Highview Baptist Church and Mission Giving

This statement was issued today by Dr. Kevin Ezell, pastor of Highview Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky. It comes in response to criticism of the church’s mission giving, which criticism comes in the wake of the announcement that Dr. Albert Mohler, who is a member of and teaching pastor at Highview, will be nominated for the presidency of the Southern Baptist Convention:

Highview Baptist Church has received numerous inquiries from around the world about our giving to missions and missions-related causes, and we are more than happy to address those questions.

As a church, we are committed to The Southern Baptist Convention and to its mission of reaching people for Jesus Christ in our community, our state, our country, and all over the world. Being “Great Commission Focused” is one of our core values. Our church has a history of missions- related giving and of sending career missionaries and volunteers to the field. We are more excited and more committed to missions now than at any time in our church’s history.

In the wake of various erroneous news reports, we do think it’s important that we clear up any misunderstanding about Highview’s contribution to the Lottie Moon and Annie Armstrong missions offerings.

In 2006, Highview gave a total of $724,984 to missions. In the Associated Church Profile (ACP) we submitted to the SBC in 2006, we simply chose not to specifically categorize our missions giving. Frankly, at the time, we did not think such categorization was necessary to promote our church.

In 2007, we gave $836,681 dollars to missions. Last year, we did specifically categorize our contribution in the ACP report. Highview gave $64,158 to the Lottie Moon fund and $13,752 to Annie Armstrong.

As for our Cooperative Program giving, Highview has chosen to give the majority of our cooperative funds directly to the SBC instead of funneling the funds through the Kentucky Baptist Convention. The reason is simple: The KBC retains 64% of those funds, and we want to ensure that more of our dollars went directly to evangelism, missions and other programs that Highview supports.

Highview Baptist Church understands that some of the questions about our missions giving come following the announcement that one of our teaching pastors, Dr. Albert Mohler, will be nominated for the presidency of the SBC. We are proud to have Dr. Mohler and his family as active members of our church.

Our giving, our going, our praying, and our serving has always been out of a desire to make Jesus’ name famous all over the world.

Missions and evangelism are at the core of Highview Baptist Church, so in the wake of some misinformation, we thought it necessary to set the record straight. To that end, we are attaching our 2008 plan for missions giving (link), which our congregation unanimously approved in November of 2007.