The Strange Ways of Doing Business in a Christian Denomination May Explain the Evangelical Aversion to Democracy

Baptist News Global: Confirmation that Adam Greenway is Out as President of Southwestern Seminary

Big deal, huh?  The president of one of the six seminaries owned and operated by the Southern Baptist Convention resigns, because of trustee pressure on him, due mainly to two things.  One, his treatment of and management of the school's faculty, causing more than 40 of them, fully a third of the total, to leave during the three years of his tenure.  Two, the fact that the school has been declining in enrollment for over a decade, under the mis-management of Greenway's predecessor, Paige Patterson and reported a $12 million deficit this fall.  In spite of the firing of his predecessor for complete incompetence, and bringing in new leadership, enrollment has not recovered and the budget shortfall has grown. 

This was apparently known before it was reported, since the trustees have been regularly cranking out reports that everything at Southwestern Seminary was just hunky dory.  But Dr. Greenway obviously knew he was on the way out, because he made a very nice, "soft landing" transition into a completely unrelated job at the Southern Baptist Convention's International Mission Board, where a job had been created specifically for him.  It wasn't an open position, but apparently Dr. Greenway has some friends on the IMB trustee board, or among the administrators, to land a nice high dollar administrator post which didn't exist before.  

This has been the modus operandi of the Southern Baptist Convention for virtually all of its existence.  It is structured and set up in such a way that the entities which it owns and operates, including its executive committee, two mission boards, six seminaries and its Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) which is its lobbyist arm, are run by trustees appointed by a committee that is appointed by whomever is elected president of the convention at its annual meeting every June.  

It's an Oligarchy of the Privileged and Prominent, Not a Democracy 

The Southern Baptist Convention itself consists of an executive director and staff, based in Nashville.  It has an executive committee, made up of individuals from its state conventions, nominated by a committee and the nominees are approved as a group by the messengers who attend the annual meeting of the convention as a whole.  This group conducts the financial and business affairs of the denomination, which involves managing contributions which come from its 45,000 or so independent, autonomous, affiliated churches through state convention groups.  Those contributions, known as the "Cooperative Program," support missionaries appointed through two mission boards, one for North America, one international, six theological seminaries which train pastors and missions personnel, a small, Washington-based lobby organization known as the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, and a publishing house, Lifeway, also based in Nashville.  

Only the officers of the convention are elected, and they are not elected by church members at large, but by the messengers who attend the annual convention.  Churches are allocated a specific number of messengers, up to a maximum of 10, I think, based on their total membership and, of course, on the amount of money the church gives to the Cooperative Program.  Messengers are nominated and elected by their local churches, so the process is rife with factions and special interests and dominated by celebrity pastors and megachurches, in a denomination where the average church attendance is 80.  

The fact that the president of the convention has the power to appoint the committee which nominates the members of every entity board of trustees makes it a set-up for a faction within the denomination to gain, and hold, control of the mission boards, seminaries and other entities for decades.  The steep decline in revenue, church membership and attendance that has plagued the SBC since 2006 is due, largely to the fact that the tendency has been to elect leaders based on who they know, rather than how well equipped they are to do the job.  

A fundamentalist faction got control of the Presidency in 1979 and has not relinquished it since then.  They won control with the claim that many of those in leadership positions were "theological liberals" and "didn't believe the Bible."  That was much more of a conspiracy theory than the truth, but it led to their complete control of every denominational entity and it has resulted in major declines in church membership and attendance, issues at virtually every seminary, both mission boards, Lifeway Christian Publishers and the ERLC.  

Multiple Examples of Incompetence and Mismanagement

The stewardship of offerings from churches, on which the denomination runs, is abominable and wasteful.  Virtually every entity of the SBC has gone through a decline, financial crisis, leadership shift, and some kind of restructuring and re-organization at one point or another.  Entities have become places where prominent, influential individuals can build a personal kingdom, gathering trustees and staff who express personal loyalty to them and enjoy living off a top-dollar salary and perks paid at the expense of those who give sacrificially to their local church.  

The article cited at the top, noting the departure of Dr. Adam Greenway from the presidency of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, is just one in a long string of such incidents which occur with regularity in the Southern Baptist Convention.  Once the largest seminary in the world, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary is a shell of its former self.  It became the fief of Dr. Paige Patterson, one of the two "architects" of the "conservative resurgence," which aimed to take over the SBC beginning in 1979, making it even more conservative than it already was, and which completed the task by 1989.  As a reward, Patterson was given the presidency at Southwestern Seminary, a job he always wanted.  Coming from a broken down Bible college in East Dallas, Patterson first served at Southeastern Seminary as partial compensation for the takeover he engineered, before heading to his native Texas and Fort Worth.  

In 15 years, after firing competent, quality professors, bringing in his buds and friends, establishing degree programs and majors that were worthless and which only a few students were interested, Patterson went through the school's capital reserves, CP allocation and contributed dollars like a hot knife through butter.  Beyond that, his personal misogyny and his theological complimentarian views of women led him to mishandle allegations of sexual abuse on both of the campuses at Southeastern and Southwestern.  That eventually got him canned,  but not until after years of incompetence led to the decline and financial issues at Southwestern, while trustees, most of whom he had used his influence to get on the board, looked on and did absolutely nothing except give their rubber stamp approval to everything he did or said.  

Church membership has dropped three million in just a little over a decade, with the years since Trump was in the White House representing growing declines in the hundreds of thousands, more than 400,000 in the last year they reported the membership.  And yet, while there are those who see the need to make a change, the structure and the system are designed in a way to prevent it.  

Reflections in Right-Wing Politics

Southern Baptists will call their convention system "democratic" because messengers elect officers and vote on business at the annual meeting.  But this isn't democracy at all.  It is an oligarchy.  Here's why: 

• The number of messengers a church can send to a convention is determined by how much money the church contributed to SBC causes during the previous year.  This is a throwback to the old "property owners vote" days, and to voting patterns prevalent in confederate states during the Civil War. 
• Only the officers of the convention, including President, first, second and third vice-presidents, recording secretary and registration secretary, all of whom are members of the executive committee by virtue of office, are actually elected by the convention messengers.  All of the committees and trustee boards, while subject to a collective "vote" of approval, are appointed by a special committee which is named by the convention president.  So whoever is the president can control the make-up of every board.  And naming friends, close associates and allies to these positions has been a very common practice since conservatives gained control of the presidency in 1979. 
• Because they are members of the executive committee, the registration secretary and recording secretary can avoid the "term limits" required of other executive committee members.  Some have served more than 20 years, and have been a pipeline of influence for factions controlling the convention.  
• Trustee boards have absolute control over the entities they run.  It has been made deliberately difficult to challenge them, even in the middle of spectacular crises.  

The Southern Baptist Convention has been hit hard in recent years, because its way of choosing leaders has led to some of the most incredibly incompetent leadership choices imaginable.  You can see what has happened at Southwestern Seminary, made even more incredible by the fact that nothing really changes.  Irresponsible and incompetent leadership has led to revelations of a sexual abuse crisis worse than anything the Roman Catholic Church imagined could happen.  

I include this information as a warning.  If we continue to elect right wing leadership connected to the religious right, this is what we will get.  There is an appeal here to the appearance of "democratic values."  But the fact of the matter is that within this particular religious denomination, control by an oligarchy is the status quo, and it always has been that way.  It's a throwback to the antebellum south, to a culture and time when prestige and prominence, in the form of wealth and influence, mattered, and nothing else did.  It was a society based on class, with the lower classes there to serve the wealthy and preserve the status quo, as well as someone else's wealth.  That's the Southern Baptist Convention in a nutshell.