Hundreds of International Mission Board (IMB) missionaries will be asked to consider voluntary retirement after IMB leaders announced Aug. 27 that the organization had spent $210 million more than was given to it in the past six years.
To address revenue shortfalls over these years, IMB has dipped into reserves and sold off property overseas — a move new IMB President David Platt said had been done by his predecessors with much prayer.
But the long-term plan for addressing the problem through missionary force attrition hasn’t produced results fast enough to adequately address the shortfall, he said.
“We praise God for the reserves and property sales that made this possible and for leadership which chose to spend these resources for the spread of the gospel,” Platt said. “But we cannot continue to overspend. For the sake of short-term financial responsibility and long-term organizational stability we must act.”
IMB leaders reported that they believe the organization needs to restore its contingency reserves to six months’ worth of its annual operating budget in order to be a financially healthy organization. At the current rate of spending, by the end of 2015, the IMB will only have about four months’ worth of contingency reserves left.
And Sebastian Traeger, IMB’s executive vice president, said that every six months that passes without the shortfall being addressed, IMB will lose another month’s worth of reserves.
‘Urgent’ need to change
That makes the need for change urgent, according to Platt. And the only viable way to regain financial footing is to quickly scale back the organization’s workforce by 600–800, he said. Currently IMB supports about 4,800 global missionaries and 450 staff in its Richmond, Virginia, headquarters.
The staff reduction will begin with a voluntary retirement incentive that will be offered to all eligible employees, including both missionaries and staff. While the parameters defining who is eligible are still being finalized, details of the incentive will be announced Sept. 10 and those eligible will be notified in the days following the announcement.
“Whether to accept the incentive is a voluntary decision completely up to the discretion of eligible individuals,” Platt said. “This offers personnel who may already be considering a transition in their lives an opportunity to make that transition.”
IMB leaders are calling this first step phase one. Phase two will focus on concluding a reset of the organization that addresses conslidating support services, recalibrating mobilization, assessing global engagement and re-envisioning training. Leaders also will continue to explore additional ways to recoup the budget as needed, such as further personnel adjustments or sales of overseas properties.
The sale of less-strategic property with profit that could be returned to the U.S. was already done in previous years, Traeger said. These properties showed up as assets in Southern Baptists’ financial reports during those years — but the reality was, they were just assets passing through, not assets sitting in reserves. Property is only denoted as an asset once it’s liquidated, Traeger explained, and those liquidated funds went straight into addressing operating budget needs.
So did Lottie Moon Christmas Offering monies, which have fallen consistently short of the annual goal by millions of dollars.
‘A healthy position’
All this spells a critical need for the missionary-support organization — a need leaders say they are taking swift steps to address.
Platt said, “We must get to a healthy place in the present in order to be in a healthy position for the future. We want to move forward with innovative vision, wise stewardship and high accountability to the churches we serve, the peoples we reach and the God we worship.”
The announcement came on the heels of the IMB trustee meeting Aug. 25–26 in Richmond and was disseminated to IMB personnel through a town hall meeting Aug. 27 before the news was released to the public.
It also came exactly a year after Platt, former pastor of The Church at Brook Hills, Birmingham, took the helm of the massive organization.
(TAB, IMB)
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