A trustee has resigned from the Southern Baptist Convention’s (SBC) North American Mission Board (NAMB) saying he does not share the vision of the agency’s new president.
“I believe that throughout my life, and particularly as I’ve gotten older, that it’s very important to take your body where your heart is,” Lester Cooper, pastor of Concord Baptist Church, Cumming, Ga., told church members Nov. 28. “If you’ve got your body somewhere where your heart’s not, that just not where it ought to be.
“I just wanted to share with you this morning — for whatever it’s worth to anybody — that this past week I resigned as trustee of the North American Mission Board,” he said.
Cooper added, in an interview with Associated Baptist Press, “My heart is not with the North American Mission Board.”
Cooper, former director of missions for the Atlanta Association of Southern Baptist Churches, was elected as a NAMB trustee in 2008. He said watching changes made since the election Sept. 14 of Kevin Ezell as the agency’s president “is not what I signed on for.”
On Sept. 30 Ezell announced an early-retirement incentive for employees age 54 and over. The goal is to reduce staff by a net 25 percent by the end of the year — including new people brought in by Ezell.
Cooper said he agrees with the strategy of focusing on church planting in urban areas with large populations, but doesn’t think the way to do it is by losing senior staff members recognized as leading experts in the field.
“I can’t imagine how you can see 80 people leave an organization that has 260 people in it and have any idea of how you are going to function or come to the conclusion of who is going to go before you have been there two months,” Cooper said. “It’s not reasonable, and I cannot get a satisfactory answer from anybody where we are going.”
He also said that since a Great Commission Task Force report adopted by the Southern Baptist Convention calls for a restructuring of NAMB within seven years, he doesn’t understand why decisions are being handed down so quickly and without vote by the board of trustees.
“I do not really see the direction I see it going in as being something that I think is helpful,” Cooper said. “I don’t think that I should stay and stand in the way of what others think need to be done.”
Cooper said three NAMB staff members taking the early-retirement option are members of his church.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Cooper, a pastor for more than 30 years with a long record of denominational service. “It’s a new day for Southern Baptists, and I really don’t know what it looks like.”
Ezell, 48, took the NAMB job after 14 years as pastor of Highview Baptist Church, Louisville, Ky. Some criticized his selection because the church favors designated missions giving over traditional funding mechanisms like the SBC’s Cooperative Program unified budget and Annie Armstrong Easter Offering. Trustees who recommended Ezell said his innovation and passion for reaching people is what attracted them to him in the first place.
Ezell said early on one of his first tasks would be to make the agency more credible to young ministers less prone than their parents’ generation to support institutions. (ABP)
Share with others: