KANSAS CITY, Mo. (ABP) — A former high-ranking International Mission Board leader who resigned over policy concerns has accepted an associational director’s position in Missouri.
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The executive board of the Blue River-Kansas City Baptist Association called Rodney Hammer as the organization’s fifth executive director Aug. 19.
In May, Hammer resigned after eight years as IMB’s regional leader for Central and Eastern Europe. He cited disagreement with controversial guidelines the board enacted in 2005 regarding new missionary candidates.
The guidelines prohibit appointment of those who acknowledge engaging in a “private prayer language” — a version of speaking in tongues — and require candidates to have been baptized in a church with an understanding of baptism identical to that in most Southern Baptist churches. The IMB will not recognize believer’s baptism by immersion if done in a denomination with a differently nuanced baptismal doctrine.
In a letter to missionaries in his region at the time, Hammer said he disagreed with the “unnecessary, extra-biblical narrowing of parameters for Southern Baptist cooperation in the Great Commission [the guidelines] represent.”
His resignation triggered a group of current and former missionaries, former board trustees and pastors to issue a statement calling for the IMB to reverse its stand.
Hammer was appointed in 1990 as strategy coordinator for China with Cooperative Services International, the IMB’s former relief and development arm. He was named as regional leader in 1999.
He and his family are in the process of relocating from Prague, Czech Republic, and have not set a specific date to begin his service in Kansas City.
Hammer earned an undergraduate degree from Baylor University in Waco, Texas, and a graduate degree from Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City. While in Kansas City, he served on staff at Maywood Baptist Church and was a church planter for the neighboring Clay-Platte Baptist Association, which includes churches in the parts of the Kansas City metropolitan area that lie north of the Missouri River.
Blue River-Kansas City Baptist Association includes about 130 churches.
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