Inflation and declining Cooperative Program giving have put pressure on the IMB budget, but strong giving to the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering and an increase in IMB funding next year will help keep missionary efforts strong, IMB President Paul Chitwood told messengers to the 2026 SBC Annual Meeting.
Thanks to voluntary reductions for other entities, the IMB will receive 51% of the national CP budget allocation during fiscal year 2026-2027, Chitwood said. “It’s a very real dollar sacrifice on the part of … the Executive Committee, our six seminaries, the ERLC and NAMB,” he said. “These are our close partnering entities, and we are grateful for the way they prioritize a missionary presence among the nations and for the sacrifices they are making.”
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Chitwood highlighted the IMB’s ministry impact in 2025, with nearly 200,000 professions of faith, 7,697 new churches planted and work among 2,358 people groups.
He also commended the 1,803 female missionaries serving with the IMB overseas who represent more than half of the approximately 3,500 total missionary force.
“No organization or institution in Southern Baptist life employs more females in vocational ministry than IMB. Not one of them is in a pastor/elder role or carries the function of pastor/elder,” Chitwood said.
Chitwood acknowledged hearing concerns from pastors and missionaries about “extreme positions that have been voiced over the last few weeks,” and he asked messengers to affirm “female IMB missionaries who have left their country, their culture, their church, their American comforts and for some, their adult kids and grandkids to answer God’s call upon their lives to take Christ to the nations.”
Read more stories from the 2026 SBC Annual Meeting in Orlando.
In response to a question from the floor regarding the IMB’s vaccination policy, Chitwood said two reviews of the policy have been conducted in the past year due to questions presented at last year’s Annual Meeting. Chitwood said an internal review from the IMB medical team and a second review by a group of physicians, professors and professionals not connected to the IMB both affirmed the IMB’s policy on vaccine requirements.
“These are decisions the IMB has been making for many, many decades, since vaccines became available, to preserve not only the lives of missionaries who go into foreign environments, but the lives of those who we bring foreign contagions to,” Chitwood said. “These are not necessarily easy decisions, but these are well informed decisions.”
