CENTRALIA, Mo. (ABP) — Combining three Southern Baptist agencies into the North American Mission Board in 1995 was a bad idea, says the last president of one of the agencies.
Larry Lewis, president of the Home Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention from 1987 until his retirement at age 62 in 1996, said in an interview with a Baptist state newspaper that he had reservations from the beginning about a major restructuring of the denomination, but he didn’t oppose it at the time because he didn’t want to appear self-serving or not to be a “team player.”
Lewis, 74, told North Carolina’s Biblical Recorder Aug. 13 that “time has proven me right.”
Much of NAMB’s brief history has been marked by turmoil. Its first president, former Virginia pastor Bob Reccord, resigned in 2006 amid allegations of mismanagement and lavish spending.
Reccord’s successor, Geoff Hammond, and three close associates resigned Aug. 11 after Hammond clashed with leaders of NAMB’s board of trustees and accusations of low morale among some of the 279 employees who work at the agency’s headquarters in Alpharetta, Ga.
Lewis said the decision to pull the former SBC Radio and Television Commission in Fort Worth, Texas, and the SBC Brotherhood Commission in Memphis, Tenn., under the same umbrella with home missions “eliminated or marginalized some of our most productive entities.”
“It was a step backwards,” Lewis said.
Lewis said he has been told that the real reason behind the reorganization was that leaders of the “conservative resurgence” were displeased with him because he wasn’t aggressive enough about weeding out what they viewed as vestiges of liberalism at the HMB, but they didn’t want to fire him because they had supported his election and he affirmed biblical inerrancy. The solution, the story goes, was to reorganize the agency in a way that didn’t leave a place for Lewis.
“I would hate to think that is true,” Lewis said, “but it may well be.”
Lewis said some people who supported his election as HMB president expected a “wholesale purging” of staff after he took office, but his philosophy was to keep a worker unless the person was “obviously liberal.”
“Frankly, we never dismissed anyone because of their theological position,” he said, although some who disagreed with his theology left on their own.
Lewis, a former church planter and college president, said he tried to be a reconciler and believed that much of the splintering in the SBC could have been avoided if conservatives offered political moderates who were theologically conservative a place at the table.
He said he is proud, for example, that he secured for his board the nomination of Richard Jackson, a self-described inerrantist from Phoenix who lost credibility among the resurgence leaders when he allowed moderates to run him — unsuccessfully — as their candidate for SBC president against Jerry Vines in 1988.
“My love and respect for a brother in Christ is not predicated on his agreeing with me,” Lewis said.
“We made every effort possible to depoliticize the process in appointing missionaries and hiring staff,” he said.
Two long-time former HMB employees told the Biblical Recorder that leadership problems at the agency predate the formation of NAMB by decades. They and other observers said the agency actually has not enjoyed a steady hand at the leadership helm since Arthur Rutledge, who led the HMB from 1965 until his retirement a few months before his death in 1976.
Don Hammonds, who retired in 1997 as interim vice president and worked during the full terms of both Lewis and his predecessor, Bill Tanner, said there is “no doubt” that Rutledge was “hands down the strongest executive” ever at the HMB.
Unlike some of his successors, who had a reputation of wanting to do things their own way, Hammonds said Rutledge “got people who knew something about what they were asked to do and he let them do it.”
“He trusted his staff,” Hammonds said.
Walker Knight, who retired as director of the department of editorial services in 1983, said Rutledge was “soft-spoken but had a backbone of steel.”
“All the staff admired him,” Knight said.
Concerns about the efficiency of Southern Baptists’ home-missions enterprise came under scrutiny several times during the 20th century. The most recent was 1959, when a study committee recommended the HMB should continue as a separate agency of the SBC but restructured its work around cooperative agreements with Baptist state conventions.
The work of NAMB is likely to be placed under the microscope once more in discussions of a Great Commission Task Force appointed by SBC president Johnny Hunt in June.
The current chairman of NAMB’s board of trustees, Florida pastor Tim Patterson, has already suggested it might be more efficient to merge NAMB and the International Mission Board into a single missionary-sending entity.
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Norman Jameson is editor of the Biblical Recorder. This story is adapted from two separate articles that appear on the Biblical Recorder website.
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