We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again now: The Southern Baptist Convention’s system of electing trustees to oversee its agencies and institutions is broken and in need of dramatic reform.
The latest evidence comes from the bizarre turn of events that happened in a 12-hour period this week when the board chair of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission unilaterally fired President Brent Leatherwood only to have the rest of the board overrule him and reinstate Leatherwood.
How could such an embarrassment happen? Because the trustee system is broken.
Mark Wingfield
Let’s start with the ERLC debacle and move to a wider perspective from there. Kevin Smith never should have been elected a trustee of the ERLC in the first place, and he sure as heck shouldn’t have been named board chairman. A simple bit of vetting would have made this obvious.
For one thing, BNG has confirmed that while serving as executive director of the Baptist Convention of Maryland and Delaware, Smith allegedly hid under the desk of a female employee, resulting in complaints that now sit in a file in the human resources office there. A BNG representative attempted to verify the contents of the file — including why Smith took such an odd action — but was told this is a “personnel matter” and cannot be discussed.
We further attempted to ask his current employer, Family Church Village in West Palm Beach, Fla., if they were aware of this incident when they hired him, and they replied with “no comment.”
For many years, Smith also held himself out as having an earned doctorate, which he apparently does not have. After eventually being confronted about this, he stopped calling himself Dr. Smith. We can find no evidence of him having a doctorate. If we’re wrong about this, someone please show us the diploma and we’ll make a correction to this article.
All this would have been easily verifiable with a couple of phone calls — except the Good Ol’ Boy System intervened. Smith, it turns out, has been recommended for position after position by some of the top leaders in the SBC. People like Al Mohler, who should have known whether his friend and former employee actually earned a Ph.D. from his own institution or not.
The way the SBC works, it’s who you know that matters more than who you are. Smith has some powerful friends in the SBC — including Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and Kevin Ezell, president of the SBC North American Mission Board and former pastor at Highview Baptist Church in Louisville, where Smith previously was a teaching pastor.
You don’t get to places of leadership in the SBC without knowing the right people.
These connections allegedly led Smith to be a widely reported contender for two high-profile denominational jobs, the presidency of the ERLC and the presidency of the SBC Executive Committee.
Riddle me this: How is it that a bypassed candidate for the presidency of an agency is elected chairman of the board of that same agency, overseeing — and eventually wrongly firing — the person who beat him out for the job?
“You don’t get to places of leadership in the SBC without knowing the right people.”
That is uniquely possible in the SBC because trustee slots too often are doled out as prizes — and sometimes as consolation prizes.
When Smith came out from under that poor woman’s desk in Maryland, he was given a job at the Florida church led by a pastor who is good friends with the very people who had been recommending Smith for denominational posts. Because that’s the way the SBC works. And all roads lead back to Louisville.
In reality, there are two Good Ol’ Boy Systems operating in the SBC today. One is run by the institutional leaders and their friends, and the other is run by the far-right Calvinists who want to take over. Al Mohler works both sides of that street.
Tension between these two systems is behind the confusion at the ERLC because the Calvinist Good Ol’ Boy system thinks the institutional Good Ol’ Boy System has gotten too soft on attacking liberalism and “wokeism.”
For reasons that are not entirely clear, Smith apparently wanted to appeal to the most conservative element but got caught and called out by the more institutional element. Institutionalists believe in following bylaws and personnel policies. Smith disregarded all such pretenses.
However, the ERLC board itself is so dysfunctional that it has delegated most real power to the small executive committee, which does have the power to hire and fire the president. Why have a board at all if just four people are running the place?
“Why have a board at all if just four people are running the place?”
And how could Smith be so incredibly arrogant to assume he could unilaterally fire the president of the ERLC without even executive committee approval, while falsely claiming he was acting on behalf of the committee? That’s not just illegal, it’s nuts.
Further, how could the board president manipulate a staff member to produce a news release about the firing that was full of lies? And how could some angry trustees then declare the whole episode never happened? It did happen.
This is amateur hour.
The problems that created this very public embarrassment will not go away until the SBC finds a better way to recruit, elect and train trustees. That whole system got jacked in the 1980s as Paul Pressler and Paige Patterson campaigned to stack trustee boards with their loyalists who would clean out the institutionalists of that day. And the trustee system never has recovered.
Here are some of the problems and solutions:
- The Good Ol’ Boys have too much influence. Their influence needs to be limited.
- The current system of state by state representation is unwieldy, creating enormous boards that cannot function. A better way would be to work for regional representation so that all areas of the country are included.
- All trustee boards need to be significantly smaller — at last half their current sizes. This would save money, increase effectiveness and raise accountability.
- Terms of service are too long. Most SBC board positions have five-year terms that are renewable for another five years. And if you come in to fill an unexpired position of someone who left early, you can be on a board more than 10 years. This is way too long and creates dynasties.
- Legacy positions need to be eliminated. Particularly with seminaries, too often the children and family members of previous board members end up serving on the same boards.
- The Committee on Nominations needs more time and resources to do its work. This is a Herculean task. They need staff support and a better way of vetting nominees.
- Institutional boards should be given the authority to remove troublesome or inactive trustees. This recently was an issue at Southwestern Seminary, where trustees attempted to remove board members working against the seminary for personal gain and were reprimanded by the SBC Executive Committee. Waiting a full year and asking the SBC annual meeting to remove a bad trustee — even if they would — is cumbersome.
As crazy as this week’s events at the ERLC have been, they do shine a light on a bigger problem. Because of its vast size, the SBC has created a system of trustee governance that is unwieldy and does not ensure the best people are chosen for service.
All SBC trustee boards would function better if they were smaller, better vetted and rotated more frequently.
Mark Wingfield serves as executive director and publisher of Baptist News Global. He is the author of Honestly: Telling the Truth About the Bible and Ourselves and Why Churches Need to Talk About Sexuality. His brand-new book is Troubling the Truth and Other Tales from the News.
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