An eight-hour meeting of North American Mission Board (NAMB) trustees March 23 yielded a 19-page report in response to allegations published about its church planting and evangelism in The Christian Index, newsjournal of the Georgia Baptist Convention.
The board’s recommendations — released on the heels of six weeks of self-examination — impose several sets of “Executive Level controls” on NAMB President Robert E. “Bob” Reccord.
“We want the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) to know we’ve responded to the issues [through the task force report] and because of that response we believe that you can trust what we’re doing here at NAMB,” said trustee Chairman Barry Holcomb, pastor of Bethany Baptist Church, Andalusia, in Covington Baptist Association.
According to the Index’s Feb. 16 article entitled “North America: Hanging in the balance,” the number of career missionaries funded by NAMB has dropped 10 percent since 1997, when NAMB was formed as the Southern Baptist successor to the Home Mission Board.
The Index also cited a lack of a consistent evangelism strategy, a loss of momentum in church-planting efforts and a drop in NAMB cash reserves from $55 million to $23 million.
After these allegations and others were printed in the 4,500-word analysis, NAMB officials quickly posted a 2,500-word response, defending the entity and voicing disappointment over the article’s timing and air of “personal attack.”
Holcomb then organized a nine-member task force, including Ellie Wade Ficken, a member of Vaughn Forest Baptist Church, Montgomery, to investigate both the allegations and NAMB’s response. The report released to reporters March 24 was the product of these efforts.
In its response, for instance, NAMB answered the allegation of the 10 percent loss in its missionary force by verifying that number and listing the core reasons for the decline. One such reason was “a 91 percent increase in health care costs since NAMB’s inception, which NAMB has not passed through to its missionaries.”
The task force, after its investigation, affirmed this reason and others, enumerating six points on which this ministry facet can be improved, including “celebrate the accomplishments of all of our missionaries” and “look more carefully at the way in which NAMB uses those dollars.”
“It’s fair to say this process (of self-examination) has been a profitable time, even though it has been painful,” Holcomb said, noting that he has spent some 25 hours around the conference table and countless others on the phone since the allegations were initially printed. “Any time we have the opportunity for self-evaluation and improvement, it’s positive.”
Following the Index article, more scrutiny fell to Reccord than anyone else; some of his activities were called into question as a conflict of interest.
On one charge, the paper raised questions about NAMB’s dealings with subcontractor Steve Sanford, a former church member of Reccord’s when he was a Virginia pastor. Sanford was asked to perform an audit of NAMB’s communications strategy in 2003, which NAMB officials say led the agency to outsource at least 28 positions in its communications and Internet areas. NAMB later hired InovaOne, a company founded and owned by Sanford, to perform some of those services.
The report determined that the use of Sanford’s company for both the communications audit and the resultant outsourcing did not explicitly violate any NAMB ethics policies but could raise questions nonetheless.
“While the Trustees discovered no intentional attempt by Dr. Reccord to show favoritism to a ‘friend’ by retaining and using Steve Sanford and InovaOne for NAMB’s media strategies, they do believe that this decision left both [him] and the board open to the charge of a conflict of interest,” the report said.
The 58-member trustee board unanimously approved a six-part plan to establish the Executive Level controls for Reccord during the meeting at NAMB’s Atlanta-area headquarters in Alpharetta, Ga. Under the accountability plan, a trustee subcommittee will be appointed by Holcomb “to develop a set of Executive Level controls to be used as a guide.”
The subcommittee, which Holcomb said he hopes to name during the coming month, will propose controls for:
- “directing the travel, speaking, and on-campus office time required for the President …”
- “the use of RFP’s” (Request For Proposals), akin to bidding to compete for work being outsourced by NAMB.
- “when the President … wants to develop new initiatives, including the appropriate oversight and approval by the Board.”
- “clarifying what constitutes poor management by an executive officer and how it should be handled.”
- providing Reccord and NAMB “with greater levels of accountability to the Board and the Southern Baptist Convention.”
Under the sixth part of the plan, the board assigned “its duly elected officers, in perpetuity, with the role of monitoring these controls, utilizing them as part of the President’s annual review, and reporting the status of these controls annually at an assigned full Board meeting.”
Holcomb said Reccord told the trustees “that he understands that, as president of this agency, he is under our directorship. … He said, ‘I am willing to work with the trustees in whatever parameters we need to,’ in order to address the concerns that Southern Baptists may have about the North American Mission Board.”
Holcomb added that the new controls are “not a blame game” — “We (Reccord and the board of trustees) are in this together, and we share the responsibility.”
Reccord said in a statement: “I am thankful that the trustee process worked. That’s why we have such a process.
While we jointly found opportunities and areas on which to strengthen and improve, I celebrate the fact that the deep and thorough financial and practices audit gave us a clean bill of health, including the status and history of our reserves.”
Holcomb noted that SBC President Bobby Welch attended the meeting.
“I phoned him about a week ago and I said, ‘Bobby, we’d like to invite you to be there for our meeting. I would like for you to be able to say to Southern Baptists that the board of trustees of the North American Mission Board handled the business at hand. And he sat through almost our entire meeting. He was very pleased with how things went and he said, ‘Barry, the board has done an excellent job. They’ve addressed the facts. And Southern Baptists don’t have anything to be ashamed of.’”
To read the full text of the task force report, visit www.thealabamabaptist.org and search for the keyword “NAMB trustee response.” (Compiled by staff; BP, ABP contributed)
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