Writing in support of the Southern Baptist news service, Baptist Press, Philip Robertson highlights the cost of independence to the Independent Baptist churches (largely fundamentalists).
It is a plan that unifies. With regard to missions, the old adage is true, "We can do more together than we can do individually." While I have many independent Baptist friends, I am not an independent Baptist, because I believe in the Cooperative Program. After all, what is it that sets the Southern Baptist Convention apart from other denominations who are doctrinally and theologically like-minded? The Cooperative Program unites us around a specific plan to fulfill the Great Commission. Churches in other denominations share a common cause, but they don’t necessarily share a common plan. Our commitment to the Word of God and the plan of Cooperative Program missions really is the glue that uniquely binds our convention together.
The contrast between the strengths of the SBC Cooperative Program and the weaknesses of our independent churches, mission boards and missionaries and our faith missions deputation practices highlights one of the most important costs of the fundamentalist flight from the denominations some years ago.
The fundamentalist position at the time was that independence for the sake of preserving purity of the faith was worth the cost of losing the power of cooperative efforts like the CP. As a missionary, I have often wished for a more efficient means of raising support and maintaining a mission ministry. But if it were in the SBC CP, for example, I would also be linked in with the likes of Rick Warren and others whose theological/ecclesiastical positions I would find more than distasteful.
There is a cost to independence, but in my mind, the cost is well worth it, if independent churches can maintain orthodoxy.
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