Critical Issues Concerning Southern Baptist Structure

With three key presidential vacancies at hand, pardon my analogy from paganism when I suggest that the planets may have aligned for sweeping changes in Southern Baptist Convention structure. Whether this will prove a blessing or a curse is a question. Bureaucratic structures are tenacious under assault. Just consider the repeated attempts at federal tax reform, resulting in an IRS more bloated and a tax code more confused, complex and convoluted than ever before. There is no guarantee that a new denominational structure will be an improvement over what we have now. If recent reorganizations are any indication I'm not optimistic. Would anyone seriously suggest that the Executive Committee has better preserved Baptist history than the old Historical Commission once did? With the debatable exception of disaster relief, has NAMB improved on any of those tasks once the responsibilities of the Brotherhood and Radio and Television Commissions?

Ask any church consultant what happens when two churches merge. In most cases within less than five years the combined congregations will shrink to the size of the larger of the two churches prior to the merger. Mergers of any kind—be it churches or corporations—are hard to pull off. Efficiency does not necessarily equal effectiveness. Yet some suggest that it's time to merge the International Mission Board and the North American Mission Board into one all-encompassing mission agency. At first glance it's an appealing concept.

The Southern Baptist Convention first organized in 1845, primarily for the purpose of giving birth to two mission agencies, known then as the Foreign Mission Board and the Domestic Mission Board. After a series of name changes and reorganizations we ended up in 1997 with the current North American Mission Board, to serve the needs of the United States and its territories, along with Canada, and the International Mission Board to serve the mission needs of the rest of the world.

In 1845 it was perfectly logical to divide up the denomination's missionary task into the two big categories of foreign and domestic. Those were the days when a clipper ship leaving the East Coast of the United States would take half a year or more to reach Shanghai. Missionaries boarding those ships said goodbye to family members on the dock not expecting to meet them again this side of heaven. In most of the world in those days people group locations corresponded reasonably well with national boundaries or if not, the people group was typically contained within a contiguous region that included one or two adjacent nation states. In few cases were people groups widely scattered across the globe. (The main exceptions were those European peoples, such as the Irish, who were immigrating to the United States and Canada.) Most people on the planet were born, lived, and died within a few miles of the same cross-reference of latitude and longitude. Most people still lived in rural and small town settings. The few larger cities that did exist were fairly homogeneous in makeup.

In 1845 there were still significant areas of Africa, Asia, and South America that were unknown and unvisited by any American or European explorer. The challenges for missionaries in those days tended to focus on daunting logistical barriers. Crossing oceans, rivers, mountains, and deserts; confronting often hostile native populations who spoke languages unknown to the missionary or his or her sending agency; disease, hunger, snake bite, and isolation; the list goes on and on. IMB Strategy Facilitator for the Western Amazon Valley of Brazil, Victor Nickerson, once told me about his study of the early missionaries to the Amazon. When he examined the historical records he discovered one quality that more than any other determined the success or failure of their work: a natural resistance to malaria. Most of those early missionaries died within two years of their arrival.

Today in many profound ways we live in a radically different world. The world is now more urban than rural. Populations are growing and constantly shifting. A few years ago IMB adopted a people group-based strategy around which to organize its missionary efforts. We stopped talking about sending a missionary to reach Djibouti. We now speak of sending missionaries to reach the Somalis or the Oromo or the Afar people. But the problem is that people groups today represent moving targets. A generation ago missiologists coined the term 10-40 Window as a convenient way to talk about the most unreached region on earth. But population migration has made the term less useful than it was twenty years ago. We once spoke of the Window as defining the people groups within the region between 10˚ north and 40˚ north latitude across Africa and Asia. Today significant pockets of the Window live in London, Paris, Frankfurt, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and in thousands of other cities, towns and rural locations. The 10-40 Window, like the people groups associated with it, has torn lose from its geographical mooring. We must redesign our strategies to conform to these new realities.

So while once the work of the two mission boards could be neatly compartmentalized, a changing global scene has now hopelessly entangled their missionary tasks.

Nonetheless until recent years there has been very little deliberate contact between these agencies. While both are charged with expanding the Kingdom of God under the Southern Baptist banner, they have done so using distinctive approaches and with very different corporate cultures. There isn't even uniformity in definitions and terminology. At IMB CPM means church planting movement. At NAMB it means church planting missionary. Our boards don't even speak the same language.

The differences between our domestic and international mission agencies run far deeper than the geography of the regions they serve. The corporate cultures of the two boards are as different as those of Apple Computer and the Marine Corp. Short of firing everybody from the vice presidents all the way down to the secretaries and starting over with a blank slate (Who can forget that seamless transition from HMB to NAMB and its resultant body count?) such a merger cannot help but be incredibly messy and stressful.

Just consider the difference in how salaries are structured. At IMB salaries are determined by two factors: tenure of the missionary with the agency and an adjustment to reflect the local cost of living. Consequently if your spiritual gifts equip you to be an effective church planter you have no economic incentive to seek transfer to an administrative role in some regional office—a job for which you may not be gifted. At NAMB and in virtually all state convention offices, salaries are determined in a hierarchical structure similar to that found in the secular corporate world. Church planters are typically at the bottom. Strategists rank higher. State convention salaries run higher on average than those of associational workers. And as for any cost of living adjustments, often missionary salaries in high cost of living areas such as the big cities of the Northeast and the West Coast are actually lower than their counterparts in old convention areas such as Mississippi and Alabama where the cost of living is greatly reduced. It is not surprising that such a system would encourage people to move from regions of great spiritual need but where compensation for ministers is stingy to areas of the country with a much stronger gospel presence but where the pay is better. In the same way field missionaries sometimes seek promotion to better-paying administrative roles for which they may be ill-suited, often leaving a ministry that they love and in which they were very effective. In our unthinking adoption of a secular corporate model of compensation, we have inadvertently proclaimed that the spiritual gift of administration is more valuable than that of evangelism. But in my 37 years in Southern Baptist ministry I have yet to hear anyone admit this.

Complicating this different approach to determining salaries is the fact that IMB missionaries work exclusively for IMB. NAMB missionaries, with only a handful of exceptions, are jointly commissioned and funded by NAMB and one of 42 different state conventions or with the conventions of Canada or the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. These joint funding arrangements are determined by 44 different cooperative agreements.

The two boards embrace profoundly different operational philosophies. This reflects the enormous differences in the nature of their respective tasks. IMB has a monolithic structure that relates to other Baptist groups around the world much the same way that a megachurch in Texas relates to some association in Minnesota in order to co-sponsor a new work in the Northwoods. No matter how gracious their manners or benevolent their intent, they will tend to overwhelm their Minnesota partners—and in the end they will control the decision-making process.

While NAMB exercises considerable power in dealing with the weak and cash-strapped conventions of the north, it must also work with some old line conventions possessing far more resources than NAMB, conventions that send more money to NAMB through the Cooperative Program and the Annie Armstrong Offering than NAMB will ever return.

Risking a very unbiblical metaphor, the role of the state conventions is the joker in the deck that complicates any hypothetical merger of IMB and NAMB. They are autonomous bodies that cannot be ignored nor can they be dictated to by any SBC board, agency, or study group. The only way to circumvent them would be to adopt a radically different approach to missions in the United States, abandoning the concept of joint funding and making all domestic missionaries the direct employees of NAMB or of some new global mission board. Such a move would almost certainly spark a civil war in the Southern Baptist Convention resulting in a catastrophic drop in CP giving.

If we were designing a new denomination in 2009 would we approach it differently than we did in 1845? Assuredly. But we have not the luxury of simply ignoring 164 years of Southern Baptist mission history. We are, at least to some extent, the prisoners of our own past. So while I agree that to do nothing but continue as we are is a long-term strategy for decline into irrelevance we must move forward with all the care of a man traversing a minefield. I believe that rather than approaching this "Great Commission Resurgence" with sweeping changes that could easily cost the denomination more in lost good will and trust than any gains won in organizational efficiency, we ought to focus on the most egregious flaws in the current system and address them one by one. I suggest starting with the following items:

• Some structure or system must be devised that results in ongoing, meaningful communication between IMB and NAMB at multiple levels from the presidents all the way to the field missionaries. The people group strategy of IMB must become truly global. When a Somali man moves from Mogadishu to Toronto to Minneapolis to London to Seattle (and in the case of a Somali that is not as unreasonable a hypothetical scenario as you might think) it is absurd that he not remain the focus of the same strategy coordinator whose team is seeking to reach all Somalis everywhere.
  
• We must develop missionary recruitment and training strategies that work across existing agency boundaries. We need an expanding pool of cross-cultural missionaries. The cultural skills required of a native Minnesotan trying to reach Somalis in Minneapolis are far greater than those of American leading an English-speaking congregation in Aberdeen, Scotland. Some years ago the US military began requiring joint command training for all their senior officers. Before promotion to general officer rank, all army, navy, marine and air force officers must serve a tour where they work side by side with officers from other military branches. Such cross-training would be invaluable for missionaries both foreign and domestic, especially for those serving in the great global cities of the earth.
  
• Domestically we must address the disparate salaries of missionaries doing similar work for dramatically different levels of compensation. We have never attempted to seriously address the economic factor in our miserable track record in evangelizing high cost-of-living urban areas such as New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, etc. It is not uncommon for a Director of Missions for a small city in the South to make tens of thousands of dollars more than his counterpart in a city like San Francisco. The home that the Southern DOM bought for $150,000 could not be touched for ten times that much in the Mission District of San Francisco. Yet the IMB missionary who works in Tokyo or London or Moscow does get at least a partial cost of living adjustment.
  
• The current makeup of the SBC's Great Commission Council, a creation of the last major SBC reorganization, is heavily skewed in favor of the interests of theological education at the expense of missions. Six seminary presidents and two mission board presidents all have equal votes. Yet when you consider the SBC budget nearly 75% of Cooperative Program funding goes to IMB and NAMB—not to the seminaries. This lopsided influence of seminary presidents on the council is bad for missions. Combine IMB and NAMB and you go from 6-to-2 to 6-to-1 in favor of seminaries over mission boards. If this body—whose work and very existence is a mystery to most Southern Baptists—is to continue functioning, this imbalance needs to be corrected.
  
• Any merging of mission boards must be done in a way that protects and preserves the priority of reaching the new convention regions of the United States. Winning Albany, New York will never have the same romantic appeal that winning China or India has. Gary, Indiana has little cachet when competing for the imaginations (and mission gifts) of Southern Baptists with places like Nairobi or Rio de Janeiro. I am not suggestion that these various priorities are equally important. But I am saying that we risk hard-won gains in the U.S. outside the South if we suddenly abandon what we have started.
  
• Finally, we need to fundamentally reexamine how we as Southern Baptists do missions education. We are failing at this critical task. I believe that the poor job that we are doing in educating our people about missions, from our youngest children through our senior adults, also underlies the weakness of much of our stewardship education. We need to gather the best and brightest from NAMB, IMB, WMU, LifeWay, state convention leadership, as well as a representative group of pastors and lay leaders to rethink how we teach missions.

God bless the men and women of the Great Commission Resurgence Task Force. They may end up shaping the next chapter of Southern Baptist history. I hope they appreciate the fragile treasure that they hold.

Glen A. Land, State Missions Director

Minnesota-Wisconsin Baptist Convention