ALPHARETTA, Ga. (ABP) — 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, 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 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 to help prevent future controversy.
“It was a long day, but I think at the end of the day, the North American Mission Board is going to be a stronger agency,” Holcomb told reporters, in a press conference with the board's officers following the meeting. “Southern Baptists, I think, will be pleased that the trustees of this agency have dealt with the issues that we have been presented.”
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 NAMB was formed as the Southern Baptist successor to the Home Mission Board. 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 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. 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 communications 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.
The report also acknowledged that NAMB had spent more than $3 million since the audit on Sanford's media ventures.
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 or other Southern Baptist work. It also questioned his involvement with his wife's speaking ministry, and questioned the prudence of several special initiatives that NAMB has instituted under Reccord's leadership, in some cases investing millions in projects that were soon abandoned or placed on hiatus.
For example, the report acknowledged that NAMB lost more than $1 million — at a time when it was belt-tightening in its traditional ministry areas — on an aborted series of young-adult conferences in 2004-2005. Called “Elevate,” the elaborate events were designed to bring 20-somethings together to learn how to apply their faith in their workplace. They were designed to pay for themselves, but attendance at the initial Elevate conferences was far below expectations.
NAMB officials ended up paying for the shortfalls — including extensive off-budget marketing and planning expenses — out of the board's cash reserves. The program was subsequently suspended.
The trustee report concludes with six recommendations, including establishment of a new trustee subcommittee charged with creating the new policy guidelines to deal with such issues in the future. The recommendations are:
— That the subcommittee 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.”
When asked by reporters if Reccord had been “disciplined,” Holcomb said, “Was he disciplined in an official sense in the executive session? The answer is 'No.'” Holcomb said that Reccord “recognizes, just as all of us do, that he's not perfect and we're not perfect…. I think that the recommendations that the board adopted today will help him.”
But Holcomb said some of the problems can simply be attributed to growing pains in an agency that is still quite new, relatively speaking. “The Home Mission Board had an over-100-year history. The North American Mission Board is still an infant, and we still have a learning curve,” he said.
Allen, the chief operations officer; Benj Smith, executive director of strategic planning; and Rick Forbus, director of the leadership initiatives team, resigned the day before the March 23 meeting.
Holcomb said Allen's resignation was not forced and not the result of the original investigation. Other sources said it was related to other issues that surfaced in the process.
Reccord released a statement March 24 saying he was “thankful that the trustee process worked.” He also noted that the month-long period since the Index article was first published “has been a time of great distraction for all of our staff from the task of North American missions…. Now it is time to get back to the work. Where mistakes have been made, I have made a pledge to use this process to correct those errors and work with our trustees to make NAMB a stronger agency.”
Trustee vice chair Bill Curtis, pastor of Cornerstone Baptist Church in Florence, S.C., said that trustees would also take responsibility for righting NAMB's ship. “[T]he trustees are prepared to acknowledge that it is a shared responsibility where we are at this point,” he told reporters.
The full report is available on NAMB's website at www.namb.net
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