Bob Reccord, president of the North American Mission Board, announced his resignation yesterday. After nine years of leading the NAMB for the Southern Baptist Convention, the entrepreneurial visionary walked away from what he said was an inherent conflict between his leadership style and the denominational structure. That came to light after The Christian Index newspaper of the Georgia Baptist Convention began tallying up the innovations versus the costs for Reccord's leadership at NAMB. The Index published a scathing criticism in a February issue
.Programs that lost money or that never got off the ground were listed as NAMB failures. Specifically, a failed evangelism initiative aimed at all North American Southern Baptist churches was criticized for losing money and lacking leadership and communication. The Index went further to classify it as a missed opportunity:
"Some observers say Southern Baptists lost a golden opportunity to capitalize on the [Hurricane Katrina[ disasters by not holding to the original launch date [for the evangelism initiative]. They say the agency had a captive audience ready to hear the message – evacuees scattered throughout several states, traumatized and asking hard questions of God. Add to those numbers the millions who watched the televised accounts around North America and there was a harvest for the taking.
No other denomination was poised to make such an evangelistic impact. But the moment was lost."
The terminology used by editors Joe Westbury and J. Gerald Harris characterizes evangelism as a sort of frenzied exploitation of hurting people. First of all, how the Index, or anyone, can categorize the massive effort of the SBC in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita as anything but the most generous outpouring of love is unfathomable. Fox News called NAMB, "one of the leading faith-based relief providers in the Gulf Coast right now."
Focusing on the issue of "harvesting" seems misguided at best, myopic at worst. How would the NAMB, SBC, or anyone else be able to harvest believers without ever having planting the seeds of kindness, hot meals, shelter, clothing, rebuilding, prayer, etc.?
Of course this clearly wasn't how the Index was thinking of evangelism or of how the NAMB should be functioning. Their report led to further investigation by NAMB's board of trustees.
They investigated the Index's allegations of impropriety, which included a primary focus on partnerships with other evangelical groups, such as Focus on the Family, Campus Crusade, and Promise Keepers.
Reccord will speak this summer's upcoming Promise Keepers events all over the nation. The Index questioned his integrity in this, citing a conflict of interest because of his own ministry, and wondering out loud if there would be enough Southern Baptist men at the PK gatherings to make them worth Reccord's while.
"Reccord will actually be speaking to a group of whom at least 75% are not Southern Baptist," the paper declared.
Does that only sound scandalous if you're Southern Baptist? Because to me that sounds like a deranged allegation from people clearly focused not on the Kingdom of God, but on the kingdom of the SBC.
"I believe that honest philosophical and methodological differences have brought us to this point of separate directions," Reccord told the Baptist Press yesterday. He reiterated his love and commitment to Southern Baptists, but also his "Kingdom heart and mindset."
Apparently that vision was a little too big.
An internal audit of the $124 million dollar NAMB revealed no financial misdeeds. Reccord also defended the volunteer missionaries the paper discounted in a tally of declining numbers of career missionaries. And as for church planting efforts that the Index said, "failed to produce the anticipated results," Reccord pointed out that the numbers of new churches in five of the last eight years represent five of the highest totals in convention history.
Whatever the Index was looking to expose, all it left showing was an ugly editorial bias toward denominationalism and the most narrow definitions of effective evangelism I've seen in a long while.
