The Southern Baptist Convention could face a financial crisis within a few years unless churchgoers start giving more money to the denomination, an internal report said.
Baptist churches traditionally ask members to give 10 percent of their income. But donations by Southern Baptists to the church decreased steadily from 1968 to 1998, to 2.03 percent of their earnings, according to a Christian research group, Empty Tomb Inc. of Champaign, Ill., which provided some of the statistics used in the report.
The report also said the percentage of donations forwarded from churches to the convention's Cooperative Program, which finances missions, seminaries and state Baptist convention ministries, dropped to 7.4 percent last year, from 10.5 percent of church income in the 1980's.
The drop in Cooperative Program financing has delayed the deployment of 100 missionaries, and meant layoffs at mission boards and tuition increases at the six Southern Baptist seminaries, according to the report, which was prepared by the convention's Funding Study Committee. The denomination's executive committee adopted the document on Tuesday.
"It is the opinion of the committee none of the entities are in a financial crisis at present," the report said. "However, all of them are experiencing trends in their fiscal health that could degenerate into a crisis in very few years."
In addition to the sluggish economy, the report cited several possible causes for the downturn in Cooperative Program support: increased local church expenditures and greater emphasis on their own missions; the belief that convention ministries have enough money; and concerns that Cooperative Program money is not spent effectively. Another theory is that "political infighting has led to decreased satisfaction with the denomination."
Many denominations are struggling with similar financial challenges, with fewer donations from younger generations.
But the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the nation, has also been beset by internal strife as conservatives have taken over positions of power, alienating some moderates.
"Historically, the fundamentalists who have now risen to power have not been strong Cooperative Program supporters," said the Rev. L. Joseph Rosas III, pastor of Crievewood Baptist Church in Nashville. Conservatives did not approve of how the money was spent or trust such a large bureaucracy, he said.
Nancy Ammerman, a sociology and theology professor at Boston University and author of "Baptist Battles," said that after 20 years of telling their congregations that the Cooperative Program is "a bad system and doing bad things, in some sense they've reaped that harvest."
Bill Merrell, a spokesman for the Nashville-based convention, said that while some moderate churches left the denomination, that caused only a one-time drop in finances.
But Mr. Merrell said, "Some of our Southern Baptist leaders, particularly in mega-churches, have developed a relationship to denominational giving that is unhealthy for them and the denomination."
The report said the convention must better educate its members about the Cooperative Program, which was created in 1925 to prevent ministries and missions from having to appeal directly to each church for money. The Southern Baptist Convention has 42,000 churches and 16.2 million members.