As all informed SBCers know, the Southern Baptist Convention employs no one, fires no one, has no CEO, and doesn’t exist except for a couple of days each year when in annual session. The SBC has, though, a number of entities: mission boards, seminaries, Executive Committee, ERLC, etc. that are governed by separate trustee bodies. If the ERLC wants to hire or fire a CEO, their trustees do it, not the Executive Committee, not the SBC in annual session.
What’s complicated is how the various entities arrive at their trustee body makeup. A recent Baptist Press story, IMB study to examine trustee fluctuations, waded into the high weeds of trustee selection and representation. Read the story and then tell me if it makes good sense to you, that is, is it easy to follow and understand? I’m guessing that maybe one in 500 pastors has an understanding of the things written about in the article.
The gist of it is that state conventions, or territories, have to reach a certain threshold of church membership to qualify to have trustee or committee representation on the various committees or entities. The threshold varies by committee or entity. Some require 15,000 members, some 20,000 members, some 25,000 members. The membership number comes from the Annual Church Profile.
So when the ACP is published, if a state convention or territory falls under the threshold no replacement trustee is appointed. The state or area loses a seat. According to the article, the Alaska, Utah-Idaho and the Hawaii-Pacific region have lost trustee slots on the IMB because of membership drops (and someone will have to explain the difference between a “territory” and a “region” because I’m not clear if the terms used are legal terms or just chosen by the writer of the article…and I don’t want to get that deep into it).
The larger state conventions also get a limited number of additional trustee slots for higher membership levels.
The Executive Committee discussed the matter and these questions were reported to have been raised:
- Could waiver of an objective numerical standard for representation set an unhelpful precedent?
- Should states with large numbers of Southern Baptists have their representation reduced to keep the committee at its current size?
- To what extent should the cost of additional members factor into consideration of expanding the EC?
I’d answer, “yes,” “not sure,” and “to a great extent.” I’m glad there are some smart people on the EC.
A few high-weeds observations:
- Spreading trusteeships around should give a broader base of support for the entity. I’m not certain how necessary this is in the 21st century.
- Trustees are expensive to manage. Some years ago IMB was spending sums in six figures just to pay trustee travel and expenses. This may be money well spent although I have often heard entity people complain about waste on this.
- Any expansion of trustee boards should be closely scrutinized. In the past IMB had almost 100 trustees, a body considerably larger than the median SBC church and larger than tens of thousands of SBC churches.
- The ACP is less and less popular and return rates are declining. I think about 20% of SBC churches don’t file it at all. In some cases LifeWay just carries over numbers from the last reporting year for a church that fails to file. How reliable the membership numbers are is a good question.
- There are situations where membership numbers are incentivized for a state convention or territory and it pays to finagle the figures upward. Some SBC entities have had to tighten the figures they accept from the states and territories because of questionable numbers reported.
- My editorial observation is that states and territories that lose a trustee slot ought to be more concerned with declining membership that with keeping plum trustee slots.
On a slow SBC news day, this kind of thing might be worth thinking about even though it isn’t sexy or worth fighting over.
Perhaps some of the brethren or sistren can further educate me on these things.
It is rare that boards with more than 15 members can effectively fulfill the governance role. I suspect that this is one of the major causes of issues at IMB and ERLC. Effective governance is critical to organizational success. Maybe we need have 15 regions with one Trustee each.
There may be something to the idea of a smaller board structure being more effective. I don’t know enough details about how the trustee boards are structured (I believe there are sub-committees and I don’t know how much work is shared among the members that a larger group may be helpful in some cases).
I disagree that that has anything to do with the situations you mentioned and don’t think it would be helpful to rehash those issues here.
2 points: 1) From my limited experience of serving as a trustee at one of our seminaries, there is really only a small number of trustees that guide the decision making process anyway, so to downsize the number of trustees across the board would probably have minimal impact on how things get done. 2) If we are using membership as the metric for representation on the boards, should we not have a definitive, across-the-board understanding of what membership is in any given church? At some churches, baptism makes you a member. At others, covenants are required to be signed. At… Read more »
Off the top of my head… 15 is probably too few -100 may be too many.
“Fixing” it would certainly be a fight though, imo.
The concept of spreading trustee appointments throughout the SBC is sound. Who doesn’t believe that if IMB or NAMB had just a couple dozen trustees each that they would all be megachurch pastors, megaspouses, oligarchs and insiders all save for a token few? Forgive my cynicism.
But expanding a board that already has several dozen should be scrutinized, which is what is being done.
“Megaspouses” almost made me spew Mt. Dew all over my computer screen.
Yeah, that was funny.
How much is spent on travel and expenses for trustees? Who are they accountable to? Who monitors the monitors, is there any outside audits?
Eric, I’m not aware of anyone here at SBC Voices that’s equipped to answer that question. If you’re really interested, why don’t you do some research to find out? As it stands it seems more like a question designed to discredit or cast aspersions.
Brent, Sent certified letter to SBC on Commerce Street in Nashville, got back referral to website and information on convention. Called was told to refer website or email. In any event is that the true problem? This is not top secret info that could harm anyone or shame anyone. Would anyone on this forum go to a church that would not disclose their finances including payments to leadership executives? Is it a fair question to ask what happened to IMB trustee oversight when the IMB went boom due to mismanagement of resources. No public held company or government agency would… Read more »
Eric, if you’re asking the SBC Executive Committee questions about concerns internal to any of the entities, you’re asking the wrong people. I commend you for asking someone something, though.
William Thornton, Who do I ask ?
Eric, ask each one or the ones you are interested in (IMB, NAMB, specific seminaries, etc.). You might identify yourself, declare that you and your church are CP, LM, etc., SBC supporting, and ask your question.
Part of your problem is that you have been supplying your own made up answers and sound like a tire slasher rather than someone with honest questions. Nothing personal…I’ve just read a lot of your comments.
But…write one or more with some honest questions. I’d be interested in the answers.
1. For a large board, there are substantial expenses. I’m sure it’s millions. But, if the Boards aren’t window dressing, and if you want agencies to be accountable, that’s not a wasted expense. I’d rather pay to have Trustees on the ground four times a year for meaningful work than “save” money with a pointless conference call once a year. 2. Trustees are accountable to the Southern Baptist Convention as laid out in the SBC’s documents and the agency’s documents. The Convention is the sole member of each agency. It’s not ‘direct,’ in that the Convention does not instruct on… Read more »
I’d be somewhat less optimistic about the value of the expenses. The slots are sometimes just perks. Some trustee failures, both state convention and national, have been quite spectacular.
Even making mild statements like these or asking pertinent questions often, quite often, brands one a troublemaker. There is little that trustees do that couldn’t be made open to those who pay the bills but we’d rather stay dark than do that.
Oh, I won’t deny there have been bad boards. You *can* waste money on travel. But you can’t separate good and bad boards based just on cheap travel budgets. It costs a lot of money to get sixty folks from all corners of Baptistdom to a meeting, even if they work themselves to death and sleep at a Motel 3. If the Trustees don’t provide value, we could save money cutting the board down to three, and buying them lunch in bed at the Ritz for a day or two. But cheaper, shorter meetings aren’t a sign necessarily a better… Read more »