The great expanse of the Mississippi River served as a metaphor for Southern Baptist’s missions and ministry through the Cooperative Program over the last 100 years as Tony Wolfe delivered the Convention Sermon on Wednesday morning (June 11) at the Southern Baptist Convention in Dallas.
Growing up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the executive director-treasurer of the South Carolina Baptist Convention, told of fishing along the banks of smaller nearby rivers. “As kids, we never thought much about how the [Mississippi] river got so big. We just kind of acknowledged that it was massive, and powerful,” he said likening the river’s force to that of the cooperative efforts of Southern Baptists through the Cooperative Program
He based his message on Ecclesiastes 11:1-6 emphasizing “cast[ing] your bread upon the waters.” Said Wolfe, “We send our bread on the surface of the waters, sacrificially and joyfully together, because when we do, wherever it is needed most, there we know after many days we may find it.”
While Wolfe acknowledged there are things that frustrate him about “our cooperative work,” but he does not let them distract him. “Because my message is too urgent, my mission is too clear, and my time is too short to waste a single day staring at the clouds or overanalyzing the winds.”
“The Cooperative Program is not about what we can do,” said Wolfe, “as much as it is about what God does in and through us; it is an intergenerational testimony to God’s supernatural activity through Baptists’ sacrificial harmony.”
Calling it a “united effort,” he said, “For generations, God has been pleased that through the Cooperative Program, the gospel has floated along the river to the nations. Churches have sent bread, God has brought rain, trees have been moved, and people all over the world have found the life-giving sustenance of the gospel of Jesus Christ sprouting up in the darkest and driest of desert places.”
The Cooperative Program has “strengthened and roared for a full century,” said Wolfe. But just as it says in Deuteronomy 6:10-11, we live in houses we didn’t build, drink from wells we didn’t dig, and eat and drink from vineyards we didn’t plant. “By God’s grace, every good thing has been entrusted to our stewardship in this generation,” he said.
Wolfe asked messengers to turn their attention to the Cooperative Program and how not only has only it become “such a powerful force in advancing the Great Commission” but towards the “depth of Cooperative Program engagement that by God’s grace” lie ahead.
In the next 100 years, what will that generation, see? he asked.
“May God be so pleased that innumerable multitudes among our neighbors and the nations downstream from us today will come to know Jesus Christ, the Living Water and the very Bread of Life, through the generous sowing and sending of Southern Baptists right now, in our day,” Wolfe answered himself. “Our commission is too clear, our message is too urgent, and our time is too short for anything less.”