Combining three Southern Baptist agencies into the North American Mission Board (NAMB) in 1997 was a bad idea, says the last president of one of the agencies.
Larry Lewis, president of the Home Mission Board (HMB) of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) from 1987 until his retirement at age 62 in 1996, said in an interview with a Baptist state newspaper that he had reservations from the beginning about the major restructuring of the denomination approved in 1995 but he didn’t oppose it at the time because he didn’t want to appear self-serving or not to be a “team player.”
Lewis, 74, told North Carolina’s Biblical Recorder on Aug. 13 that “time has proven me right.”
Much of NAMB’s brief history has been marked by turmoil. Its first president, former Virginia pastor Bob Reccord, resigned in 2006 amid allegations of mismanagement and lavish spending.
Reccord’s successor, Geoff Hammond, and three close associates resigned Aug. 11 after Hammond clashed with leaders of NAMB’s board of trustees and accusations of low morale among some of the 279 employees who work at the agency’s headquarters in Alpharetta, Ga.
Lewis said the decision to pull the former SBC Radio and Television Commission in Fort Worth, Texas, and the SBC Brotherhood Commission in Memphis, Tenn., under the same umbrella with home missions “eliminated or marginalized some of our most productive entities.”
“It was a step backwards,” Lewis said.
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.
“I would hate to think that is true but it may well be,” Lewis said.
He said some people who supported his election as HMB president expected a “wholesale purging” of staff after he took office but his philosophy was to keep a worker unless the person was “obviously liberal.”
“Frankly we never dismissed anyone because of their theological position,” he said, although some who disagreed with his theology left on their own.
Lewis, a former church planter and college president, said he tried to be a reconciler and believed that much of the splintering in the SBC could have been avoided if conservatives had offered political moderates who were theologically conservative a place at the table. (ABP)
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