BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (ABP) — Cindy Dawson, a former missionary with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, has been elected coordinator of Global Women. She takes over an organization that is struggling to overcome a generational divide.
Global Women, based in Birmingham, Ala., was founded in 2001 as a way for Christian women to network and mentor younger women through “shared learning and service.” The group encourages and facilitates service in mission and ministry among Christian women worldwide.
But the fledgling organization has endured tension between its veteran leaders and the younger women it wants to nurture.
Several young staff members and directors — including the organization's first two coordinators — have resigned. Younger leaders accuse Global Women of stymieing creativity to adhere to an old paradigm, while older leaders say the group needs more experienced leadership to propel it to success.
In an Aug. 10 open letter to the board of directors, former director Susan Jones wrote that when she accepted that position, she thought Global Women valued and listened to young women. During her board membership, however, she said she came to believe that was not the case.
“My unspoken role at board meetings was to make sure that the needs of older board members were met,” Jones wrote. “Airport pick-ups, grocery store runs, and luggage transportation were part of the expectations that I, along with other young board members, came to realize were seen as part of our board service. I often felt that the ideas that I shared during board sessions were dismissed because of my age.”
Dorothy Sample, president of Global Women's board of directors, downplayed those disagreements and said new coordinator Cindy Dawson, 46, would add a “wealth of experience” to the group.
“Cindy has a very warm spirit,” said Sample, who, like many in the group, was formerly a national leader of Woman's Missionary Union, a Southern Baptist auxiliary. “She has good experience. After our interview with her, we just felt that she really matched the vision that we have for Global Women.”
Founded in 2001, Global Women partners in projects aimed at educating and supporting women internationally, especially in Russian-speaking countries and in Southeast Asia.
As missionaries, Dawson and her husband, Frank, served with a Romany ministry team for eight years in Moscow. There she managed the office, planned events from London to Siberia, organized an international missionary choir, and directed music for Hinkson Christian Academy, a school for children of missionaries.
While she's counting on that experience to help her perform well with Global Women, Dawson said, it's overwhelming to have such an opportunity to make a big impact for women.
“It's an exciting place to be for me right now,” Dawson told Associated Baptist Press. “We've been back in the states for a couple of years just doing normal jobs. So now it's very exciting for me to be able to focus on the needs of women.”
Dawson's years of field experience is something past employees, many of them recent college or seminary graduates, did not have. The lack of that experience created tension within the organization, some veteran leaders said.
But others, like former coordinator Suzanah Raffield, say age has nothing to do with the tension. Instead, she and former co-worker Meg Olive said, differences between two visions for the organization caused the rift.
“A difference in missiology, along with views on organizational structure,” were the main problems, said Raffield. “I believe it is hard for some of the board members to leave the old, familiar paradigm,” she said.
Raffield, a founding board member, said she believed Global Women was formed as an “interdenominational organization built on a new paradigm.” Instead, she said, she found hindrances to that goal.
“There is a fine line between mentoring and manipulation,” Raffield told ABP. “We must be careful to encourage and not engulf those with whom we work.”
Leann Gunter, now associate pastor at Peachtree Baptist Church in Atlanta, April Hurst, and Olive also left the group soon after they joined. Raffield resigned from her post in June 2005. Olive was hired as Global Women's student coordinator at the end of September 2005 and resigned nine months later.
Current Global Women representatives said some of the young women were hired on a one-year contract basis, not for a prolonged tenure.
The leaders declined to comment on the record about the strained relationships.
Olive, who became a board member at Global Women when she was 19, said decisions at the group were made by “a handful of women who are strongly committed to the organizational structure and missiological principles that have worked in the past.” And that's the problem, she said.
“A great deal of the tension and turnover within Global Women is worsened by the manipulating control exercised by some members of the board of directors and leadership team,” Olive said. She added that Global Women is needed in the world today, but many of the things it does are “outdated, and creativity is stamped out by those caught in the old paradigm.”
“I believe there have been divergent views about the organization's vision and purpose,” she told ABP. “The majority of the board's leadership is committed to an old paradigm of mission and ministry that I … believe to be ineffective in today's world. At its heart, I believe Global Women should be ministry-oriented. If individual women's lives are not being bettered by the things Global Women is doing, then the organization is not being effective.”
In her letter, Jones echoed that sentiment, saying she had hoped the group would welcome the voices and opinions of all women, whether young or old, rich or poor. Instead, she said, it was a group that believed it could “decide what policies best served the women of the world through statistics and previous experience alone, without ever listening to the voices of the women themselves.”
“Global Women, to me, was based on ministry with the women of the world, not only ministry to them,” Jones said. “As I became more and more familiar with the governance and methods of the organization, I came to feel that this was, in fact, neither what Global Women was nor what some of its leaders dreamed for it to be.”
For her part, Dawson said she didn't know details about the past hiring process or conflict among Global Women workers, since she had been working overseas. The important thing, she said, is that the women at Global Women can work together to do something good for women around the world.
“The message of God's love and grace expressed through Christ is a message the women of the world need to hear and experience,” Dawson said. “Global Women is involved in making this happen, so I am excited about this opportunity.”
The Dawsons and their two daughters live in Pelham, Ala., where she is minister of music at Crosscreek Baptist Church.
-30-