Nearly $1 million in endowment funds has been transferred from control of Southern Seminary in Louisville, Ky., to national Woman’s Missionary Union as part of a formal mediation over the disputed assets of the Carver School of Church Social Work.
Though the mediation reportedly took place last summer, officials of Southern Seminary and WMU have refused to speak publicly about the matter since then. Sources familiar with the negotiations said a gag order was included as part of the deal at the request of the seminary.
The transfer of $928,541 from the Southern Baptist Foundation to the WMU Foundation does appear in WMU’s audited financial report for last year, however. That audit, which must be submitted each year to the Southern Baptist Convention’s (SBC) Executive Committee, is a public record. It was available for review during the Executive Committee’s Feb. 21-22 meeting in Nashville.
The audit states the funds in question were transferred to the WMU Foundation by the seminary after a previous trust was terminated.
Asked about the matter last summer before her retirement as WMU executive director, Dellanna O’Brien said she could not speak about the endowment dispute. The most she would say is: “Yes, we have had a mediation and settled to each party’s satisfaction.”
The matter reportedly was discussed in executive session during the WMU Executive Board meeting at Shocco Springs Conference Center in January. During that meeting, board members approved the distribution of large sums of money from an undisclosed source. The distributions will benefit the Eleanor Terry Chair for Christian Women’s Leadership at Samford University and the new graduate program in social work at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, among others.
Baylor has taken up the mission once held by the Carver School before its termination at Southern Seminary. Baylor not only offers the master-of-social-work degree with an emphasis on church social work, but the program is run by Diana Garland, the previous dean of the Carver School at Southern.
In 1998, the seminary sold the Carver School name and certain undisclosed assets to Campbellsville University in Campbellsville, Ky., a liberal-arts school affiliated with the Kentucky Baptist Convention. That transaction capped a tumultuous saga of transition that began in 1993, when Albert Mohler became president of Southern.
Amid several years of faculty upheaval — with a turnover rate of more than 60 percent — a dispute arose between Garland and Mohler over faculty hiring requirements for the Carver School. Mohler insisted all prospective faculty members must oppose women being ordained as pastors. Garland told students and the press the requirement would place the Carver School’s accreditation at risk.
Mohler promptly fired Garland as dean for insubordination.
In the ensuing months, Mohler and the seminary trustees launched a study of whether the seminary should continue operation of the church-social-work school, the only one of its kind in the nation. Ultimately, Mohler declared, and the trustees affirmed, that some principles of social work are incongruent with biblical theology.
Nearly four years passed while WMU sought to resolve the fate of the Carver School endowment funds with the seminary. Eventually, both sides agreed to binding mediation, according to multiple sources familiar with the proceedings.
The funds in question originated as part of the WMU Training School, which was founded in Louisville in 1907. At that time, women were not allowed to enroll as students at the seminary. In 1952, the training school was renamed Carver School of Missions and Social Work. Then in 1963, by action of messengers to the SBC annual meeting, the Carver School was merged into Southern Seminary. The two schools already shared adjoining property and had a close working relationship.
In 1984, Southern made the Carver School of Church Social Work one of four schools operating under the seminary umbrella, putting it on equal status with the schools of theology, Christian education and church music. The Carver School received accreditation for its master-of-social-work degree, making it the first and only accredited degree of its type in the nation.
With the 1963 merger, the seminary became provisional beneficiary of several endowment funds related to the Carver School. These included a general endowment fund, the Margaret M. Norton Fund, the William Owen Carver Fund and nine scholarship funds.
At that time, WMU took action to direct the Southern Baptist Foundation, which held the funds, to make Southern the recipient of earnings “provided that the seminary uses such income in conformity with the requirements of the trust agreement.”
In addition to the endowment funds, WMU also gave to Southern Seminary real estate valued at $799,500 at the time of the 1963 merger.
That property, which today houses the seminary’s new Boyce Bible College, reportedly was not part of what WMU asked to have returned. (ABP)
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