Trustees of the Southern Baptist Convention's North American Mission Board met in an eight-hour closed session March 23, emerging with recommendations that impose “executive-level controls” on NAMB President Bob Reccord and other administrators at the agency.
Reccord was not fired, and board leaders said he technically was not “disciplined.” But the board will enact guidelines to improve accountability on the CEO, apparently aimed at reining in some of his more controversial activities.
Meanwhile, the NAMB's chief operating officer, Chuck Allen, resigned, along with two mid-level executives he hired.
In the special called meeting at the board's suburban Atlanta headquarters March 23, trustees heard the findings of an ad hoc panel appointed in February. The committee was formed to respond to news reports, first published by Georgia Baptists' newspaper, the Christian Index, outlining allegations of poor management at the missionary-sending agency. Those news reports also detailed the NAMB's failure to meet expectations since it was formed in 1997 by the merger of the Home Mission Board and two other Southern Baptist agencies.
The nine-member study panel consisted mostly of NAMB trustee officers and chairpersons of the board's standing committees. Trustee chairman Barry Holcomb, pastor of Bethany Baptist Church in Andalusia, Ala., said he and fellow panel members had recommended appointment of a second ad hoc committee, charged with creating new policy and procedure guidelines.
The entire business portion of the meeting was conducted in executive session, with all guests and non-voting members of the board asked to leave. The board voted, without dissent, to enter the closed session since it would involve “issues regarding personnel,” Holcomb said.
In a nod to the meeting's import, SBC President Bobby Welch, pastor of First Baptist Church in Daytona, Fla., was present. Welch serves as a trustee of all SBC agencies and boards by virtue of his office.
According to the Christian Index, the number of career missionaries funded by NAMB has dropped 10 percent since 1997, when the NAMB was formed. The Index also cited a lack of a consistent evangelism strategy, a loss of momentum in church-planting efforts, and a drop in NAMB cash reserves from $55 million to $23 million.
The paper also raised questions about the NAMB's dealings with subcontractor Steve Sanford, a former church member of Reccord's when he was a Virginia pastor. Sanford was asked to perform an audit of NAMB's communications strategy in 2003, which NAMB officials say led the agency to outsource at least 28 positions in its communications and Internet areas. The NAMB later hired InovaOne, a company founded and owned by Sanford, to perform some of those services.
The study committee's report — a version of which was released to reporters March 24 — found no clearly unethical behavior by Reccord or the board. However, it repeatedly detailed past actions and practices that could leave the agency open to criticism or make it appear less than accountable to Southern Baptists.
For instance, a change in the way that the board counts missionaries — which inflated the count to match an SBC-adopted goal of 5,000 — ”has the potential to be confusing to Southern Baptists,” the report said. “While NAMB has clearly defined those categories through its publications and at the convention, perhaps a better job must be done to educate Southern Baptists about the valuable role of our MSC [volunteer, short-term] missionaries to Southern Baptist life.”
The report determined that the use of Sanford's companies for both the audit and the resultant outsourcing did not explicitly violate any NAMB ethics policies, but could raise questions nonetheless.
“While the trustees discovered no intentional attempt by Dr. Reccord to show favoritism to a ‘friend' by retaining and using Steve Sanford and InovaOne for NAMB's media strategies, they do believe that this decision left both [him] and the board open to the charge of a conflict of interest,” it said.
Among the other issues raised in the Index article were questions about Reccord's extensive travel and speaking schedule, which frequently includes trips and events not directly related to NAMB work.
The trustee report concludes with six recommendations:
• That a subcommittee be created to recommend rules “to be used as a guide for directing the travel, speaking, and on-campus office time required for the president of the agency.”
• That the panel create a similar set of guidelines for proper handling of competitive bidding for outsourcing contracts.
• That the committee develop “controls to be used as a guide to be followed when the president of the agency wants to develop new initiatives, including the appropriate oversight and approval by the board.”
• That the panel recommend criterion “for clarifying what constitutes poor management by an executive officer and how it should be handled.”
• That the committee establish procedures “that will provide the agency and its head with greater levels of accountability to the board and the Southern Baptist Convention.”
• “That the board task its duly elected officers, in perpetuity, with the role of monitoring these controls, utilizing them as part of the president's annual review, and reporting the status of these controls annually at an assigned full board meeting.”
The report is available at www.namb.net.