GREENSBORO, N.C. (BP)–Messengers stepped in to prevent a seminary student who works for LifeWay Christian Stores while in school from being denied eligibility later in life as a LifeWay trustee — and other such situations — by voting for an amendment to an Executive Committee recommendation on trustee qualifications.
Executive Committee members in their June 12 meeting passed a recommendation to amend the SBC bylaws so that no person who has served as an employee of an entity would be eligible later to serve as a trustee of that entity.
“It’s hard for someone who has been working in an administrative capacity to come back and work in a governing position,” Mike Hamlet, pastor of First Baptist North Spartanburg in Spartanburg, S.C., told the committee on Monday.
“We’ve seen this happen several times not only in national entities but also I’ve seen it happen on the state level,” Hamlet said. “So it is really a protection there for our entities in having people govern there so that there are no hard feelings for anyone coming back on, either intentionally or unintentionally, where it might cause a problem or a conflict of interest.”
But at the SBC on June 13, Bill Sanderson, a messenger from Raleigh, N.C., objected to a segment of the recommendation which said, “No person shall be elected to serve on the board of any one of the above entities if the person or his or her spouse has ever been an employee of the entity, a subsidiary of the entity, or of an entity which has been merged into the entirety.” He moved that the wording be struck.
“I feel that if we have a student like some of these from Southeastern that are working at LifeWay in Raleigh to subsidize their work, when they graduate from Southeastern and they go off and pastor — having received compensation from LifeWay as a student — they no longer are qualified to be a trustee of LifeWay,” Sanderson said.
“[The] same is true if they go as a Journeyman for the International Mission Board, come back, finish seminary [and] go into the pastorate having received funds from the International Mission Board. They cannot be a trustee no matter how old they are as a pastor or whether they pastor First Baptist Daytona Beach or not. I think that needs to be looked at and I think it needs to be struck because those two examples are but two — I could give you others,” he said to applause.
Messengers approved Sanderson’s motion by an overwhelming majority, and then the amended recommendation passed.
“Let us simply assure you, we have no problem with that,” Executive Committee chairman Rob Zinn said after the votes. “That was never our intention, so we’re perfectly happy with what you’ve done.”
Also among the bylaw revisions is a provision that no person may serve on an entity board while his or her spouse is serving on another entity board, and a stipulation was added to ensure that any person elected as a trustee must have been “continuously a resident member for at least the preceding three years of a church or churches which were in those years in friendly cooperation with the convention.”
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