Every problem facing the Southern Baptist Convention, every new crisis and scandal and reported financial irregularity, can be reduced to a single and seemingly insoluble root cause: a bloated trustee system that is outdated, inefficient, unmanageable and hopelessly beset by perverse incentives.
This is the topic of the second episode of “Stuck in the Middle with You,” the podcast I am hosting with BNG Executive Director Mark Wingfield.
To borrow a phrase from Ronald Reagan: Governance is not the solution to the problem; it is the problem. As is often the case with local, state and federal government agencies, a toxic combination of lax oversight, complicated and archaic financial controls, entrenched self-interests and a labyrinthine statutory framework serve to protect a permanent class of powerful oligarchs, a few kleptocrats and too many unaccountable executives.
Benjamin Cole
Added to the problem is the reality that the Cooperative Program, once hailed as a miracle funding mechanism to secure a stable, albeit diminishing revenue stream for convention-owned ministries, is providing less and less of the underwriting for convention entities.
And what have Southern Baptists done to bring their 20th-century funding model and governance structures in line with the challenges and advances of the 21st century?
In a word: nothing.
Well, that’s not entirely true. There was the Mohler-Floyd led efforts to reorganize the convention ministry program and structure in the mid-1990s. You know, the one that created a behemoth of the North American Mission Board and birthed both the Great Commission Council (which has no real purpose except to give entity heads another line item in their travel budgets) and the Council of Seminary Presidents (which has no real responsibility apart from oversight of the denominational archives in Nashville).
And then there was the Mohler-Floyd led effort to “ask the hard questions” and find a more “faithful and effective” framework of ministry cooperation. The so-called “Great Commission Resurgence,” which Mohler promised was “not an effort to reinvent the Southern Baptist Convention,” resulted in a giant nothing burger, according to a recent report adopted by the convention’s messengers.
Despite the time and energy required to perform these hamster wheel efforts, neither of them attacked the real problem driving a deeper wedge in the convention’s subterranean fault lines: a broken trustee system.
“Southern Baptists have been fixing sheetrock and shingles when the widening cracks in the system’s entire foundation keep claiming more acreage.”
For the past three decades, Southern Baptists have been fixing sheetrock and shingles when the widening cracks in the system’s entire foundation keep claiming more acreage. And of course, we’ve been busy endlessly fighting off efforts to tinker with our confessional statement while giving more and more oxygen in annual meetings to accommodate the parliamentary maneuvers of a narrow group of doctrinal enforcers, many of whom receive their paychecks from the churches they are hauling before the credentialing tribunal.
Which is basically all the conservative resurgence has accomplished after 45 years: fewer harvest laborers, reduced crop yields, but some higher fences and deeper moats. I seem to remember someone warning that post-1979 convention leaders would, if not careful, “destroy the castle” to “build a wall of orthodoxy.”
Maybe it’s time, at long last, to make good on Mohler’s promise 15 years ago to “ask the truly hard questions.” And since we can’t find out what “hard questions” got asked during the yearlong Mohler-Floyd reform efforts of 2009-10 (the tapes are still under lock and key), we propose a few questions of our own.
First, why do Southern Baptists need roughly 600 trustees to oversee a dozen ministry organizations? Each of these trustees is obliged to attend at least one (in the case of the ERLC) and as many as four and sometimes six meetings a year. Trustee officers must attend an additional four to six meetings a year on top of that.
The expense associated with getting these trustees to meetings, covering their hotel and meal expenses, is tremendous, and the disproportionate expense borne by smaller entities (Gateway, Southwestern, ERLC) to accommodate this governance model consumes too much of the entity’s resources that should be utilized for ministry purposes.
“Why has no entity proposed a reduction in their own trustee board?”
Why has no entity proposed a reduction in their own trustee board or considered merging trustee boards as might be prudent for theological education?
Answer: Southern Baptist entity executives are perhaps hesitant to reduce the size of their own boards because such a reduction would be a tacit admission of inefficiency. Moreover, Southern Baptists themselves don’t like to admit things aren’t working.
We are, by nature, personifications of Einstein’s theory of insanity: We keep doing the same thing over and over but keep expecting different results. It’s time to right-size the SBC’s trustee system, and the coming 100 year anniversary of the Cooperative Program seems like a felicitous moment for needed change.
Second, what effective purpose do the Great Commission Council and the Council of Seminary Presidents serve? That is, beyond giving six seminary presidents additional power centers to leverage their collective influence to either advance empty reforms (as in the case of the Great Commission Resurgence of 2009-10) or to block needed reforms (as in the successful effort of 2021 to defeat increased accountability measures in the SBC Business and Financial Plan).
These meetings are needlessly time consuming and costly (you should see the reimbursements paid out of seminary budgets to cover associated travel and meal expenses), or better yet, you should ask to see the minutes from their meetings (which are not reported to anyone in the SBC, including their own trustees).
It is time to abolish these redundancies and eliminate the power centers that work too often against convention interests.
Third, why have entity charters allowed for self-perpetuating loopholes in the trustee selection process? Why, for instance, does the convention countenance mechanisms for manipulated governance by entity executives vis-a-vis the ability to propose interim replacements to fill trustee vacancies?
Fourth, why has the convention not enacted an outright ban on individual trustees serving successively on numerous convention boards? Why, for instance, have a handful of Texas pastors been recycled across the IMB, Executive Committee, Lifeway and various seminary boards?
Why has one Southern Seminary trustee, who was elected to serve from one state, then recycled to serve from another state when he moved churches for a combined three terms?
How did one entity president’s son-in-law, serving successive churches in Kentucky, Arkansas, Florida and Texas, manage to get repeatedly appointed from each state to convention committees and boards?
I could raise countless other questions and give numerous other examples of trustee recycling, but I’m trying diligently to point out the flaw in the system without impugning the character of those who keep getting recycled.
Fifth, why has the convention not enacted an outright ban on denominational employees serving as entity trustees? Why, for instance, has Lifeway been sent trustees who were seminary professors? Why have seminaries been sent trustees who are employees of the mission boards? Why have the mission boards been sent trustees who are employees of the seminaries?
“We’ve also been repeatedly filling trustee vacancies with paid denominational employees.”
It’s not just that we have been recycling trustees from a handful of churches. We’ve also been repeatedly filling trustee vacancies with paid denominational employees. The potential and unavoidable conflicts are numerous, and the perverse incentives against serious oversight and accountability are obvious.
What church would put the financial secretary on the finance committee? It’s unseemly, imprudent and corrosive.
Sixth, how many immediate family members of entity executives and the children of denominational employees should be allowed to serve as convention trustees? Particularly, I don’t think entity executives’ children, parents or in-laws should be prohibited outright from trustee service, but there needs to be a comprehensive look at how best to ensure any trustee role they are offered will be kept beyond arms-length from the entity served by their employed family members.
And if they are asked to serve, the entity must have clear policies that mandate public recusal when needed.
Seventh, why have SBC entities resisted every effort to make trustee attendance and voting records public? Why are trustee minutes not published online for all Southern Baptists to read? Why has the convention placed a higher premium on opacity and nondisclosure rather than transparency and public accountability?
These are just a few questions of the many I have formed over the years of closely watching convention governance practices. They are also questions I have heard with repeated and increased frequency among average Southern Baptist pastors and laymen who are tired of business as usual.
More than anything, Southern Baptists are tired of reading about the failures of our trustee system to preserve the fiscal responsibility, financial health and effective management of convention interests.
It’s time to fix what’s broken in our system and wean Southern Baptists from the cycles of unforced errors, basic incompetence and naive governance that threaten mission viability and undermine the confidence Southern Baptist churches have in the entities they own.
My fear, however, is that nothing will happen again.
Probably because the same people who’ve done nothing constructive to address the problem for 30 years — denominational oligarchs and paid convention leaders who benefit from a system with negligible oversight — and a steady stream of well-meaning but ineffective trustees will leverage the power centers they’ve cultivated to prevent the people who pay the bills from meddling too much in their CP-funded playgrounds.
Benjamin S. Cole is a crisis communications consultant who lives in Plano, Texas, and tweets about SBC life under the pen name The Baptist Blogger. He is cohost with Mark Wingfield of the “Stuck in the Middle with You” podcast.
Related article:
The SBC’s trustee system is broken