Randy Adams is the second person to be a declared candidate for SBC president. Baptist Press had a story on him on January 15th. I’m pleased there is more than one candidate (Al Mohler) and there are some things Adams has written that I like. The idea of remote voting for the SBC Annual Meeting bubbles up every year and is one that I don’t like. It’s a bad idea.
For a little background on the idea of remote voting take a look at
EC not going to waste missions money on remote SBC voting…
Satellite SBC meetings and remote voting: the best, terrible idea around
More about satellite SBC annual meetings
Randy Adams, manifestly, isn’t impressed with the opinion of your humble hacker and plodder blogger on the concept. He writes in My Commitment to Southern Baptists. In it he says that
…every cooperating SBC church should be valued, and strategies to increase engagement of all churches in SBC life must be employed, including the use of technology to enable remote access voting at the Annual Meeting of the SBC. We should not be satisfied with how few of our churches participate in the Annual SBC Meeting. Cooperating SBC churches must not be disenfranchised from participation in the decision-making process because they cannot afford to travel to annual meeting locations.
Adams is a state convention CEO whose constituent churches are in Oregon, Washington, and northern Idaho, a long distance from sultry Orlando where the annual meeting will be held this June. Adams office is about 3,035 miles from the convention center. In a way, I don’t blame him for making this populist but bad idea about using technology to make votes at the SBCAM from, well, anywhere. A few observations and questions:
I take issue with his assertion that cooperating churches that cannot afford to send their pastor (and/other messengers) to the SBCAM have been “disenfranchised” unless you mean that every SBC church who couldn’t send messengers to the AM for the past 173 years has been deprived of what should have been their right, that is, to vote on SBC matters brought before the AM.
The SBCAM is a corporate meeting and since we do not allow proxy voting, messengers have to be present. The Executive Committee reported that “there [is] no known model for web-based constituent participation in any similarly-sized, deliberative body, nor even in any state Baptist convention…” The idea (always comes up, though Adams didn’t specify it) that all of the 1,126 SBC Associations could be voting points is silly. Even the idea that 41 state conventions could be polling locations is not workable. Now that we’re all connected with smart phones, the idea that tens of thousands of SBC messengers could conduct a meeting by phone, or even take votes by phone, is absurd. Maybe he has some actual proposal in mind. Let’s hear it.
But I get that this is an idea that always gets some traction with segments of SBC life. Two-thirds of our churches are small. It does cost to get to the annual meeting.
I suspect that those who favor the idea think it would be a route to changing a convention that they see needing change. Hey, we already did that through the Conservative Resurgence. It took time, effort, and money. Paige Patterson might be beleaguered for some things but tackling the strategy that required tens of thousands of mostly small church pastors and laypeople to get to ten or twelve consecutive annual meetings was daunting. But, it was done and here we are.
But why don’t we start here: The state convention Adams leads is quite large geographically. May I presume that he has already led his state convention to implement remote voting at his own meetings? Yes? No?
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I’m quite pleased that we have more than one candidate for SBC president and, I like some of the things Randy Adams has written. This one I don’t.
More on Adams’ candidacy later. He’s put a lot out there to think about.
Just so ya know, the Executive Committee staff said in 2018 that “The issue of annual meeting decentralization has been raised and examined by the Executive Committee many times, including in 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1995, 1997, etc. and most recently in 2011, which was reported to the Convention’s messengers in 2012.” Add one more to that list. It’s like whack-a-mole, it always pops up.
How can we have a “Convention” if we do not actually “convene?”
Just sayin’ . . .
I have not read the whole thread so please do not torch me…LOL!
Exactly.
Would that be like a multi-site congregation that never congregates? 😉
How about a test run involving the Baptist Convention for Washington, Oregon and Northern Idaho? For example, break the physical meeting location into thirds so that physical meetings are held simultaneously in Portland, Seattle, and Coeur D’ Alene. Broken up this way the convention could likely physically be housed into a larger church in each state. You wouldn’t have to book a convention center. Companies run remote meetings all the time. This is not a big deal logistically. For real time debate you could have mikes 1A, 2A, etc. in Portland and mikes 1B, 2B etc. in Seattle etc. In… Read more »
You’re a corporate guy, roger. Are you aware of any corporate annual meetings where shareholders vote remotely? Or where 10k shareholders are involved in a meeting all at the same time? Corporate boards do this all the time. Then there’s the matter of participation in debates…
The EC revisited the matter recently but without a new, formal analysis.
William. With corporations most shares are held by mutual funds and institutional investors. However, in the old days individual people held shares in their own name. They voted by way of a proxy that the shareholder mailed in — in advance of the meeting. Also, any shareholder could show up, in person, at the annual meeting if he wanted to with proxy in hand. My wife and I did this several times and voted our shares, in person, at the meeting by turning in our proxy cards at the meeting as we entered the room. If the SBC had a… Read more »
Roger, I don’t assume that you didn’t but the previous articles linked (and the embedded links in them) discuss a lot of this. You have a lot of good thoughts and more knowledge than I of the tech stuff that might be relevant to this. Here’s what I see in these discussions: 1. The general idea that the SBC “disenfranchises” churches by not providing a way for them to participate and/or vote is one that sells well. There’s always a market for it. Details don’t matter. 2. It’s reflexive to get demagogic with this. After all, what kind of sorry… Read more »
I will be attending the annual meeting in Orlando. I’ve booked a flight for less than $200. A hotel near the convention center for two nights for less than $75 a night. If you share the room, the cost for that goes down too. With some free meals and a few other cheap meals, it is more than possible to attend the convention for $500 or a little more. I’m a small church pastor who has really only been a part of small churches. If a church really wants to send a messenger to the convention, almost all can come… Read more »
Adam Blosser I think it is more of an issue of want to. I make attending every year even though I am bivocational. Even while bringing my kiddo manage to spend less then $1000. People can attend if they want to.
I agree with you Andrew. I don’t mean to minimize the sacrifice it often requires for people to attend, but we sacrifice to attend the things we really want to attend. Thank you for your commitment to being a part of the process.
I think that’s the issue: some folks in smaller churches and bivo situations, there’s not enough ‘want to’ on the part of the church. Sometimes there’s want to on one side but not on the other–and sometimes it’s truly a “cannot.” When I was bi-vo, the church didn’t have the ‘want to’ and I didn’t have the personal funds to make the trip–I wasn’t starting near a major airport, it would cost $300 to fly anywhere, and when that’s a week’s salary from your job, it’s getting cost prohibitive quick. The church didn’t want it as a priority, and we… Read more »
Thanks for enlightening me. I will be voting for Randy Adams.
I think the bottom line is that isn’t going to happen because the people in charge don’t want it to happen. It’s not because of logistics or technical hurdles. They are real, but they are far from insurmountable.
The bottom line is that no one who supports remote voting cares enough to gather the masses for just one time to force the issue on the floor of the convention.
There are considerable legal hurdles. Folks in charge, I grant you, like status quo.
I don’t have an opinion on this topic one way or another. I do challenge everyone to find some footage on the 1985 SBCAM in Dallas. We had 45,000+ messengers. This required the messengers to be divided into 2 assembly halls.
We had long periods of dead time while the moderator and recording secretary got motions and ballot results from down the hall. (Every vote would have to be ballot with remote locations, no show of hand votes.)
A hundred or so assemblies will cause issues people have never considered. This is not an easy proposition.
I could wish that every Southern Baptist had the highest level of integrity, but we know that such is not the case. There have been abuses in our system. Even though the instruction that you must be in the room to vote is made clear at every election, do we believe that such NEVER happens? I wish I believed that.
If we had remote site voting, or even worse, in-home or in-church voting, the potential for abuse would be great. That is just one factor in this, but it is a real factor.
Before any changes are made about e-participation in the annual meeting, I think a good hard look at the annual meeting as it exists now is in order. I follow along remotely but I’ve never been in person. A lot of it seems (from the outside) as superfluous. If we lost the resolutions, which are meaningless, and the celebrity cameo speeches, how much time is actually spent on real, impactful work?
It’s an essential legal meeting. Trustees, committees, budgets are formally approved. As the SBC geeks would say, ‘The SBC only exists while the convention is in session.”
Resolutions are not an essential task of the am.
The EC has done a feasibility study on this and has decided there are too many legal issues involved. In addition, the way the annual meeting works is that anyone can make a nomination for an officer on the floor of the convention without announcing it beforehand. Customarily, the announcement for president is made a few months in advance, but technically, any messenger from the floor can make a nomination on the spot. Also, it would be very difficult to have a true debate/discussion on motions, etc. with remote access. Here’s a real possibility: Let’s say that the live feed… Read more »
Bill – I love your thoughts here. The resolutions are totally meaningless and I could not care less about the celebrity cameo speeches. The reports and the business are important. They’ve decreased the time spent, which is good, but it could probably be streamlined even more.
Raises a fair question. Churches don’t vote, messengers do. Churches are allotted a number, two to twelve. The SBC prez is a constitutional officer with legal status. I suppose the thing could be reworked so that the president is elected by proxy which would mean that candidates would have to be nominated before the meeting, churches would have to register messengers prior, committees would have to check and certify messengers before the meeting, and some locations or system for voting created. Corporations do this through evoting for stock shares and those shares voted by proxy at the annual meeting. Corporations… Read more »