RICHMOND, Va. — Tom Elliff, a longtime Oklahoma pastor and former missionary, has been nominated to be president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s International Mission Board.
Elliff, 66, is the choice of a 15-member search committee to succeed Jerry Rankin, who retired last July after 17 years as president of the Richmond, Va.-based mission board, which employs about 5,000 missionaries.
Tom Elliff (Baptist Press photo)
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His nomination will be presented to the IMB’s trustees when they meet in Dallas in March, said Ken Winter, vice president for church and partner services at the mission board. Winter made the announcement in Williamsburg, Va., to Baptist state convention executive directors and editors, who were gathered for their annual fellowship meeting.
Elliff was president of the Southern Baptist Convention from 1996-1997, and in 1990 was president of the SBC’s Pastors’ Conference, a traditional launching pad for higher positions in SBC leadership.
For 20 years he was pastor of First Southern Baptist Church in Del City, Okla., resigning in 2005 to become the IMB’s vice president for spiritual nurture and church relations. In that role, which he held for four years, he counseled missionaries and encouraged SBC churches to be involved in mission activity.
Elliff and his wife, Jeannie, were themselves missionaries for two years, serving in Zimbabwe from 1981 to 1983. They resigned and returned to the United States after their daughter was seriously injured in a car accident.
It’s not the first time Elliff has been considered for the IMB’s chief executive position. Baptist Press, the SBC’s news service, reported in 1995 that he was on the short list of the search committee which eventually nominated Rankin for the presidency.
If elected this time, Elliff will assume leadership of the IMB in the midst of a denominational debate about the mission board’s role and the level of its funding. Advocates of the “Great Commission Resurgence” movement in the SBC are proposing a restructuring of the Cooperative Program, the denomination’s unified giving plan, to dramatically increase funds for the IMB. Some have suggested the international board should assume responsibility for domestic mission activity as well — a task currently assigned to the SBC’s North American Mission Board.
Great Commission Resurgence proposals are encountering resistance from those who fear increased IMB funding will reduce contributions to state Baptist conventions, which maintain a wide array of ministries and have seen steep drops in funding during the economic recession.
Elliff’s two terms as SBC president coincided with an earlier denominational restructuring — called the Covenant for a New Century — which reduced the number of convention agencies from 19 to 12 and in fact combined several of them to create the North American Mission Board.
As the denomination’s top elected official, he supported the restructuring, saying at the time, “Any organization that cares about being effective is constantly seeking better, more effective methods. God’s people must be constantly seeking for the best ways to be stewards with the resources God has given us to share the gospel with the world. The restructuring is not the first time Southern Baptists have sought to restructure to make us more effective. If our Lord tarries, we’ll probably do it again.”
Elliff is a graduate of Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia, Ark., and holds a master of divinity degree from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, and a doctor of ministry degree from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky. He and his wife have four grown children and 25 grandchildren.