Will Baptists help the Women's Missionary Union?

The fundamentalists vs. moderates theology war tearing apart the Southern Baptist Convention has come to the SBC Women's Missionary Union as painful retrenchment.

Wade Burleson wrote on Dec. 12:

Day before yesterday, the employees of the Woman's Missionary Union were called to a meeting to announce difficult but preemptive measures that were being taken due to the economic downturn. The WMU is short two million dollars in revenue. The executive director of the WMU, Wanda Lee, is working very hard to keep all of the WMU's employees in place, not wanting to lay anyone off. To accomplish this, the employees of the WMU are having to take what amounts to a four week furlough, spread out over an eight month period, without pay.

The problem is as much by design as it is a result of demographic change and the effects of our current economic difficulties.

The theologically moderate WMU refused to come to heel when SBC fundamentalist leadership whistled, so funding has been progressively cut off and sustaining work taken elsewhere in a process which from the outside looks like deliberate destruction of a historically sustaining institution.

The WMU's Lottie Moon Christmas Offering for International Missions and the WMU's Annie Armstrong Easter Offering for North American Missions bring in hundreds of millions of dollars a year to the International Mission Board and the North American Mission Board, respectively.

In return the WMU until recently received reimbursements from both organizations. But after some maneuvering which included an attempt by the NAMB to strip the WMU of the Lottie Moon trademark, both contributions have been sharply reduced and one is being phased out.

Burleson details the history of WMU sustenance of key Southern Baptist institutions, a part of which was a Great Depression bailout of what was then the Home Mission Board.

He in effect calls for Southern Baptists to come home from the theology wars to their consciences in this matter when he writes:

I imagine the WMU will not publicly wave a flag, asking for Southern Baptists to step into the gap for them. However, in my opinion, this is a true test for those of us identified as Southern Baptists. Will we now turn our backs on WMU when they are at a low point, financially?

In the history of what has been called the SBC conservative resurgence, that apparently would be an unprecedented denominational turnabout.

It is unlikely.

The Cynical Use of 'Freedom of Religion'

Kate Childs Graham of the National Catholic Reporter and YoungAdultCatholics-Blog.com doesn't give anyone a free pass in her essay on the misuse of freedom of religion. She writes:

In response to the injustices of the Second World War, on December 10, 1948, the United Nations’ General Assembly adopted what it called the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).

On this, the 60th anniversary of the Declaration, it is time to take a look at the ways that one of the human rights it listed, the idea of religious freedom, is being used, ironically, to further discriminatory agendas.

We recommend you read the entire essay.

Presbyterian Church(USA), Peru, CNN & pollution

For 10 years, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) mission workers in Peru have worked with the people of La Oroya, which Doe Run Co. heavy-metal operations have made one of the ten most polluted cities in the world.

Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) mission worker Jacob Goad (right) describes the environmental and health effects of the Doe Run smelter operation (in the background) to CNN, which is producing a documentary on the church’s work in La Oroya. Photo courtesy of CNN

Emily Enders Odom of the Presbyterian News Service writes:

In this city of 35,000 people, more than 95% of the children have elevated levels of lead in their bodies which can cause mental retardation, kidney problems and stunted growth.

“This tragedy,” said Sara Lisherness, Director of the Compassion, Peace and Justice Ministry area of the General Assembly Council (GAC) of the PC(USA), “is the result of American company Doe Run, operator of one of the largest smelters in the southern hemisphere, dumping over two million pounds of toxic emissions, such as lead, over the city each day.”

CNN is to air a report on the city Thursday, Dec. 11 as part of its Planet in Peril series.

Misspending God's money

Stop Baptist Predators makes superb use of Mary Kinney Branson's book Spending God's Money to illustrate how key Southern Baptist Convention organizations are abusing the trust of faithful contributors.

Branson is a former marketing director for the SBC's North American Mission Board and her book is "an insider's account of the extravagance and financial mismanagement there."

Christa Brown writes:

Branson provides details that implicate high Southern Baptist officials and those details are not flattering. For example, (NAMB President) Bob Reccord “had a $1 million fund he could use at his discretion, no questions asked and no receipts required.” (Branson at p. 61)

Can you imagine any other organization that would allow an official to spend such sums with so little oversight? According to Branson, that $1 million fund was replenished each year, and in Reccord’s last two years, the fund was reduced to $350,000. In other words, the money didn’t just sit there. He spent it. “No receipts required.”

When Reccord resigned, 41 Southern Baptist leaders signed a letter, praising Reccord and essentially whitewashing his “undisputed misuse of funds.” (Branson at p. 18) One of those signers was Johnny Hunt, who is now the president of the Southern Baptist Convention. Another was evangelist Jay Strack.

According to Branson, after Bob Reccord left the North American Mission Board, “auditors discovered that payments were being made to evangelist Jay Strack ($300,000) and Bob’s mega-pastor Johnny Hunt at Woodstock Baptist Church ($92,000). Final payments were sent after Bob resigned but before he left the building…. There were no written contracts. So nearly half a million dollars was paid to Strack and Hunt through verbal agreements with Bob.” (Branson at p. 113)

Brown's entire piece also deals with the Baptist General Convention of Texas "Valleygate" scandal and a great deal more.

It deserves to be read in full here.

Anonymous blogging an institution

Apparently determined to show the world of religious blogging that mainstream newspapers are irrelevant, the Florida Times-Union published a Sunday story which dwells heavily on a single, anonymously penned blog whose name and URL it haughtily refuses to publish.

We agree with Frink about the right of the author of FBC Jax Watchdog to anonymity.

Church governance and its abuses are our concern.

First Baptist Church of Jacksonville, Fla., is a church whose executive pastor for education, Jim Smyrl, has declared the Catholic Church to be a cult and has abjured anyone who voted for a pro-abortion candidate to repent.

The blog mentions those two issues and raises a variety of other significant issues which, if false, are easily rebutted. Indeed, charges should be rebutted and corrected if and when errors are made. Accountability should, in our view, run both ways.

The blog's charges are often documented with audio recordings, copies of deeds and the like, very much the way a good online news article should be documented. Although the tone is far too strident to be confused with mainstream, professional, American journalism.

The third largest of the 43,000 churches in the Southern Baptist Convention is its principal concern - ample reason for an aggressive, frequently updated blog.

This blog and its peers will be of growing importance as more traditional publications continue their decline in resources and number.

Noncommercial blogs like FBC Jax Watchdog are sometimes our nation's best, current substitutes for (rapidly disappearing) aggressive, local, weekly newspapers, the best of which in their time held community institutions accountable to the communities they served.

How tangled an IMB Web?

Frink calls attention to a retired insurance broker's assessment of the Southern Baptist International Mission Board's embezzlement coverup:

So .. I was really shocked when I heard about the Gray Harvey case. Not only have I been active in churches for 45 years or so, in the SBC for 27+ years, but I spent 50 years in the Property & Casualty Insurance business, which is the line of business that covers stuff like employees stealing. So I know a bit about that.

For one thing, I doubt that the SBC insured employee theft. If they had, they would have been reimbursed for Mr. Harvey's theft, and I figure the insurance company would either have collected from the malefactor, or prosecuted. I DON'T figure they'd have let it die a natural, peaceful death.

He makes his view of the IMB trustees who allowed the case to go unprosecuted and took the reported oath of silence quite clear when he says:

If I was somebody like Sam Walton, and this sort of shenanigans had gone on in MY company, I'd fire the lot of them.

We concur, although former IMB trustee Wade Burleson's attempt to hold them to account earned him a drumbeat of anonymous criticism which implied that Burleson was egolistically damaging missionary efforts, until Burleson responded:

If you are the person who used to work for the board and worked with Gray Harvey, you may also be the person that two people told me was involved in the embezzlement.

Please email at wwburleson@hotmail.com and I will tell you if you are the one identified by two people, in writing, as an accomplice.

In His Grace

Wade

Fri Dec 05, 10:04:00 PM 2008

Accomplices?

How tangled is the disastrously miswoven web?

How much does your faith cost?

'Tis the season when moral good is celebrated and sometimes tearfully lived, as Fayetteville (N.C.) Observer Senior Editorial Writer Gene Smith illustrates in How much does your faith cost?

He gives us the quiet fabric of his own life, not the dollar-and-cents spreadsheet you may expect, concluding in the what we see as the truest spirit of the Christmas season:

But if your personal code, whatever it may be, isn’t about how you relate to the rest of your kind and the least among them, and to the world we all share, then it’s about nothing I can reconcile with any scripture I’ve read.

Read it all [Here].

What is your story of Christmas faith silently and with sacrifice adhered to in an ordinary thing?