INDIANAPOLIS (BP) — At St. Stephen Baptist Church, a majority African American church ministering in mostly Hispanic La Puente, Calif., the Cooperative Program (CP) ranks a line item on the church’s budget.

Kenneth Curry, senior pastor of Friendship Baptist Church, an African American congregation in Yorba Linda, Calif., thinks globally rather than myopically in his pursuit to fulfill the Great Commission while also transforming the local community.

“We have to think bigger, broader, better in terms of how we’re able to multiply our efforts together,” Curry exhorted fellow pastors. “We can’t think myopically. We’ve got to think globally, bigger in terms of how we’re able to work together.”

Curry, along with St. Stephen Senior Pastor Tony Dockery; Roland Pierce, president of the newly formed Arizona African American Fellowship; and Greg Perkins, president of the National African American Fellowship (NAAF) of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) showcased the responsibility and benefits of supporting CP in a panel discussion at the 2024 SBC annual meeting.

During a 15-minute talk June 12 on the CP Stage of the exhibit hall, the four shared their churches’ stories while discussing the responsibility the approximate 3,800 African American churches have to give to CP.

“We are mandated as members of the Southern Baptist family to financially support the work of Southern Baptists,” said Perkins, panel discussion moderator and lead pastor of The View Church in Menifee, Calif. “We are appealing to you because I believe the SBC more broadly, and more specifically the National African American Fellowship, within our ranks has all of the financial resources that we need to ensure that we can underwrite and undergird the works of this great convention.”

Dockery, vice chair of the SBC Executive Committee, encouraged pastors to enlist their leadership team in casting a church-wide vision that includes giving to CP, noting the importance of the funding mechanism to maintaining international missions.

When St. Stephen adopted a village in Mali, West Africa, more than a decade ago, he said, the Southern Baptist missionaries already on site provided the church a connection point to begin its outreach there.

“At St. Stephen, we really tried to get everyone to understand,” he said, “we need everyone on board financially to invest in the people here locally … but again, the benefit we had in international missions is there are already missionaries in the field where we want to go.”

Pierce, senior pastor of Broadway Missionary Baptist Church in Phoenix, witnessed the reach of CP in Broadway’s current work to plant two churches.

“The Cooperative Program has come in and blessed them with dollars to repaint the building, refloor the building, do a lot of things with their community,” Pierce said, “and help change the direction of their church, because they reallocate dollars to be able to do ministry opposed to just upkeeping a building.

“So they’ve done that for about two or three churches, already, in the state of Arizona,” Pierce said of CP.

CP strengthens missions and ministry through cooperative efforts, the pastors said.

(EDITOR’S NOTE — Diana Chandler is Baptist Press’ senior writer.)