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I applaud the direction of our denomination as ABCUSA explores new ways of creating community, forging identity and engaging in mission in 2010 and beyond. I believe that the proposed structural changes will allow us to do these things more effectively and efficiently. My hope is that the changes, if approved, will lead to increased partnership and participation between the local church and its leadership with the various national mission entities. While our current structure served us well in the 70s and 80s, by the time the 1990s rolled around, it became time-worn. |
Our current structure is a child of the waning days of Christendom in America, designed primarily for legislation and regulation while affirming the fundamental values of representation and diversity. At one time, the denomination wanted to speak with a single voice on national and international issues of importance. At one time, our denomination was moving towards a single standard when it came to things like ordination, educational requirements and commissioning. The days of regulating local churches and regions on these matters are long gone.
The best thing about our current structure has been the representative process and commitment to racial-ethnic diversity and gender inclusiveness. For almost two score years, those commitments have been effective in changing and growing our denomination in such a way that ABCUSA is one of the most racially diverse and gender inclusive denominations in mainline Protestantism. American Baptists are healthily represented at the General Board table by a balance of whites and people of color, men and women, clergy and lay, and a balanced geographic distribution.
One flaw in our current structure is the overlapping of Board structures where the same group of people wear a multiplicity of fiduciary hats. Our current structure dictates that the Boards of International Ministries and National Ministries elect their Board of Directors only and exclusively from among people who sit as directors of the General Board of ABCUSA. This means that a director on the General Board also serves as a director on either the Board of National Ministries or the Board of International Ministries.
In most cases, these same directors also serve as directors on their Regional Boards. Therefore, a “Representative” is likely to be a director of his or her Regional Board, the General Board, and one of the Mission Boards. As though this were not enough responsibility for one person, our current structure also calls for persons sitting as a Director on one Mission Board to serve as a member of the other Mission Board. Our current structure wears out good people with endless meetings, competing commitments, and confusing bureaucracies.
Our current structure makes it particularly difficult to recruit and retain pastors to serve as directors on a multiplicity of denominational boards. Besides serving their churches, most of the pastors I know have time for perhaps only one other really big thing to engage in as an expression of their ministries (such as community engagement, politics, education, etc.). It is the rare pastor who has both the time and the interest to serve concurrently on three different denominational boards. If that pastor serves with distinction on any of the three boards he or she is a part of, the chances are that he or she will become part of an executive committee, special task force or commission.
One of the positive impacts of the proposed new structure is the de-coupling of our board structures, which would allow each board to recruit board members who are not required to wear other denominational hats. I believe that this is really significant when it comes to clergy leadership at the denominational level. The pool of clergy leadership willing and able to offer excellent skills and direction to a single board will only expand in our new structure.
This will be a good thing for pastors serving as directors and the churches they serve going forward. In the future, seldom will we have the need for a “meetings week” where a pastor would have to be absent from the pulpit on Sunday morning in order to accommodate the denomination’s need to fit everything in.
Our commitment to diversity and our current representative process has made ABCUSA a very big tent theologically, politically and culturally. That is a good thing. For the last twenty years, however, we have found it incredibly difficult to speak with one voice or to discern the mind of Christ on several issues of importance. We have become adamant in our perspective that our denomination is the “American Baptist Churches” and not the “American Baptist Church.”
Increasingly, local churches and regions do not feel that the “denomination” speaks for them. While I am not sure if our current amalgamation of societies, associations and regions doing ministry as the American Baptist Churches USA is a denomination in the truest sense of the word, I am pretty clear that while every entity (church, region, society, etc.) refuses to have its voice muffled, no entity these days is completely comfortable with having another speak for it.
The proposed new structure provides a way for each of the partners in our system, from the local church to the Board of General Ministries, to speak its own truth without having to affirm continuity or compliance with the truth of others, nor engaging our denomination in endless theological and cultural battles. Positively, this will increase our capacity to form communities of learning and practice addressing our fundamental needs for identity and community.
From where I sit as Executive Director of the American Baptist Home Mission Societies (National Ministries), the proposed new structure will free our denomination up to do what it does best, to engage in mission and to partner with each other to make mission happen.
For the last twenty years a large number of pastors and churches disengaged from ABCUSA as culture wars and structural battles became the order of the day. I am proud of the work of my colleagues on the General Board and General Executive Council who for the last couple of years have sought to get back to the business of making the main thing the main thing.
For the Home Mission Societies, that means addressing mission in America. I believe that in our new setting, with a board free to do its business and speak its truth, we will find committed leaders to direct us, and willing and prayerful churches and individuals to join us, in that enterprise. The decisions that we make this year will have a deep impact on what we are all able to do together in 2010 and beyond.