The SBC Executive Committee is looking for a CEO and lawyer Jonathan Whitehead put his name in for the job. He got a call from the EC that he wouldn’t be interviewed. I doubt it will assuage his supporters but I will not be considered and I didn’t even get a courtesy phone call.
I’ve never met Jon but we have swapped a few tweets and comments. I’d call him laconic in his interactions with me, but then so is everyone else on Twitter who doesn’t want to write a book in a gazillion tweet thread. I rather like Jon, partly because I have an affection for solid Baptists who are disrupters, who aren’t afraid to criticize, and who do not shrink back from asking questions.
Jon has a youtube piece wherein he gives six ideas for our leaderless Executive Committee. (Sorry, no link because my SBCV colleagues would exhaust the supply of smelling salts but just look him up on Twitter @jrwhitehead and you’ll find all you need.)
Here are his six ideas worth discussing:
Disclose the CEO’s salary that of top staff
I’ve been calling for this for all the entities for about half my adult life. There’s no reason ordinary SBCers shouldn’t be able to easily find how much their leaders are being paid. Whitehead agrees. If disclosure the compensation of CEOs and top staff would be embarrassing, then quit or don’t apply for those positions. Somehow every public corporate CEO manages life with their pay made public. And I would add that the information should be published in the SBC Book of Reports and Annual and at each entity’s online site. The folks who pay the bills shouldn’t be forced to jump through any hoops to get this data.
Disclose 990 level financial data.
IRS Form 990 is what charities file. Churches do not, nor our entities. Whitehead says he would disclose the information normally found on these forms. Maybe that would be a good idea for entities. Some favor individual churches having to file this. I do not and Whitehead just addresses the EC in this regard.
More board decisions and fewer committee decisions
Did you hear the one about the SBC entity who made a million dollar payout to a departing employee…and (if my memory is correct) only a single trustee knew about it? If I’m wrong correct me but it’s a longstanding practice for our large trustee boards to be run by a small group of select trustees. Whitehead says we don’t always know who these few are. I don’t know but let the full boards vote publicly on major decisions. I agree with him. The current system has a back room smell to it.
More discussion and interaction between the EC and entity trustees
This could be complex and I’ll let Whitehead explain it whenever he wants. The EC already administers a Business and financial plan for the convention. The plan is long and detailed and includes this sentence, “Entity boards of trustees should oversee the operations of the entity in such a manner as will assure effective and ethical management.” I think it is demonstrably true that this part of the plan has not been followed in some cases. Maybe Whitehead has this in mind or maybe something more general.
Stop using the IRS 501(c)3 Group Exemption Letter
Whitehead believes that churches should not use this letter because of possible liability issues. It’s his legal area. My state convention touts their 501(c)3 letter as a service that Georgia Baptist churches can use. Could get technical here.
Sex abuse investigations by independent organizations and not by current leadership.
“New faces are not a solution to broken systems,” he says. Sounds good. Isn’t that exactly what the convention just did in regard to EC sex abuse?
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It’s an odd thing for someone to publicly “apply” for an open SBC leadership job. Of course, our accepted system is to work the phones behind the scenes to get consideration for any job. I believe we have people whose unbridled ambition has them hungering and thirsting for about any high profile SBC job…but, what do I know? I’m just a (retired) pastor of an average sized SBC church.
It’s tough to have honest, public discussions in SBC life. We’d rather create a blue-ribbon ad hoc Task Force, let them meet privately, make a report, and seal all the records for a generation. That’s our system.
