DALLAS (ABP) — Otto Arango exported to Latin America the church-planting strategies he developed in South Texas. But some observers familiar with his work in Mexico say Arango — the central figure in an investigation that revealed misuse and mismanagement of Texas Baptist church-starting funds in the Rio Grande Valley — also made many exaggerated claims south of the border.
Dexton Shores, director of border/Mexico missions for the Baptist General Convention of Texas, conducted a survey last December of church starts in North Tamaulipas in northeast Mexico. His survey of 43 pastors, reported to have started 75 percent of all new works in the area, found only 12 percent of the church-starts could be verified.
Shores also pointed to inflated figures regarding the number of active students and graduates in church-planting programs reported by the Piper Institute for Church Planting, a 2-year-old nonprofit corporation founded by Arango.
“Of the 43 pastors surveyed, eight said they had used [Arango's church-planting] materials for a short time …. Twenty-two of the 43 pastors surveyed said they had never [them],” Shores said. The survey found only 17 percent of the number of graduates initially reported by the Piper Institute.
The new findings come on the heels of a five-month BGCT investigation that uncovered evidence that 98 percent of the 258 BGCT church starts in the Rio Grande Valley reported by Arango and two of his colleagues no longer exist, and some never existed. The BGCT gave more than $1.3 million support to those 258 church starts in the Valley.
The Piper Institute for Church Planting evolved two years ago from the Institute for Church Planting that Arango founded in McAllen, Texas, years before. The Piper name was added after one of two foundations started by Baptist philanthropists Paul and Katy Piper provided major funding to Arango's institute to start churches in Mexico.
However, the Piper family exerts no operational control over the ministries it funds, including the church-starting institute, which received $150,000 in fiscal 2006 from Piper's Christ Is Our Salvation foundation. Baptist leaders expressed concern this scandal might reflect poorly on the Pipers' five-decade commitment to start churches.
Arango did not reply to e-mails and phone calls asking for answers to specific questions. Over two weeks, he was given the opportunity to respond to more than 20 issues, but he offered no reply other than two brief e-mails.
In the first, he asserted the BGCT investigators' report contained 13 to 15 mistakes or contradictions, but he did not specify their nature. In the second, he referred all questions to E.B. Brooks, executive director of the Piper Institute.
Brooks called Shores' survey “incomplete, inaccurate and un-audited.”
“We have individual statements detailing name of the church, address, pastor's name and his or her address, the telephone number and an attendance figure for each of the churches started,” Brooks said, noting the information was provided both to the institute's board in September and to BGCT staff leaders.
“Current data from northeastern Mexico, through our indigenous coordinators, indicate that there are 992 students enrolled in training, some of whom have started 198 churches,” Brooks said. “According to the coordinators, there are an additional 24 cell groups, which, in their terminology, are intended to grow to become churches.”
A study by two Piper Institute staff members and a board member verified the existence of at least 47 new churches in the specific region Shores surveyed, Brooks noted.
But Shores said he spoke with three leaders of the North Tamaulipas Regional Convention, who said there was no report at their annual meeting last month of any new churches from training institutes that use Arango's curriculum.
A statement posted on the Piper Institute website reads: “We are very concerned by the allegations of misconduct in the church-starting work of the Baptist General Convention of Texas…. We take these allegations very seriously and we will respond in an adequate manner.”
The Piper Institute's board of directors is scheduled to discuss the allegations Nov. 14 in Dallas.
The Piper Institute's website features a list of partners, including the BGCT, the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, Baylor University's Truett Theological Seminary, Baptist University of the Americas and the National Baptist Convention of Mexico.
Spokesmen for some of those entities affirmed their past relationship with the Piper Institute, but others sought to distance themselves from Arango and the institute he founded.
“No more BGCT funds will be channeled through the Piper Institute this year, and no funds have been budgeted for Piper Institute projects in 2007,” said BGCT Executive Director Charles Wade.
CBF had a formal partnership with the Piper Institute, Arango and the Union of Baptists in Latin America — of which Arango is president — from Feb. 14, 2005, to June 30, 2006, said Lance Wallace, the Fellowship's associate coordinator of communications.
Neither Baptist University of the Americas nor Truett Seminary ever had any official partnership with the Piper Institute, leaders of those schools insisted.
Truett Seminary Dean Paul Powell said he agreed to serve on the Piper Institute board because of his friendship with the Piper family and his gratitude to them as financial supporters of the seminary. However, Truett Seminary “is not a partner in any official sense” with the institute, he added.
Arango pressed leaders at the school for their endorsement, Powell said. At one point, he recalled, Arango even asked Truett Seminary administrators to provide him business cards printed with his name and the school's logo — a request they denied.
“Otto was always wanting a partnership with us, but he could never tell me what that involved,” Powell said. “I told him clearly that we could not give free education to people, and we could not send faculty to Mexico or Central America. I now think he wanted the partnership to lend respectability to his cause.”
At the three board meetings he attended, Powell said he asked for an accounting of the work Arango reported. “The exact words that I used in every meeting were: ‘This reminds me of the proverbial river that was a mile wide and an inch deep,'” he recalled. “I had asked for an accounting so often without getting it that it was getting embarrassing, and I was ready to resign…. We trusted the reports because we could not make site visits to so many places to check for ourselves.”
Perceptions about how the Piper Institute relates to another listed partner, the National Baptist Convention of Mexico, vary. Brooks maintained that the Piper Institute works through indigenous coordinators who, in turn, work with churches.
However, BGCT's Shores painted a different picture. On April 6, Mexican Baptist national leaders met with staff leaders of the Piper Institute to present a 10-point statement of their position on church-starting and a seven-point list of conditions for their continued work with the institute. The Mexican leaders said their goal was to plant churches — not small cell groups dependent on a sponsor.
The leaders outlined expectations about the need for people representing the Piper Institute to work with the national convention, but accounts of that meeting differ.
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— With additional reporting by Marv Knox. Associated Baptist Press receives funding from Christian Missions Concern, one of two foundations started by Paul and Katy Piper.