(EDITOR’S NOTE — Sunday, Oct. 6, is Cooperative Program Sunday in the Southern Baptist Convention.)

TUPELO, Miss. (BP) — “They had never seen anything like that,” Pastor Matt Powell said of the members of First Baptist Church of Tupelo who attended the 2024 Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) annual meeting in Indianapolis.

There was the International Mission Board (IMB) commissioning service, the various seminary reports and, on the bus trip home, a walking tour of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Returning to the bus, Powell held the attendees’ rapt attention as he read to them from the SBC’s Book of Reports, he told Baptist Press months after the event.

He explained the work of Southern Baptist entities and how churches and state conventions support the work by giving to the Cooperative Program.

“Our church could probably do more,” was the immediate response from the attendees, Powell said. “There was a pride, in the best kind of sense, to be a part of the Southern Baptist Convention.”

The church took its full allotment of 12 messengers in addition to 13 guests, ranging in age from 4 to 86, compared to past years when Powell and his wife might have been the only messengers from First Tupelo.

It was the first annual meeting for Mickey Holliman, now 87 and the oldest on the trip. The lifelong Southern Baptist had been a member of another church for many years, he said, and had never been encouraged to attend an SBC annual meeting.

He’d always thought of the meeting as a trip to a big town where you stayed a couple of days, listened to some speakers, heard some Q&A’s and perhaps a few arguments and debates.

“I found it to be entirely different,” he said of the meeting. “I thought the Q&A came off excellent. I never heard anyone debating anyone. A question was raised, an answer was given, end of conversation.

“So, overall, I walked away with a totally different impression of the convention. If Matt were to approach me again, I would go back. I probably would want to give others the opportunity to do it before I turned right around and went back.”

He appreciates the Cooperative Program and First Baptist Tupelo’s level of commitment. First Tupelo gave 5.9 percent of its undesignated receipts to the Cooperative Program in 2022, or $205,113 of $3,421,248, according to the 2023 SBC Annual Church Profile.

“Getting God’s Word out into the world is a message that the Scripture tells us we are responsible to do,” Holliman said. “Personally I’ve never had any thoughts other than being supportive of what we do as a church family and what we provide to the convention, and I don’t think I would change my mind at any point in the future to do anything any different.”

He encourages others to attend the annual meeting to see the Cooperative Program in action.

“Go to the convention,” Holliman said. “You’ll learn things about what is done and how the message of going out and telling the world about Jesus and how it is handled, before it reaches out to the missionaries and their roles, but how it is administered at the convention.

“I think it’s something that all church members should have an opportunity to learn more about.”

Powell now has a problem, perhaps a good one.

“We would have no trouble asking any of those that represented our church as messengers to go again,” he said. “They all want to go again. But my problem is now, there’s probably 50 more people that want to go too.”

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