By Bob Allen
The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship Coordinating Council authorized staff leadership Feb. 22 to renegotiate terms of the CBF Resource Center’s current lease with Mercer University as part of the implementation of a new structure approved last summer following a two-year revisioning by a blue-ribbon task force.
Pat Anderson, interim executive coordinator of the Atlanta-based CBF charged with reconfiguring office space around recommendations of the 2012 Task Force, said Feb. 26 that the current staff is smaller than five years ago when it moved into 19,000 square feet on the first floor of a building on Mercer’s Atlanta campus, formerly housing offices of the Georgia Baptist Convention.
As part of that process, Anderson said CBF officers authorized him to explore other options, including relocation to new space in the Atlanta area that would provide greater visibility to the 22-year-old organization that also just hired a new CEO.
That will require renegotiating a 10-year lease the Fellowship signed with Mercer in 2007 to occupy part of the Administrative and Conference Center located on the Macon-based university’s Cecil B. Day campus in Atlanta.
Mercer purchased the five-story building for $12 million in 2003 from the Georgia Baptist Convention, which moved its Baptist Center into a new building in Gwinnett County and had recently severed ties with Mercer over theological issues dividing moderates and conservatives in the Southern Baptist Convention.
“This relocation moves us toward a space that addresses and fits the movement that we’re headed in through our re-organization,” said Keith Herron, CBF moderator and pastor of Holmeswood Baptist Church in Kansas City, Mo. “As an organization, we are headed in a new direction and sometimes new spaces are needed for future needs.”
Moderator-elect Bill McConnell, a layman from Knoxville, Tenn., said the intent is to keep building expenses in the ballpark of the $300,000 a year it costs to rent the current office space.
Suzii Paynter, elected the day before as the CBF’s third executive coordinator, had to leave before the end of the meeting to catch a flight, but she is aware and supportive of the possible move, past moderator Colleen Burroughs told council members.
In its early years, CBF rented commercial office space at a couple of different locations in the Atlanta area.
In 1995, the CBF Coordinating Council voted to rent half of a 32,000-square-foot building that would house Mercer’s new McAfee School of Theology and was completed in January 1997. The five-year pre-paid lease was accompanied by purchase of about four acres of property for $1.25 million to be used either for construction of a permanent CBF headquarters or sold for future profit.
Together the lease and purchase provided $2 million for the launch of Mercer’s new theology school. The original agreement was with the understanding that eventually the entire space would be used by the theology school.
Anderson said the land was later resold to Mercer and, due to a stronger real-estate market, the Fellowship turned a profit. He said no other CBF partner has been more supportive than Mercer, but the time has come to re-evaluate the landlord-tenant arrangement that is one part of that relationship.
Larry Brumley, Mercer’s senior vice president for marking communications and chief of staff, said university officials “are always open to exploring alternatives with our good friends at CBF.”
Offices of the CBF Foundation and Church Benefits Board would join the CBF staff in a new Atlanta location.
Mercer’s 300-acre Cecil B. Day Campus in Atlanta houses six of the university’s 11 schools and colleges: the College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, Stetson School of Business, Tift College of Education, McAfee School of Theology, Georgia Baptist College of Nursing and the College of Continuing and Professional Studies. Nearly 3,000 of Mercer’s 8,300-student enrollment attend classes on the campus, where the primary academic focus is graduate and professional studies.