Dear Editor:
The Willie McLaurin story came at a very bad time for the SBC, even though it would be hard to find a recent time without turmoil.
After spending much of my career as an expert in fraud and the damages that its varied schemes can cause, I became a victim myself. I think I’m qualified to write about it, including what happens, or should happen, after the fraud is discovered.
Although my work focused on determining the financial costs fraudsters left behind, the emotional pain of discovering the betrayal of trust, always fraud’s genesis, was often just as significant. Inevitably, as in the McLaurin case, victims blame themselves for failing to recognize the moral, if not legal, deficiencies of the persons truly at fault. In that way, it is a lot like other breaches of trust, including sexual abuse, marital infidelity and other workplace misconduct.
In the case of nonprofits like the government and the SBC, taxpayers, donors, co-workers, board members and other stakeholders properly “feel” victimized, yet their financial harm is indirect at best. Indeed, it is the mission of the organization itself that was harmed, both by the actions of the fraudster, and the all-too-common lack of diligence of its nonprofit management team.
Why do matters like these go on so long? Whistleblowers’ comments are rarely welcomed by a nonprofit board, but more often are attacked as a means to maintain peace. Such intransigent attitudes can provide a real boost to those with improper motives.
From my own viewpoint, management can easily transform its unyielding “inerrant” beliefs into a closed, elite and sometimes arrogant management style. To the contrary, “for-profit” victims usually take a more aggressive stance when their personal wealth is affected.
Purely by way of example, if McLaurin had not been hired at all, been paid according to his actual qualifications or been discovered as a fraudster sooner, more funds would have been available for the organizational mission and other coworkers might have been paid better. The only protection for donors and other “stakeholders,” both before and after the discovery, rests with the same governance that allowed it to happen in the first place; and it’s no secret that widespread governance failures have been plentiful throughout Baptist entities.
Now there is one more reason to question the old elite and all-too-often arrogant governance approaches that brought us here.
It is no surprise to me that McLaurin’s successor is a marketing and media professional. Get ready for the usual post-crisis messages, which seeds have already been laid by calls for prayers for the McLaurin family and calls for immediate consequence-less forgiveness, tending again to pre-assign fault to those who might not be so motivated.
The board has every right to decide it received an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay; and the multiple accolades support such a notion that the false degrees may not have actually mattered. That said, they did matter as a threshold, or they would not have been used as “fraudulent inducement”to get the job to begin with.
Lest we forget, the SBC pawned off ministers known to be damaged goods for a long time. This time it is all public, and it will not be so easy. The board apparently has decided to “forget it and move on” — authority they clearly possess — yet no Baptist minister has the authority to deliver priestly absolution for the “church” at large.
This might be a good time to question immediate forgiveness delivered by those who were not even affected and begin to focus on the new paradigm of forgiveness that incorporates a semblance of accountability, and one that does not demand a “one size fits all” immediate time frame, expressed so well in Matthew I. Potts’ Forgiveness — An alternative account.
James L. Hart, Vestavia Hills, Ala.