SBC’s North American Mission Board and conservative control

Broken at creation, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) North American Mission Board is a “wasteful funding mechanism” that “has served as a pressure device to keep state conventions in line with Southern Baptist Convention programs,” wrote SBC elder statesman Duke K. McCall.

McCall, who was SBC Executive Committee chief executive officer and president of two SBC seminaries, wrote in an essay in the recently published book Against The Wind by Carl L. Kell that:

The state conventions are a better alternative for domestic missions than a central organization. This has been obvious for at least 50 years in that most of the Cooperative Program funds sent to Atlanta for the North American Mission Board have actually been spent by the state conventions through various kinds of ‘partnership’ programs.

McCall is apparently recommending a return of power to and retention of funding by the state Baptist organizations – a view that is echoed complaints voiced recently at at Hardin Baptist Church in Dallas. Norman Jameson of the North Carolina Biblical Recorder wrote of that session:

Unfortunately, the church planter funding process through NAMB is cumbersome, even “stupid” as Jeff Long from Parkwood Baptist Church in Gastonia labeled it.

Host pastor Austin Rammell said there is “massive replication” in the process of identifying, training, placing and funding church plants and planters. “Either the state convention needs to go away or NAMB needs to go away,” said Rammell, who is on the Baptist State Convention board of directors. “I think the obvious answer is NAMB.”

Also arguing that the NAMB was a mistake from the moment of creation is Larry Lewis. He was president of the Home Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1995 when it was merged with the SBC Radio and Television Commission and the SBC Brotherhood Commission to create the NAMB. The NAMB was not created for the sake of efficiecy, Lewis said in an Aug. 13 interview with the Biblical Recorder:

Lewis said he has been told that the real reason behind the reorganization was that leaders of the “conservative resurgence” were displeased with him because he wasn’t aggressive enough about weeding out what they viewed as vestiges of liberalism at the HMB, but they didn’t want to fire him because they had supported his election and he affirmed biblical inerrancy. The solution, the story goes, was to reorganize the agency in a way that didn’t leave a place for Lewis.

It seems nonetheless clear that the GCR Task Force strategies will not involve the return of authority to state conventions that McCall implies and Lewis might accept. If there is a reorganization, it will almost inevitably involve further concentration of SBC executive authority through the merger of the troubled NAMB, whose focus is domestic ministries, with the SBC’s also troubled, missionary-sending, International Mission Board.

Interfaith Alliance call for ‘restoration of civility’

Responding to Nazi- and Holocaust-baiting by the Southern Baptist Convention’s Richard Land and others, a group of prominent faith leaders led by Rev. Dr. C. Welton Gaddy of the Interfaith Alliance called in an open letter for restoration of civility to public debate.

The letter gave four examples of “divisive and ill-spirited rhetoric:”

• Land, SBC ethics & religious liberty chief, “compared some of the proposed health care reforms to ”what the Nazis did.” Actually, Land bestowed a “Joseph Mengele Award” on Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the president’s chief health care adviser. After strong criticism, Dr. Land apologized for his comments, though he offered no apology to Dr. Emanuel.”
• The Republican National Committee was asked to take down a link to a YouTube video parody whose subtitles were doctored to suggest Hitler was criticizing Democratic health care proposals.
• “Fox News host Glenn Beck comparedv Obama Administration treatment of Fox News to the fate of the Jews during the Holocaust.”
• Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) calling the current health care crisis “a holocaust,” although he later apologized in a letter to the Anti-Defamation League.

It said:

The Holocaust was a tragic event in which the Nazis systematically murdered six million Jews. The Nazi regime that perpetrated this mass genocide was one of the most horrific in world history. There is no place in civil debate for the use of these types of metaphors. Perpetrators of such language harm rather than help both the integrity of the democratic process and the credibility of religious commentary.

We, the undersigned faith leaders, call on our colleagues in all religious communities as well as elected leaders, commentators, pundits and others engaged in public debate to refrain specifically from using inappropriate Nazi and Holocaust references and, generally, to help restore civility to our national dialogue.

Signing the letter were:

• The Rev. Dr. C. Welton Gaddy, president, Interfaith Alliance
• Imam Mahdi Bray, executive director, Muslim American Society Freedom
• Rev. Dr. David Currie, Texas Baptist Denominational Leader, Retired
• The Right Reverend Jane Holmes Dixon, former bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington
• Rabbi David Gelfand, senior rabbi of Temple Israel of the City of New York
• Rev. Galen Guengerich, senior minister, All Souls Unitarian Church
• Dr. Derrick Harkins, senior pastor, Nineteenth Street Baptist Church, Washington, D.C.
• Dr. Maureen McCormack, SL, Sisters of Loretto
• Rabbi Jack Moline, rabbi of Agudas Achim Congregation
• Rev. Peter Morales, president, Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations
• Rev. Meg Riley, director, Advocacy and Witness Programs, Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations
• The Rev. Dr. Daniel Rosemergy, minister, Greater Nashville Unitarian Universalist Congregation
• Rabbi David Saperstein, director and counsel, Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism
• Dr. Sayyid M. Syeed,
  national director, Office for Interfaith & Community Alliances, Islamic Society of North America
• The Rev. Dr. Herbert D. Valentine, founding president, Interfaith Alliance