RICHMOND (ABP) — Although the Southern Baptist Convention is the only group with power to unseat a trustee of one of its agencies, the International Mission Board's attorney said Nov. 8 the board has the legal power to effectively bar the participation of trustee Wade Burleson.
Derek Gaubatz, the IMB's general counsel, said: “Any board has the ability … to regulate how it will conduct itself. And anybody, including the International Mission Board … has the power to take measures that it thinks will help it function most effectively as a deliberative body.”
The censure effectively prevents Burleson from participation on the board, including serving on committees or speaking or voting in meetings.
Burleson has said his participation in trustee meetings is governed by the SBC members who elected him, not his fellow trustees. He has vowed to continue to attend IMB meetings and will attempt to vote and carry out his other duties, short of being disruptive.
But Gaubatz said Burleson's colleagues were within their rights to do anything they could short of actually removing him from office. “Any board, whether it is the board of IMB or the board of IBM, has the power to take measures that it thinks will help it function most effectively as a deliberative body,” he said. “The only limit that exists on that power is if there's something in the bylaws that says, you know, you can't do such-and-such.”
He said a much more extreme example of such a situation would be suspending a trustee who “came into a meeting and used a bullhorn the whole time and was disrupting the meeting.” The board would have the right to eject that person from the meeting even though the SBC had not unseated him, Gaubatz said.
But Burleson, contacted Nov. 8, called that analogy “irrational and illogical,” because he is not disrupting the board's business.
“In the past year and a half, I have spoken politely in public board meetings — and very courteously — only twice,” he said. “And it was about raising the pay we give our missionaries when they retire.”
Gaubatz also noted that although Burleson said he disagrees with the code of conduct under which he was censured, he has not made any official attempt to rescind it. “Mr. Burleson like any other trustee, has been free since that code was passed to express his dissent about that by, in a proper forum, bringing a motion to the board to rescind it or rescind portions of it he disagrees with,” he said. “To my knowledge, he has not done that.”
Burleson countered that he knows any such motion would garner no opposition other than his vote and perhaps a handful of others on the board.
Burleson said the new trustee-conduct policy essentially took his critiques of the missionary requirements “out of the hands of the Southern Baptist Convention to deal with, and they brought them in internally, and said, ‘We're going to deal with it by passing new [trustee-conduct] policies.'”
“In the beginning, I tried to abide by those policies,” he continued. “But what I found is those policies about prohibiting dissent are the worst policies that have been published in the history of any Southern Baptist Convention agency.”