COLUMBIA, Mo. (ABP) — A two-year-old alternative Baptist state convention in Missouri has named a former executive director of the rival Missouri Baptist Convention as its interim executive director.
Jim Hill, who resigned as the old Missouri convention's executive director in 2001, will serve as the interim administrator of the Baptist General Convention of Missouri. He replaces retired Baptist college administrator H.K. Neely, who had been serving on a volunteer, part-time basis as the organization's executive since it was founded.
Neely said the organization — formed in 2002, after a long struggle by fundamentalists to take over the governing structures of the Missouri Baptist Convention came to fruition — had grown too large for a part-time executive to run it any longer.
The announcement was made at the group's annual convention April 30.
Hill served as the MBC's executive director from 1998 until 2001. He resigned in response to the takeover of the convention's governing board. A native Missourian, Hill served as pastor of several churches in the state and is a graduate of MBC-affiliated Southwest Baptist University as well as Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City.
Since resigning from his convention post, Hill has been president of RDI Consulting, a firm that consults on fund-raising and church development, in Jefferson City, Mo.
According to Word & Way, a newspaper historically affiliated with the Missouri Baptist Convention, Hill said he recognized a problem in the MBC 10 years ago. “The peak year was 1964,” he said. “It's been in decline ever since…. What I was hoping to do [as MBC executive director] was to throw out the bureaucracy and streamline [operations],” he said. “We [BGCM] are free…to organize…without an existing bureaucracy.”
Hill added that the Baptist General Convention of Missouri has a bright future because control will not be an issue. “We have voluntary cooperation without the need to control…. Control never works,” he said.
In addition to hearing of Hill's appointment, messengers to the convention's annual meeting at Windermere Baptist Conference Center on Missouri's Lake of the Ozarks re-elected Bill Miller as the group's president and Sondra Allen as secretary. Miller is pastor of First Baptist Church of Farmington, Mo., and Allen is a member of First Baptist Church, Jefferson City, Mo.
In addition, they elected Owen Taylor to his first term as vice president. Taylor is pastor of Manchester Baptist Church in suburban St. Louis.
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