| BAPTISTS TODAY
News Release www.baptiststoday.org |
January 23, 2007
Baptist scandals just one threat to denominational missions funding, observers say
MISUSED MISSION MONEY
NAMB has been tarnished by ongoing revelations that Bob Reccord — who resigned as president of the agency last spring — used his position for self-promotion, directed high-dollar contracts to friends, intimidated staff, wasted millions of mission dollars on failed projects and then left with a hefty severance package reported in excess of $500,000.
“We have always given to Annie Armstrong and the Cooperative Program to support NAMB,” wrote Georgia pastor William Thornton in a Jan. 18 post at BaptistLife.Com. “…I want to know how NAMB has been spending God’s money and our money.”
Reccord’s activities — including spending more than $3,000 in mission funds to take his wife to London for the premiere of the movie, The Chronicles of Narnia — came to light through an extensive article in the Feb. 16, 2006 issue of The Christian Index, the Georgia Baptist newspaper.
Initially, NAMB trustees defended Reccord and condemned the report. But their own investigation confirmed many of the accusations that led to Reccord’s departure — though an apparent soft landing — in April 2006.
Further revelations have surfaced recently in the book, Spending God’s Money: Extravagance and Misuse in the Name of Ministry (Father’s Press, 2007) by NAMB’s former marketing director, Mary Kinney Branson.
Branson, the highest ranking female employee in the agency when she left, spent 16 years with NAMB and its predecessor, the Home Mission Board, before taking early retirement in 2004 after being told by her supervisor to be “sweet and feminine” to two agency vice presidents that didn’t like her.
Because she left on good terms, Branson said she was not asked to sign a “release and waiver agreement “ as were some 100 other employees who were terminated or pushed into retirement. Those signers agreed to “keep confidential all aspects of my employment relationships” and not speak of NAMB leaders, publicly or privately, “in a negative or poor light,” in exchange for “enhanced separation benefits.”
EXTRAVAGANCE OVER EVANGELISM
Not bound by any legal agreement, Branson confirmed earlier findings of Reccord’s extravagant spending such as private jets and sweetheart deals for friends, and revealed a few more from an ice sculpture at Reccord’s inauguration to exotic travel disguised as leadership retreats for Reccord and his vice presidents. Rather than promote Southern Baptist mission efforts, Branson said she was told to “brand Bob Reccord.”
“Eventually Bob became bigger than NAMB,” she wrote, “…even though we were an agency before Bob and hoped to be one after Bob.”
Vice presidents were given wide freedom and often mimicked Reccord in freestyle spending and developing projects that were self-serving, she added. And the quality of mission materials suffered greatly as a result.
“No one seemed to be minding the store — or the budget,” writes Branson. “The NAMB VP’s were spending like children whose rich, busy parents gave money instead of time.”
Reccord began writing books — or using a NAMB magazine editor as his ghostwriter — and hired an expensive outside marketing firm to advance sales. He and his wife, Cheryl, set up a separate for-profit corporation called Total Life Impact, Inc., that promoted Bob as a writer and speaker.
Trustees, elected by the SBC, were courted by Reccord and given limited information about expenditures, said Branson. Unlike the half-inch-think budget reports Branson remembered from the former HMB, NAMB trustees were given only a handful of pages listing large general categories.
“So NAMB sat like a patient in a hospital gown, with its back to the wall,” writes Branson. “All NAMB was showing the trustees was its front side, and it seemed impolite to ask them to turn around.”
Hidden from the trustees, according to Branson, were big-money deals Reccord had made without their knowledge or approval. When Reccord and his top cohorts finally left NAMB last spring their financial extravagance remained costly.
“NAMB finally spent more than a million dollars of contributors’ money to buy out just one of InovaOne contracts — contracts most trustees had known nothing about,” said Branson.
InovaOne was a company created by Reccord’s friend Steve Sanford who was given, without competitive bids, outsourcing that eliminated the jobs of nearly 30 NAMB communications specialists.
MOVING ON
Legendary Southern Baptist evangelism professor Roy Fish was brought in last summer as interim president. He urged remaining NAMB employees to “take your belt up a couple of notches” and “trumpet the gospel.”
According to a Baptist Press report of the initial meeting, Fish assured the NAMB staff that his confidence in the agency “has not diminished one bit.”
However, the hefty price of Reccord’s departure has some loyal Southern Baptists questioning their ongoing support.
Thornton, the Georgia pastor, said NAMB trustees should not expect churches to just “move on” and forget the past too quickly.
“According to reports, Southern Baptist offering gifts are still going to Robert Reccord as a part of his two-year severance agreement,” said Thornton in his post. “…How long do I need to tell my church that we are still paying for his leadership debacle?”
Thornton said he also wants to know what salary will be offered to a new president and what safeguards are in place to avoid a repeat of recent financial and supervisory abuses.
According to Branson, trustees, following the Index expose, discovered that Reccord had access to a $1-million discretionary fund — replenished each year — that required no approval or receipts. Trustees reduced the amount to $50,000, with required expenditures itemized.
Mike Ebert, NAMB’s current senior director of communications, did not return calls to Baptists Today seeking answers to questions raised by Thornton and others.
TROUBLE IN TEXAS
Texas Baptist leaders are looking to rebuild trust as well after revelations last fall that more than $1.3 million was spent on church-starting efforts in the Rio Grande Valley from 1999-2005. Despite reports of great success, an independent investigation revealed only a handful of the 258 reported churches — in fact, as few as five — actually existed.
David Montoya, pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in Mineral Wells, Texas, and a widely read blogger, said he warned Baptist General Convention of Texas (BGCT) leaders about the misuse of funds long before they seriously investigated. During the state convention meeting in November, Montoya made failed attempts to get votes on terminating BGCT executive director Charles Wade and turning evidence from the investigation over to law enforcement agencies immediately.
Voting in executive session just prior to the larger convention meeting, the BGCT executive board instructed Wade to explore with legal counsel how funds might be recovered and to determine whether results from the independent investigation should be turned over to law enforcement.
In December, Wade announced that the evidence was being submitted to authorities to investigate what laws, if any, had been broken. Regardless of legal repercussions, it is broken trust that BGCT leaders are now compelled to address.
“Texas Baptists will always strive to direct mission dollars to their best possible usage,” Don Sewell, executive liaison for mission relationships for the BGCT, told Baptists Today. “Within that effort, we pledge to be even more vigilant in the dispersing of funds; Texas Baptists deserve to be assured that sacrificial offerings are efficiently channeled to the harvest field.”
While the misuse of church-starting funds is tied to just one of the many mission programs of the BGCT, efforts to move beyond the crisis will not be without challenges.
Montoya and two other pastor/bloggers led a small meeting Jan. 16 in Mesquite, Texas, to discuss ways congregations can support favored BGCT ministries while bypassing the convention’s headquarters he deemed as “the palace in Dallas.”
TRUST-BUILDING
Restoring trust to an organization is possible under the best circumstances, said George Bullard, a church leadership consultant and former associate executive director of the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina.
“If credible leaders and their boards with perceived integrity respond quickly and significantly to apparent abuses, and if it turns out these leaders were not personally involved, covering up something, or obviously incompetent, then their organizations can move beyond such crises,” said Bullard, now strategic coordinator for The Columbia Partnership.
Ruben Swint, a fundraising consultant with Generis, sees church leaders who influence the budgeting process as key players in directing mission support.
“Certainly it is harder to gain support if the stewardship of contributed funds is called into question,” said Swint. “If a denominational agency cannot provide them with a trustworthy account of how funds are used, their own commitment to the mission of the agency can lessen. And, those outside the budgeting process who learn of the inappropriate use or misuse of funds, will call into question the church’s intention to contribute more, or anymore.”
Trust, said Swint, is the only asset of agencies and organizations dependent upon gifts. But beyond being trusted, mission groups need to rethink how they partner with churches beyond asking for more and more money.
“Rather than approach congregations asking for money to do work on their behalf, agencies must approach congregations uniquely asking how they can help the congregations carry out their mission,” said Swint. “This means that agencies may not offer the same level of services, products or experiences to every church; rather, agencies offer customized support and ask for appropriate funds to provide that support.”
Swint said this personalized approach creates an even more intimate relationship out of which greater trust and stewardship can grow.
Connie McNeill, coordinator of administration for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (CBF), said it is important for organizations that receive and distribute church gifts to ensure trustworthiness by the way they are structured and operate.
“We require a standard of leadership throughout the organization that is trustworthy,” said McNeill. “That leadership requires a system of internal controls be in place to which every employee is subject.”
McNeill said trust is enhanced when a governing body — in CBF’s case, the coordinating council — has a clear responsibility as fiscal stewards and when the organization discloses all pertinent financial information to its constituents.
A MAJOR CHALLENGE
All denominational groups that depend on church funding for their missions operations, whether dealing with damage control related to misused funds or not, have a big challenge ahead, some leaders warn.
“The forces making it harder for churches to support any cooperative missions work are unrelated, on the whole, with (the recent Baptist) incidents,” said Bullard. “They have more to do with the ability of churches to engage in direct missions throughout the world without needing an intermediary.”
Those holding the reins of denominations, he said, need to rethink how they relate to their constituency of churches.
“Denominational agencies need to continually discover how they can help churches reach their full kingdom potential regarding missions and ministry rather than asking churches to help denominations reach their full kingdom potential,” said Bullard. “It’s the churches, pilgrim!”
A former missions leader for American Baptist Churches, USA, agrees that the biggest challenge facing denominational mission endeavors has to do with changing giving patterns and how churches engage more directly in missions.
“In an earlier time we gave to the church and considered it the church’s money,” said Bob Roberts, ABC’s former associate general secretary for world mission support. “Now we want to know, ‘where did my money go?’”
For half a century, American Baptists and Southern Baptists built excellent “single-gift methods” for supporting missions, said Roberts. But they were dependent on a generation that trusted budgets.
“My own generation accepted a budget and gave to a budget,” said Roberts, now retired in Orlando, Fla. “But those 45 or 50 years old now, or younger, are highly suspicious of budgets.”
FINDING NEW WAYS
Roberts said cooperative mission giving developed as an alternative to the societal method in which every missionary or group sought their own funding from churches. The goal was to avoid duplication and get more missions for the money.
“But we tended to build administrative structures larger than they needed to be,” he confessed.
The generational shift in giving patterns along with churches making direct connections to do missions means that less money will be put in denominational buckets, said Roberts, and a new approach needs to surface.
“There has been a revolution in mission support and I think all of us are having a hard time with this,” he said.
Baptist leaders, said Roberts, need to develop new models of direct giving that respect both the desire of churches to determine how their funds are used and the need to avoid unnecessary duplication of services.
“There has to be some kind of creative new way to do this,” said Roberts. “…I don’t see us going back to a unified budget system for a long time.”
On the other hand, Roberts questions the efficiency of doing missions without cooperation at all, adding: “I’d like for that dollar to produce every bit as much missions as possible.”
Following publication of this article, NAMB offered a general written response.
(John Pierce is executive editor of Baptists Today, an autonomous,
national news journal based in Macon, Ga.)