I have heard a lot of people advocating for what I have called the nuclear option – a vote in Anaheim to remove EVERY SINGLE trustee at the EC who votes to oppose the will of the messengers and refuses to support an agreement to give full support to best practices for the Sexual Abuse Task Force. I wrote an article last week saying that such was not a good idea, for three primary reasons.
- First, last week’s meeting was preliminary – the final decision wasn’t made yet.
- Second, there is another way. We can be patient and slowly replace trustees, year by year.
- Third, once we open this door, it remains open. We had two impeached presidents in well over 200 years of our nation’s existence and now we talk about impeachment the day after a president’s inauguration, it seems. Once we go down this road, we might have such motions at just about every AM.
For me, a trustee should not be removed because they voted in a way I don’t like. Dissent and disagreement should be treasured and protected. Trustees should be removed for heresy, for malfeasance, for misconduct, and for breach of fiduciary duty.
Today, the EC is meeting and Rob Downen has tweeted that negotiations with the EC have failed because the EC’s lawyers did not negotiate in good faith (this came from Bruce Franks). This is disturbing and discouraging. Evidently, Ronnie Floyd and others undercut any hope of an agreement between the EC officers and the Task Force.
In an update to Southern Baptist Exec Members, @BruceFrank1 says all-day negotiations with the abuse task force failed on Monday.
He says the task force does “not believe the new EC lawyers were acting in good faith or good knowledge of SBC polity.” #SBCtoo #SBC
— Robert Downen (@RobDownenChron) September 28, 2021
If there is no agreement today, I will be reconsidering my view of the “no nuclear option.”
I am coming to the belief that ignoring the nearly unanimous vote of the convention to all Ronnie Floyd and past staff and officers to avoid having their dealings with abuse victims come to the light may be a breach of fiduciary duty. If it is, then it is right to remove those who refuse the convention’s wishes.
There are various views here on how authoritative the vote of the convention is on the EC. I have asked people in the know and gotten a range of answers that were less than clear. I am not coming out in full support of removing trustees, but it is something I discounted a week ago and am considering now.
The confusion is the legal standing of the EC. Other entities actually have the right to refuse the resolutions and desires of the messengers (remember the NIV resolution?). The EC is different. It is the SBC ad interim and is different. No one seems to know exactly what that means and I am trying to figure it out, but it seems egregious to have a nearly unanimous vote of 15,000 messengers and have the EC basically thumb their nose at it – after Ronnie stood there and said he would listen!
I was optimistic that cooler heads would prevail and an agreement would be reached, but am told that Ronnie led out in scuttling the agreement. That is sad to see. Hopefully, the EC will correct the mistakes of their staff.
