Messengers to the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) annual meeting in June may not get to vote on the fate of International Mission Board (IMB) trustee Wade Burleson of Oklahoma afterall.
IMB trustee Chairman Tom Hatley announced Feb. 16 that the executive committee of the trustees voted to ask the full board of trustees to consider reversing the motion passed at its January meeting to recommend removing Burleson from office.
This announcement came in the midst of Internet chatter on Weblogs, or blogs, indicating a potential groundswell of Southern Baptists headed to Greensboro, N.C., in June intending to debate whether he could remain an IMB trustee.
Bloggers have also speculated that the conflict involved disagreements among SBC officials over the leadership of Jerry Rankin, IMB’s president and chief executive officer.
Alabama trustee Bill Hudgins, who serves as second vice chairman, disputed this claim. “To think the board of trustees would use a policy to go after Jerry would be a slam on our integrity.”
In January, IMB trustees charged Burleson with “broken trust and resistance to accountability” because of a blog he has maintained. On the blog, Burleson has been highly critical of previous board actions placing theological restrictions on missionary appointees that he said go far beyond SBC doctrinal consensus.
Hatley said in a January press release that the trustees did not take the action because of Burleson’s opposition to the new policies but because of the way he had conducted his dissent. Because trustees of Southern Baptist agencies are elected by SBC messengers, they can only be removed by action of the full convention. Without a motion to reverse the vote of the January meeting, the trustee recommendation related to Burleson would be acted upon at the June 13–14 SBC meeting.
Hatley said that since the January decision, “we discovered more options for handling trustee relationships.”
In a statement released Feb. 16, he said, “We have determined that we have the ability to seek management of these issues through internal processes that were not known during our January meeting. We have never reached this stage of conflict before and did not know of all our options.”
The IMB trustee executive committee — which consists of the board’s chairman, first and second vice chairmen, recording secretary and chairmen of the board’s five primary standing committees — met in Atlanta Feb. 10 to review the Burleson action.
Hatley will make the recommendation at the full board meeting March 20–22 in Tampa, Fla. (TAB, BP, ABP)
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