Why did the IMB hide embezzlement?

Frink calls attention to a retired insurance broker’s assessment of the Southern Baptist International Mission Board’s embezzlement coverup:

So .. I was really shocked when I heard about the Gray Harvey case. Not only have I been active in churches for 45 years or so, in the SBC for 27+ years, but I spent 50 years in the Property & Casualty Insurance business, which is the line of business that covers stuff like employees stealing. So I know a bit about that.

For one thing, I doubt that the SBC insured employee theft. If they had, they would have been reimbursed for Mr. Harvey’s theft, and I figure the insurance company would either have collected from the malefactor, or prosecuted. I DON’T figure they’d have let it die a natural, peaceful death.

He makes his view of the IMB trustees who allowed the case to go unprosecuted and took the reported oath of silence quite clear when he says:

If I was somebody like Sam Walton, and this sort of shenanigans had gone on in MY company, I’d fire the lot of them.

We concur, although former IMB trustee Wade Burleson’s attempt to hold them to account earned him a drumbeat of anonymous criticism which implied that Burleson was egolistically damaging missionary efforts, until Burleson responded:

If you are the person who used to work for the board and worked with Gray Harvey, you may also be the person that two people told me was involved in the embezzlement.

Please email at wwburleson@hotmail.com and I will tell you if you are the one identified by two people, in writing, as an accomplice.

In His Grace

Wade

Fri Dec 05, 10:04:00 PM 2008

Accomplices?

How tangled is the disastrously miswoven web?

How much does your faith cost?

‘Tis the season when moral good is celebrated and sometimes tearfully lived, as Fayetteville (N.C.) Observer Senior Editorial Writer Gene Smith illustrates in How much does your faith cost?

He gives us the quiet fabric of his own life, not the dollar-and-cents spreadsheet you may expect, concluding in the what we see as the truest spirit of the Christmas season:

But if your personal code, whatever it may be, isn’t about how you relate to the rest of your kind and the least among them, and to the world we all share, then it’s about nothing I can reconcile with any scripture I’ve read.

Read it all [Here].

What is your story of Christmas faith silently and with sacrifice adhered to in an ordinary thing?