.

“Forgive me for the harm or hurt that this has caused,” he asked.

SBC president Bart Barber later posted that day through X (Twitter): “Biblical Christianity offers you one and only response to that plea, fellow Southern Baptists. Yes, Willie, I forgive you.” But expressions of shock and disappointment sounded across the convention.

“Like a tsunami whose destructive surge will recede slowly, it is way too soon and too impossible to calculate the colossal amount of damage his actions have caused a beleaguered denomination already staggering from various issues and in-fighting,” wrote Chris Turner and Lonnie Wilkie of the Tennessee Baptist & Reflector, former colleagues of McLaurin at their state convention.

When the previous search committee skipped over McLaurin in favor of Wellman, they wrote an editorial in May still advocating for their friend and the advancements in the SBC his election would have represented.

Now they are expressing devastation. “McLaurin…brought calm to a battered organization in the wake of former President Ronnie Floyd’s resignation and to

Marion | Tivo McCrary was dismissed from his position as executive pastor at Cornerstone Church in Marion Aug. 21 after church elders learned of allegations from several teens in the church that McCrary had engaged in inappropriate behaviors and communications with them. Church leaders said they were fully cooperating with an investigation by local law enforcement.

Cornerstone leaders said McCrary had been vetted by a reputable employment firm and passed a criminal background check at the time he was hired.

Before being named to the executive pastor role in 2021, McCrary served as Next Generation Pastor at Cornerstone starting in 2019. He also spoke at two IBSA student events in 2022. Church leaders with students attending those events have been contacted regarding McCrary’s dismissal.

He previously served a church in Birmingham, Alabama.

Kenosha, Wisc. | The bivocational pastor of a church in Lake County, Illinois was arrested Aug. 10 in Somers, Wisconsin, and charged with two misdemeanor counts of disorderly conduct and lewd and lascivious actions. Thomas Bartmer, 57, was taken into custody in the parking lot of Walmart in the village just north of Kenosha. He was booked at the Kenosha County jail, posted bond, and was released.

Bartmer is a Bristol, Wisconsin resident. He has served as pastor of Lighthouse Church in nearby Antioch, Illinois since 1997.

the EC’s handling of sexual abuse claims related to SBC churches. However, the calm is now a tempest, blowing away more of the SBC’s credibility…. It wasn’t supposed to end this way,” they summarized.

With McLaurin out of the running, the search committee is receiving resumes again. “We will continue on to our next phase in the search process with the goal of attracting a strong pool of potential candidates,” Hughes said. The portal at SBC.net will be open until September 30.

“Obviously, our hearts are broken and disheartened so we’re spending a lot of time praying together,” Hughes said of the search committee.

“Our team is united.”

—IB Staff, with reporting from Baptist Press and The Baptist Paper

Aberdeen, Miss. | A lawsuit by former Baptist Convention of Maryland/Delaware (BCMD) Executive Director Will McRaney against the North American Mission Board (NAMB) was dismissed a second time by a U.S. District Court in Mississippi, because the case was out of its “subject matter jurisdiction.” McRaney claims defamatory statements were made about him by NAMB personnel that cost him speaking engagements and income after he was dismissed from the state convention.

“This lawsuit will clearly require the Court to inquire into religious matters and decision-making to a degree that is simply impermissible under the Constitution and the ecclesiastical abstention doctrine,” the judgment favoring NAMB stated.

McRaney has 30 days to file an appeal.

IB Staff, Baptist Press