Executive decisions

Johnny Cash might be gone, but he left me with his voice this morning.”
   
The time: 7:30 a.m. — already the thick of the workday for Rick Lance, executive director of the Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions (SBOM).
   
The place: Lance’s office at the SBOM in Montgomery. He’s got a packed schedule to consult, but first he’s consulting an oversized mug of coffee for a little help in ridding himself of his new deep voice — a gift from the outgoing winter season.
   
“It’s her special blend,” he says, wielding the coffee in one hand, pointing to Mary Sue Bennett with the other. And apparently it’s working — after a few sips, his voice has stepped up a half octave or so.
   
Bennett, special assistant to Lance for nearly 22 years, laughs knowingly but quickly — it’s time for business. In two minutes — 8 a.m. sharp — the state board’s four team leaders are meeting.
   
“I call her Condi. She is like our Condoleezza Rice,” Lance says of Bennett. “She’s the captain of the calendar.”
Meetings are not strangers to Lance. In fact, he’s got three back-to-back this morning. Right on schedule, he assumes his chair, brings the first meeting to order and introduces himself as Johnny Cash.
   
The team leaders react with comfortable but respectful laughs — they know it’s a charming blend of intelligent wit and professional dignity that fills the pinstriped suit at the head of the table.
   
But they also know it’s a suit (or coat, rather) Lance would just as soon drape around someone who was cold. “The last of the Southern gentlemen” he’s been called, but he humbly jokes, “I’m just an old-timer — a type ‘A’ personality in a Model T body.”
   
When he heads up the board room table at this and all other meetings, his inherent humility seems to add to his stature — most who know Lance are convinced he’s taller than the six feet he says he is.
   
“He is funny, and at the same time his ‘serious’ is very sincere,” says Bennett, who served with Lance at First Baptist Church in Tuscaloosa from 1983 until 1998. That year he was named SBOM executive director, and both he and Bennett moved their families to Montgomery.
   
“He challenges us spiritually and mentally, and he’s caring, too. He has served as my pastor for a long time,” Bennett says.
   
Pastor — that’s the role Lance loves, even now in his current position. 
   
“Many people view my position as a president or CEO position. It is that, but even more so I like to think of myself as being in a shepherding role.”
   
When he is out across the state speaking to churches and other groups, Lance says he never introduces himself as SBOM executive director. “I am a missionary,” he says. “My coworkers are missionaries. We are to Alabama what the International Mission Board is to the world and what the North American Mission Board is to our nation. We are all here to help Alabama churches in whatever way we can.”
On this day, like all others, Lance and the other team leaders, his “kitchen cabinet,” are starting their service to the churches in prayer. 
   
He’s already had one prayer time this morning (after his meeting with the newspaper at the breakfast table), but this one is different. All who are present share, with Ala­bama’s pastors and leaders heavy on their hearts and minds.
   
“As busy as we are, in our ministry, we are about relationships,” Lance says, talking later with SBOM staff in the third meeting of the morning. “We have to take control of our calendars and not let our calendars take control of us.”
   
It’s the policy of Alabama’s state missionaries to make themselves as accessible to churches as possible, and Lance models this, bending over backwards to attend countless building dedications, board meetings and church anniversaries.
   
This particular week, he is on the road five out of seven days. And while a member of Vaughn Forest Baptist Church in Montgomery, he’s at someone else’s church 48 Sundays a year.
   
Despite a hectic schedule, however, he still holds that the basis of his ministry is simple. “Life can be summed up in one word — missions,” Lance says.
   
As he sits in his office between meetings, his cell phone vibrates in his coat pocket and his computer dings with e-mail alerts. But despite the blessings of technology, Lance says he still holds to the idea that the pen — and the Sword — are mighty.
   
“I know we were projected to be a paperless society by 2000, but I still like to handwrite notes. I am old-fashioned in that way,” he says.
   
Lance is a reader, too — a self-proclaimed “bookaholic” incriminated by shelves upon shelves of books. A novel name-dropper like Oprah, he’s been known to recommend formative or helpful reading in staff meetings — and his co-missionaries take it to heart.
   
“My reading these days is more sporadic than systematic,” says Lance, who prefers books on preaching and historical topics. His moments to read come mostly in airports or at home on evenings he is not attending meetings. On those nights, he, his wife, Pam, and sometimes daughters Noelle, 25, and Allison, 21, sit down for dinner and spend time together.
   
“I try to walk an hour at night, too,” he says, noting that the exercise makes wonderful time for thought. And once he’s settled in for the night, he reviews the day’s good and bad moments.
   
“I ask myself provocative, introspective questions about how situations were handled and whether or not opportunities were grasped,” he says. “And I ask myself, ‘Did I do anyone any good today?’”