Celebrating a century of impact through the Cooperative Program

In 1925, Southern Baptists gathered for their annual meeting in Memphis, Tenn., and adopted a pair of foundational structures that still define the convention’s work today.  The Baptist Faith and Message laid a doctrinal foundation for the Southern Baptist Convention’s cooperating churches, while the Cooperative Program provided the unified funding method by which their work would be accomplished.

In 2025, Southern Baptists celebrated the 100th anniversary of this historic event and saw the fruit that comes from generous giving. As Southern Baptists of Texas Convention churches continued to give faithfully and sacrificially through the CP, churches were planted across the state to help push back against a growing rate of lostness. When disaster relief workers mobilized to minister to survivors of floods and fires, they did so with the help of cooperative giving. 

Simply put, the Cooperative Program’s impact has been wide-reaching and significant. 

As churches give through the Cooperative Program, 45% of undesignated receipts remain in Texas to mobilize SBTC churches and 55% is forwarded to SBC entities for national and international missions and ministry. Those gifts support international missionaries serving in some of the harshest mission fields on the planet, church planters in North America, and students attending one of the SBC’s six seminaries.

In February, the Texan featured Acts Fellowship Church in Austin, where more than three dozen people have been sent to seminary to prepare for future kingdom service—including 20 who have trained at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth. 

“ … It’s a great way to take part in equipping the next generation of Christian leaders and to partake in the expansion of God’s kingdom,” Acts Fellowship Pastor Charles Lee said.

Caroll Marr, senior pastor of Southcliff Church in Fort Worth, said giving through the CP is personal for his congregation, which supports and sends missionaries around the globe.

“It is easy to think a larger church can make a global impact in a way a smaller church cannot,” Marr wrote in the Texan earlier this year. “Yet because of the Cooperative Program, even churches that do not feel they have a personal connection with missions or are not able to go on a mission trip are just as connected as our church.”

Throughout the year, SBTC churches were encouraged to do three things: pray for record CP giving in 2025, plan a CP Sunday to emphasize the importance of CP giving, and post testimonials to social media to spread the word about how God has used CP to bless individuals’ lives.

“The Cooperative Program is a way that we can make sure not only [our church] is being effective in reaching our neighbors and the nations right now,” said Aaron Kahler, lead pastor of Hays Hills Baptist Church in Buda, “but that we and other Southern Baptist churches will be effective 100 years from now.”