A Time of Transition
Three key SBC leadership changes
by T. C. Pinckney Vol. XXII, No. 9, Nov/Dec 2009
Each of us experiences many changes. We finish school and look for a job. We marry and make the adjustments. Jobs change. We age and learn to cope with the physical limitations. Organizations, even Christian denominations, also face times of transition and change. And so it is today with the Southern Baptist Convention. Three key posts are or soon will be open, and search committees are prayerfully seeking God’s man for each of these positions.
IMB leader Jerry Rankin announces retirement
International Mission Board President Jerry Rankin announced Sep. 16 that he will retire July 31, 2010, ending a 17-year tenure marked by sweeping organizational changes and a steady personal calling. "Everything I have done has been driven by an unequivocal sense of a call to missions, to make my life count and to make the greatest impact possible on reaching a lost world for Jesus Christ," Rankin said.
Rankin told IMB trustees during his report at their Sept. 15-16 meeting in Jacksonville, FL, that his presidency should not be judged for the accomplishments of the organization under his leadership but for how the organization is poised for the future.
Such sentiments are consistent to Rankin's approach in leading the 163-year-old organization. Early in his administration Rankin began placing a greater emphasis on the work remaining in world evangelization than on what had been accomplished.
When Rankin took over leadership of the IMB in 1993, the Southern Baptist mission organization saw nearly 4,000 missionaries help start more than 2,000 churches in 142 countries. Last year more than 5,500 IMB missionaries helped plant nearly 27,000 churches and engage 101 new people groups for a total of 1,190 engaged people groups.
The move from tracking countries to focusing on people groups reveals another area where Rankin worked to change the IMB. Country counts faded during the past 10 years as the organization shifted to finding the best ways to engage new people groups and population centers.
"To mobilize and involve churches and Southern Baptists rather than our doing missions on behalf of Southern Baptists is an innovation that we have been pursuing for the past 12 years. The whole mobilization perspective is where we are going. That's the hope of the future of missions," Rankin said.
"Never in my experience have we had a board of trustees so unified, supportive and sensitive to the spiritual nature of our task," he said in his report. Rankin said this common vision is vital as the organization moves into the next phase of its history.
"We have always been a missionary-sending agency with unlimited capacity to send and support the missionaries being called out of our Southern Baptist churches. That is no longer the case as appointments are being restricted and strategies must be changed to more effectively deploy and utilize limited numbers of personnel.
"The next president must deal with economic realities that will not permit us to presume upon unlimited financial resources as we have in the past. Southern Baptists are at a point of crisis in deciding whether to continue a bureaucratic legacy, supporting a comprehensive plethora of ministries and programs, or focus resources on fulfilling the Great Commission."
IMB search committee seeks recommendations
A team of International Mission Board trustees met Oct. 6 in Richmond, VA, and announced they will begin accepting recommendations to bolster their search for the IMB's next president. The 15-member search committee was appointed in September following Jerry Rankin's announcement that he will retire as IMB president in July 2010. Jimmy Pritchard, senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Forney, TX, is chairing the committee with Norman Coe, associate pastor of Highview Baptist Church in Louisville, KY, as vice chair.
"We will be grateful for Southern Baptists' recommendations as we consider the individual God is calling. All recommendations will be valued and prayerfully considered."
Recommendations can be sent to imbpresident@fbcforney.org or to P.O. Box 97, Forney, TX 75126. The deadline for submissions is Dec. 31.
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Morris Chapman announces Executive Committee retirement
Morris H. Chapman has announced his plans to retire as president and chief executive officer of the Southern Baptist Convention's Executive Committee effective Sept. 30, 2010. Chapman, upon retirement, will have led the Executive Committee 18 years.
His tenure has spanned junctures of:
– theological conviction, such as the adoption of the Baptist Faith and Message 2000.
– heightened denominational effectiveness, such as the streamlining of the SBC's entities during the mid-1990s and an invigorated emphasis on the Cooperative Program and stewardship.
– cultural relevance, such as the SBC's racial reconciliation resolution in 1995 and a multi-year emphasis on family ministry that began in the latter 1990s.
Chapman, 68, announced his retirement in a letter to Executive Committee members on the opening day of their Sept. 20-21 meeting in Nashville, TN, writing that after giving "serious and prayerful thought to my retirement date" in recent years, "the time has come."
His announcement comes on "my 50th anniversary in the ministry," Chapman wrote, connecting back to his work on church staffs as a teenager followed by his first pastorate in Rogers, Texas, at age 26.
Chapman was elected as Executive Committee president while concluding two years of service as president of the Southern Baptist Convention (1990-92). He had preached the convention sermon at the 1989 SBC annual meeting in Las Vegas, served as president of the SBC Pastors' Conference in 1986 in Atlanta and chairman of the SBC Committee on Order of Business for the 1985 SBC meeting in Dallas.
Executive Committee authorizes search
Members of the Southern Baptist Convention's Executive Committee voted Sept. 20 to authorize their chairman to name a search committee for a successor to Morris H. Chapman who became Executive Committee president and chief executive officer on Oct. 1, 1992, after conservatives had prevailed in a battle dating back to 1979 to uphold biblical inerrancy in the Southern Baptist Convention.
EC chairman Randall James, an assistant pastor of First Baptist Church in Orlando, FL, did not immediately name a search committee after Chapman's announcement during the opening session of the EC's Sept. 20-21 meeting in Nashville, TN. James did ask Chapman, however, to remain in office after next September if the search process extends longer than expected.
7-member committee to seek Chapman successor
A seven-member search committee has been named to seek a successor for Morris H. Chapman, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Executive Committee. Executive Committee chairman Randall James, at the close of the EC's Sept. 21-22 meeting in Nashville, named himself and six others to the committee.
Joining James, a Floridian, on the presidential search committee are EC members Martha Lawley of Wyoming, Clarence J. Cooper of Mississippi, David O. Dykes of Texas, Doug Melton of Oklahoma, Jay F. Shell of Arkansas, and Danny S. Sinquefield of Tennessee.
James said he hopes the committee will be able to present a nominee by next June's SBC annual meeting in Orlando, FL. Names submitted to the committee will be held in "the strictest of confidence," James said, requesting that potential candidates' names be submitted by Dec. 31.
James said the names of nominees for president of the Executive Committee can be addressed to Presidential Search Committee c/o SBC Executive Committee, 901 Commerce St., Nashville, TN 37203, or to him at First Baptist Church, 3000 S. John Young Pkwy., Orlando, FL 32805.
TRUSTEES: NAMB search committee formed; Page to lead evangelism
As reported in the September 2009 Baptist Banner, Geoff Hammond and three of his closest associates resigned their positions with the North American Mission Board after trustees met more than seven hours in executive session Aug. 11. The resignations were effective immediately. No announcement has been forthcoming regarding reasons.
The appointment of an eight-member presidential search committee and the unanimous approval of former Southern Baptist Convention President Frank Page as vice president of evangelization topped news from the North American Mission Board's Oct. 7 trustee meeting in Denver.
Tim Patterson, chairman of NAMB's trustee board, appointed Ted Traylor, pastor of Olive Baptist Church in Pensacola, FL, as the committee's chairman.
Appointment of the search committee comes two months after the Aug. 11 resignation of Geoff Hammond, who had led NAMB since May 2007. Patterson acknowledged that he did not appoint a search team as quickly as the International Mission Board or the SBC Executive Committee, whose leaders both announced their pending retirements in recent weeks.
"If you look at the other entities that immediately selected their search teams, they have not gone through what we've gone through," Patterson told fellow trustees. "We needed some time for healing. We needed some time for realigning. We just needed some time to take a breath and wait a bit before we did this.
"They will begin their work immediately," Patterson said of the committee. "Please pray for that team as we seek God's will and God's direction."
Signaling their intention to strengthen NAMB and move the entity forward, trustees unanimously approved Frank Page to the top evangelism post.
"If you'll approve this recommendation," NAMB's interim president, Richard Harris, told trustees, "I believe it will take Southern Baptists to a new level in emphasis on evangelism and impact for the Kingdom and, most importantly, in fulfilling the Great Commission. I believe he is God's man for the hour to lead Southern Baptists forward."
After the unanimous vote, Page, pastor of Taylors First Baptist Church in Taylors, SC, addressed the trustees, saying in part, "Thank you, and I will pledge to you what I have pledged to every church to which I have ever gone. I will work with all my mind and love this work with all my heart. And I will lift up the name of our Lord Jesus wherever I go and whatever I do."
Page served as Southern Baptist Convention president from 2006-08. He has been pastor of First Baptist Church Taylors, SC, near Greenville since 2001.
Trustees also named Richard Harris as the mission board's interim president, to remain in the role until a president is chosen. Harris has been serving as acting interim president since Aug. 12.
In closing remarks to the trustees, Harris addressed the GCR and current discussion over restructuring the SBC. "The North American Mission Board staff welcomes any scrutiny, any help that would cause us to be more effective and more efficient," Harris said, urging trustees to pray for members of the GCR Task Force.
"I want to say to you without apology, I think Southern Baptists need two mission boards," Harris said. "We do need the North American Mission Board. We do need the International Mission Board. And if I walked out the door of NAMB today, I would still wave that flag. The missiology for reaching North America today is different than the missiology for reaching Third world countries."
[Above condensed from several Baptist Press articles.]