“Irresistible Cooperation”: Intercongregational Financial Cooperation as A Spiritual Impulse and Theological Obligation according to Lee Rutland Scarborough

Celebrating Christian Centenaries

Southwestern Journal of Theology
Volume 68, No. 1 - Fall 2025
Editor: Malcolm B. Yarnell III

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Introduction

Perhaps as much as any other person, Lee Rutland Scarborough, president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary from 1914 to 1942, was influential and instrumental in the organization of the Cooperative Program and in the proliferation of the theology behind it during the second and third decades of the twentieth century. Through his leadership in the $75 Million Campaign (1919–24), Southern Baptists discovered both a new denominational consciousness and a burgeoning ambition for missiological effectiveness. Through his prolific writing on the doctrine of cooperation and his leadership in innovative Baptist mechanisms of missions funding, he captured the spirit of cooperation among Baptists in the South while empowering them with new language, and new urgency, for inter-congregational financial cooperation. 

His work in the five-year campaign and in the articulation of the doctrine of cooperation became the fertile soil in which the Southern Baptist Cooperative Program was officially planted May 13, 1925, in Memphis, Tennessee. But is the doctrine of cooperation—specifically the component of intercongregational financial cooperation—a binding obligation upon Baptist churches? Is the Cooperative Program merely a Southern Baptist mechanism of pragmatic efficiency, or is it the denominational outworking of something more innate, more entrenched within the Christian consciousness? For one-hundred and eighty years, Southern Baptists have relished the opportunity to associate and cooperate based on shared biblical convictions. For the last one-hundred years, they have found an efficient mechanism for this shared, sacred effort in the Cooperative Program. But from where does the Baptist impulse toward intercongregational financial cooperation stem?

Scarborough saw the Acts 2 Pentecost as an “epochal event,” a “pivot” on which turn “prophetic, dynamic, and mighty things.”¹ He devoted much of his life and scholarship to articulating the biblical doctrine of cooperation which, he believed, began in the Spirit-filled Great Commission movement on the day of Pentecost. “The holy bonds of their cooperation” were cemented among Christ’s gathered disciples, in that very moment in the outpouring of the Holy Spirit in the New Testament church.² Among these cementing bonds Scarborough saw what he labeled “an irresistible cooperation” that was brought about by “the strong hand of [God’s] omnipotence” as “he incorporated them into a spiritual unity and gave them a driving force.”³ For Scarborough, Great Commission cooperation was something God did within and among Christ followers upon the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Cooperation would not be a matter of salvation, but it was “a condition of acceptable obedience to Christ’s will in our service to Him.”⁴ 

Full-throttled, intercongregational cooperation for missions was, at least in some manner, “irresistible” for Scarborough. Whether cooperation is truly “irresistible” in the same sense as the Reformation doctrine of irresistible grace (as many Baptists have understood it throughout history) is likely beside the point. Scarborough’s emphasis was on the cooperative impulse—the inherent desire and drive—for working together within churches and between churches under the empowerment of the Holy Spirit for the advancement of the gospel. From Pentecost forward, Christians would hold a Holy Spirit-empowered impulse and a biblically grounded theological obligation to cooperate with one another relationally and financially, within Christ’s churches and between them, for the advancement of the gospel. This spiritual impulse, this theological obligation, is still the driving force behind the Southern Baptist Cooperative Program today. 

The Spiritual Impulse of Intercongregational Financial Cooperation

When Pentecost came, the disciples were all together in one place (Acts 2:1),but the emphasis is not on their physical location as much as on their “concerted activity or unity.”⁵ Scarborough interprets this as a precursor to effective, Spirit-empowered evangelistic cooperation.⁶ They were “all together” in the sense that they were of one mind and one purpose—the purpose of the Great Commission. Adam Dodds sees their Spirit-filled togetherness as an expression of koinonia (“fellowship,” 2:42), evidenced not only in their relational and spiritual togetherness but also in their outward-facing fellowship, which in some way mirrors the koinonia of God’s own triunity. Their Spirit-filled oneness in the missio ecclesiae specifically revolves around the task of evangelism—the communication of the gospel—as a reflection of God’s own triune cooperation in the task.⁷ At the beginning of Luke’s account, Acts 2:1 set the missiological situation within the context of the disciples’ physical and spiritual togetherness, owning a shared, gospel-focused single-mindedness. Scarborough imagines this unified togetherness to be the imprint of a church that “majored on God’s big ‘together.’” “Spite and death thrive in divisions,” he writes, while “pentecosts grow in unities.”⁸ 
The Holy Spirit’s empowerment loosed the tongues of the disciples that day to declare with all the power and authority of heaven the “magnificent acts of God” in the gospel of Jesus Christ (Acts 2:11).⁹ At Pentecost and in every generation, to be Spirit-filled is to be gospel-fluent. Nonetheless, each was not declaring the gospel alone, but they worked cooperatively. Scarborough believed that Peter’s sermon in 2:14–40 was an expanded, formal demonstration of what all the Spirit-filled disciples were doing in 2:4, 6–8, and 11. “All went afield,” he notes, and “the tread of a mighty spiritual army of evangelists was heard in Jerusalem.”¹⁰ Martin Luther elaborates: “Not only Peter preached on Pentecost Day, but . . . all the disciples, as well as the eleven apostles. All of this happened at the moment when they were set afire by the Holy Spirit.”¹¹ Alan J. Thompson argues for an eschatological shift here in God’s delegated authority from the temple leadership to the leadership of the apostles (more specifically, the message of the apostles) on the basis of Peter standing “with the Eleven” in 2:14 and the crowd’s response to Peter “and to the rest of the apostles” in 2:37.¹² What they were doing, they were doing together. What they accomplished, they accomplished together. 

Scarborough understood the Pentecost to not only be an eschatological inauguration, but also a perennial paradigm of cooperative, Spirit-filled evangelism for local churches.¹³ In Acts 2:1–14, he saw “a demonstration of gospel team work,” showing the disciples “how to work together under the leadership of Christ’s vice-regent, the Holy Spirit.”¹⁴ Pentecost stands in church history not only as an eschatological marker, but as an epochal evangelistic example for Christ’s churches in every generation. Scarborough believed that “the two major practical doctrines” of the day of Pentecost were the doctrines of worldwide missions and of the voluntary, organized cooperation between individual Christians and between autonomous churches.¹⁵ It was there that God himself commenced “his organized campaign” for perennial, cooperative, Great Commission success in every generation.¹⁶ The apostles never forgot the impact of Pentecost; it formed within them a thirst for more organized and ever-expanding Great Commission cooperation. This spiritual impulse, deeply engrained in the Christian conscience on the day of Pentecost, included what quickly became the regular practice of intercongregational financial cooperation. 

According to Chad Brand and David Hankins, the Antioch church’s collection for a benevolent need in Jerusalem (Acts 11:27–30) was evidence that churches throughout the region regularly participated in intercongregational financial giving and receiving.¹⁷ The pooling and sending of financial resources was a spiritual impulse for Spirit-filled, gospel-focused churches. As the gospel spread, the pattern continued, the impulse grew, and the organization expanded. Paul’s ministry in Corinth was initially funded by his own tent-making efforts, but when Timothy and Silas joined him, they brought funding with them from the churches in Macedonia (Acts 18:5; 2 Cor 11:9). Paul did not receive missionary funding from the Corinthians for his Corinthian ministry. Instead, the cooperative funding of Macedonian churches subsidized the cooperative missions work in Corinth. Roland Allen sees a biblical paradigm of intercongregational missionary funding in this passage as applicable for all generations.¹⁸ Andreas Köstenberger roots this specific instance in the Corinthian context uniquely.¹⁹ Either way, the biblical evidence of burgeoning, intercongregational financial cooperation is as undeniable as is the supernatural Christian impulse that secured it on the day of Pentecost. 

In Philippians 1:5 and 4:15–20, the Philippian church is praised and prayed for by the missionary apostle because of their ongoing “partnership/fellowship in the gospel” since the day he first came to them up until the time of his writing. What is in view here is the Philippian church’s ongoing financial subsidization of Paul’s missionary work.²⁰ Philippians 4 provides what is considered by some to be the most substantial evidence for ongoing, intercongregational financial cooperation in mission work. Robertson noted that while Paul’s bookkeeping with the Philippian church was unique, the Philippians were later joined in like manner by the churches in Thessalonica and Berea.²¹ The biblical record is clear that the Philippian church pooled its resources with other Macedonian churches to fund evangelistic and missionary work in the first-century Near East. This intercongregational financial cooperation was a biblical pattern, built upon the spiritual impulse that fell from heaven and filled the disciples on Pentecost, setting fire to the co-working Great Commission relationship of early Christ followers. 

The Theological Obligation

Scarborough’s contemporary and the chair of the Baptist Faith and Message committee, E. Y. Mullins, acknowledged the New Testament pattern of intercongregational cooperation as a “clearly revealed principle of the gospel. . . . Paul gathered funds in European churches for the poor in Jerusalem. Christians scattered abroad were enjoined to cooperate with missionaries and laborers in the Kingdom . . . The duty of cooperation for great common ends is . . . clear.”²² Mullins understood cooperative funding between churches not merely as an opportunity, but as a biblically sanctioned “duty.” Later, Scarborough became even more emphatic, writing that “no church has a right” to consume all its revenue for its own ministries.²³ The doctrine of cooperation included financial obligations in addition to relational ones. Scarborough’s tone and content in this aspect of the doctrine of cooperation is an echo of Baptist confessional sentiment from the earliest days of the movement 5,000 miles away and three centuries removed.²⁴ Intercongregational financial cooperation for the purpose of Great Commission advance knows both biblical and Baptist historical precedent.

If intercongregational financial cooperation is truly a deep-seated spiritual impulse with demonstrable biblical precedent, then can a church refuse such cooperation and still abide in the will of Christ? The answer to this question, for Scarborough, was an emphatic “No.” Less than one month after the Convention’s adoption of the Cooperative Program, Scarborough rebutted objections in a short article in Texas Baptists’ Baptist Standard, suggesting that refusal “to co-operate in doing the work” would be nothing short of a betrayal of the gospel, including the theological obligation of individual Baptists and Baptist churches to financially work together to “put on the budget.”²⁵ Instead, “full-fledged, uncritical, co-operative, constructive promotion of our Southern Baptist co-operative plan” is obligatory within the Southern Baptist fellowship, and such cooperation “will bring Baptists to the top of the Gospel hill.”²⁶ Scarborough’s timely rebuttal was not a boyish whiplash in defensive posture. In 1921, he had published his provocative article “The Heresy of Non-Cooperation” in the same Baptist paper; its content was as incriminatory as its title was provocative.²⁷ 

Scarborough was not alone in his position. Nor was he first. In his 1900 book, The Training of the Twelve, Alexander Bruce of the Free Church of Scotland connected the perpetual “operations” of Christ’s Great Commission plan and the “capacities and idiosyncrasies of the agents” to the power they received together on the day of Pentecost—a power that carries with it a “moral” obligation for all Christians and all churches in generations to come.²⁸ In America, the conversation surrounding Southern Baptist confessional cooperation was well primed by May of 1922 when Scarborough’s companion article “Is Co-operation a New Testament Doctrine” circulated in several Baptist papers in the South.²⁹ The editor of The Baptist Advance commented that he had been

saying for a long time that a Baptist has no more right to refuse to co-operate in Baptist work than he has to get drunk or to commit adultery. . . . If a new Baptist confession of faith is to be formulated (as it seems that there will be) we believe an article on co-operation should be included in the confession. We believe no Baptist should be considered sound or in good standing if he refuses to co-operate in the work of Baptists.³⁰ 

In the October 19, 1922, issue of Texas’s Baptist Standard, Pastor Ervin F. Lyon of First Baptist Church San Angelo, Texas, published the seventeenth in his series of eighteen articles on “Who the Baptists Are.” These articles would delineate distinctively Baptist doctrines and principles on which Southern Baptists should be clear and of which they should be unapologetically proud.³¹ The seventeenth installment in his series of Baptist doctrines was titled, “Baptists and Co-Operation.” Lyon asserted, “All of our associations and conventions are founded upon the principle of wholesome and in the main, harmonious co-operation.” He further insisted that churches which refuse to cooperate with their sister churches for evangelistic, educational, and missional endeavors, if they do not “die because of their own inactivity,” will eventually “drift into heretical organizations” and “break with the denomination.”³²

That the cooperative obligation is theological in nature is not to be lost on the Southern Baptist conscience. Along with the birth of the Cooperative Program in 1925, the Convention adopted its first official confession of faith. Scarbrough himself was among its authors. The confession included Article 22 on “Co-Operation,” which declares the Baptist theological position to be one “most surely held among” those gathered that day (as it was among those gathered to revise and re-confess in two confessional revisions since, in 1963 and 2000).³³ On the same day that Scarborough’s “Three-Fold” defense appeared in the Baptist Standard, a longer article by him appeared in South Carolina’s Baptist Courier. In no uncertain terms, he rebuked those in the Convention who would advocate for doctrinal purity while refusing to financially cooperate with the work of the Convention. Such an argumentative non-cooperant has “no right” to engage in doctrinal debates within the Convention: “They are obsessed. They have a brain spasm.”³⁴ 

Intercongregational financial cooperation, according to the Convention’s unified financial plan to underwrite their shared mission, was not merely a spiritual impulse. For Scarborough, it was a theological obligation planted deeply in the Baptist conscience, and at least conceptually, it was a prerequisite for rightful participation in the Convention’s doctrinal and organizational work. The matter of cooperative funding for missions is one of theological substance, an obligatory participation for churches who convene to make decisions and set the course for the realization of their shared mission. 

Conclusion

According to L. R. Scarborough, and many Baptists before and since, financial cooperation between Spirit-filled, gospel-focused churches is both a spiritual impulse and a theological obligation. The spiritual impulse is a shared Pentecostal enduement, and the theological obligation is a shared doctrinal commitment. If the Convention is to thrive in the generations ahead, advancing the Great Commission to the ends of the earth, Southern Baptists in the third decade of the twenty-first century must rediscover the irresistibility of sacrificial cooperation, both relationally and financially. The commitment to Spirit-filled gospel single-mindedness and the hunger for a powerful, cooperative advancement of the Great Commission must awaken within us and between us again. 

Southern Baptists are not lacking in financial resources. Neither are we lacking in denominational organization. What fades among us and between us in the Cooperative Program’s one hundredth year is the joyfully sacrificial and faithfully expectant cooperative commitment that falls like fire from heaven upon those who long for nothing more. The following three propositions are offered in conclusion toward that end. 

1. Southern Baptists must recover their spiritual hunger for a sweeping, global movement of the gospel. Pentecostal enduement cannot be separated from Great Commission injunction. The power of the Holy Spirit in Acts 2:1–4 was given for the express purpose of local and global gospel saturation in 1:4–8. Southern Baptists are a Great Commission people. Nothing will unite us or propel us forward together like our shared commitment to the fulfillment of the Great Commission. When we allow our theological obligations and spiritual impulses to stir this cooperative evangelistic hunger within us and among us, we are at our best. When anything else is stirred within us and among us, we are not. 

2. Southern Baptists must recover the Pentecostal spiritual impulse that awakens and ignites cooperative gospel single-mindedness in every generation. On the day of Pentecost, spiritual power for the accomplishment of the shared mission was poured out from heaven on a unified, praying church. In fact, every “pentecost” in the book of Acts fell upon churches in the context of prayerful expectation, gospel single-mindedness, and unified togetherness (Acts 2:1–4; 8:14–18; 10:1–11:17; 19:1–7). If it is power from on high that awakens and ignites cooperative Great Commission commitment within and among Christ’s people, Southern Baptists need to become again a people who are marked by desperately focused prayerfulness, eager spiritual togetherness, and relentless gospel single-mindedness. 

3. Southern Baptists must recover the joyful theological obligation of sacrificial commitment to their shared mission. An obligation only becomes a burden when duty is divorced from joy, but obligation and joy are not mutually exclusive. Every church in the SBC could consume one hundred percent of its own financial resources; there is always another building to build, another staff member to hire, or more technology to upgrade. But localized plans must not supersede Great Commission obligation. A church financially turned inward, minimizing its cooperative missions giving, is one that will eventually experience the “shame” of self-centeredness (2 Cor 9:4). But the church financially turned outward, sacrificing its own financial comfort especially through seasons of hardship, will know the enduring “joy” of cooperative gospel single-mindedness (2 Cor 8:2). 

Let Southern Baptists recommit to their Cooperative Program in its one hundredth year. Let the joy of spiritual togetherness in the Great Commission reignite our passion for global gospel advance. Let the Pentecostal impulse of intercongregational cooperation, both relational and financial, awaken us to greater sacrifice. And let the theological obligation of the same become the enduring joy of the churches as the gospel narrative unfolds in our generation. 

1. Lee Rutland Scarborough, Products of Pentecost (New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1934), 41. ↩︎
2. Scarborough, Products of Pentecost, 91.  ↩︎
3. Scarborough, Products of Pentecost, 92. ↩︎
4. Lee Rutland Scarborough, “Article 19 On Co-Operation,” The L. R. Scarborough Digital Materials Collection (Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, http://cdm16969.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p16969coll11/id/1133). ↩︎
5. Craig Keener, Acts: An Exegetical Commentary (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2012), 1:795. ↩︎
6. Scarborough, Products of Pentecost, 75, 91.  ↩︎
7. Adam Dodds, “The Mission of the Spirit and the Mission of the Church: Towards a Trinitarian Missiology,” Evangelical Review of Theology 35, no. 2 (2011): 212, 216. ↩︎
8. Scarborough, Products of Pentecost, 74–75. ↩︎
9. For “magnificent acts of God” as gospel proclamation, see Anthony D. Wolfe, “Confessionalism and Cooperation in the Baptist Movement, 1609–1925,” PhD diss. (The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2024), 199–202. ↩︎
10. Scarborough, Products of Pentecost, 99. ↩︎
11. Martin Luther, “Holy Pentecost: First Sermon,” in The Complete Sermons of Martin Luther, trans. by Eugene F. A. Klug, Erwin W. Koehlinger, James Lanning, Everette W. Meier, Dorothy Schoknecht, and Allen Schuldheiss, ed. by Eugene F. A. Klug, 6:151–65 (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2000) 153. ↩︎
12. Alan J. Thompson, The Acts of the Risen Lord Jesus: Luke’s Account of God’s Unfolding Plan (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2011), 179. ↩︎
13. Scarborough, Products of Pentecost, 28. ↩︎
14. Scarborough, Products of Pentecost, 32. See also 88–89. ↩︎
15. Scarborough, Products of Pentecost, 82. ↩︎
16. Scarborough, Products of Pentecost, 68. ↩︎
17. Chad Brand and David Hankins, One Sacred Effort: The Cooperative Program of Southern Baptists (Nashville: B & H, 2005), 67–71. ↩︎
18. Roland Allen, Missionary Methods, St. Paul’s or Ours: A Study of the Church in the Four Provinces (London: Robert Scott, 1912), 84. ↩︎
19. Andreas Köstenberger, Salvation to the Ends of the Earth: A Biblical Theology of Mission, 2nd ed. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2020), 167. ↩︎
20. Archibald Thomas Robertson, The Acts of the Apostles, Word Pictures in the New Testament vol. 3 (Nashville: Broadman, 1930), 436. See also Andreas Köstenberger, “Women in the Pauline Mission,” in The Gospel to the Nations: Perspectives on Paul’s Mission, ed. Peter Bolt and Mark Thompson (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2000), 233; Eckhard J. Schnabel, Paul and the Early Church, vol. 2 of Early Christian Mission (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2004), 1159. These authors and more see the koinonia of Philippians 1:5 in light of not only spiritual and relational reciprocity but ongoing financial investment in the mission work of Paul. ↩︎
21. Robertson, The Acts of the Apostles, 462. ↩︎
22. Edgar Y. Mullins, “Doctrinal Statement,” E. Y. Mullins Papers (Box 39, Folder 17), The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville. ↩︎
23. Scarborough, Products of Pentecost, 119. ↩︎
24. A doctrine of intercongregational financial cooperation was evident in the Separatists’ A True Confession (1596) to which John Smyth alluded while in Amsterdam, and upon which the first London Baptist Confession (1644) was built. See Wolfe, “Confessionalism and Cooperation in the Baptist Movement, 1609–1925,” 80–81. ↩︎
25. Lee Rutland Scarborough, “A Three-Fold Betrayal of the Truth,” Baptist Standard, June 11, 1925, 8. ↩︎
26. Scarborough, “A Three-Fold Betrayal of the Truth,” 8. ↩︎
27. Lee Rutland Scarborough, “The Heresy of Non-Cooperation,” Baptist Standard, November 24, 1921, 6, 14. ↩︎
28. Alexander B. Bruce, The Training of the Twelve (New York: A. C. Armstrong, 1900), 35–42. ↩︎
29. Lee Rutland Scarborough, “Is Cooperation a New Testament Doctrine?,” Alabama Baptist, May 18, 1922, 5; “Is Cooperation a New Testament Doctrine?,” Baptist and Reflector, May 11, 1922, 4–5; “Is Cooperation a New Testament Doctrine?,” Baptist Message, May 4, 1922, 4. ↩︎
30. J. S. Compere, untitled editorial, Baptist Advance, February 23, 1922, 4. ↩︎
31. E. F. Lyon, “What Baptists Believe,” Baptist Standard, June 22, 1922, 7.  ↩︎
32. E. F. Lyon, “What Baptists Believe: XVII Baptists and Co-Operation,” Baptist Standard, October 19, 1922, 15, 17. ↩︎
33. Baptist Faith and Message, Preamble. ↩︎
34. Lee Rutland Scarborough, “Southern Baptists Lift Up a Great Doctrinal Standard,” Baptist Courier, June 11, 1925, 7. ↩︎