ATLANTA - Two large, anonymous gifts to the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (CBF) allowed the organization to fund several missionaries over the past two years who otherwise may not have reached the mission field.

The fellowship's global missions program received $8.2 million of the $9 million gifts, to be spent over several years, according to Associated Baptist Press. The remainder went to church starts and the CBF Church Benefits Board.

Without the gifts, CBF would have placed a moratorium on commissioning and deploying new mission personnel. Some veteran personnel faced early retirement. Layoffs loomed for others.

"These gifts have been very important in strengthening the ministry of CBF," said Daniel Vestal, the fellowship's national coordinator. "They have made it possible for us to send missionaries that would not have been sent otherwise. They have provided the financial resources for mission projects, church planting and mission support."

CBF spends about $11 million a year on global missions in the Unites States and abroad. The unbudgeted gifts were used to send 16 new mission personnel to Toronto, North Africa, China, Los Angeles, Athens, Southeast Asia and Detroit. It also provided supplementary college funds for children of field personnel and provided stipends for student missions.

The money also funded such field projects as agricultural development, literature, assistance to orphans and street children, hunger and refugee relief, medical needs, water development, and Bible distribution, the news service reported.

"Gifts such as these enhance CBF's work by relieving the pressures of the relatively lean economic years, providing resources to boost a particular ministry, like the 600-percent increase in student missionaries, and giving the organization time to rebound from dips in normal revenues," said Gary Baldridge, CBF global missions coordinator.

"The next challenge will be to maintain and to increase these ministries beyond the life of the gifts," Baldridge said. "At some point within the next two or three years, normal giving to CBF will need to have increased substantially for these works to continue."