Trust Through Transparency

For the Great Commission

Together

Southern Baptists are at our best when we cooperate to reach the whole world with the Gospel of Jesus Christ. From global missions to North American church planting to educating the majority of seminary students on our continent Southern Baptists are working to fulfill the Great Commission together. 

Trust

Our Great Commission cooperation runs on trust. Southern Baptists in the pews must be able to trust our entities and leaders, and our entities and leaders must trust Southern Baptists in the pews. Sadly, our convention is running at a trust deficit. If we keep this up, our cooperation will unravel, and our Great Commission ministry among the nations will suffer.

Transparency

Given that the SBC is a financial partnership to fund missions and ministry, financial transparency is key to rebuilding and maintaining trust among our cooperating churches and entities. Southern Baptists are incredibly generous, giving hundreds of millions of dollars each year toward Great Commission causes through our convention. These faithful men and women deserve to know where and how their missions dollars are spent. They deserve financial transparency and accountability.

I’d love to hear from you.

Hi, my name is Rhett Burns. In the spirit of transparency, I want you to know who is running this website, which I operate at my personal expense. I’m a small church pastor in South Carolina, and a former IMB missionary to Central Asia. Because I care deeply for our cooperative missions and ministry as a convention, I offered the 990 Financial Transparency motions at the last two annual meetings, and I am doing my best to provide Southern Baptists with real solutions to the persistent problem of waning trust in our convention.

Financial transparency is one of the unifying issues in SBC life. The issue has support from all “wings” of the SBC, and it will benefit all of our cooperating ministries.

I am especially grateful to the Center for Baptist Leadership for its advocacy, support, and solutions related to transparency in the SBC. As you will see on the Resources tab, CBL has provided me the opportunity to write on this issue several times.

If you’d like to discuss financial transparency in the SBC, feel to reach out to me via email at rhettburns@trfirst.org