The Associated Baptist Press is reporting that the president of Southern Baptist's North American Mission Board (NAMB), Geoffery Hammond, appears to be on the way out over leadership issues and conflict. Hammond replaced Bob Reccord in 2007 who was removed for mismanaging the agency. What exactly is NAMB doing? Why does it exist? What is its role? How is it to interact with state conventions? How does it serve the local church? I don't really know if anyone knows the answer to those questions. I really don't know if anyone is even asking the right questions. I do know that we keep seeing failure across the board and we keep looking for scapegoats. Maybe Hammond is horrible as a leader and there are better leaders available. Maybe he isn't and the culture is just broken and no one knows why they exist. I don't know. But, this makes two presidents in a row that have been removed (if it does happen) and that points to some larger problems, I would think.
I write this post because reading the article made me think of the seminar yesterday at the Willow Creek Leadership Summit with Gary Hamel. I put my notes up in a post yesterday (follow the preceding link) and I want to say that Hamel has gotten me thinking about developing bottom up, organic, leadership structures for the 21st century. Marty Duren and I have been working on a concept called "ChurchAsMissionary" where we are saying that the local church is to function as the missionary. Our new collaborative website (along with Todd and Paul Littleton, Art Rogers, and David Phillips) is called missioscapes.com. We will be exploring how churches can reposition themselves for mission in a rapidly changing world as they launch out from older structures. I don't know what kind of future denominational bureaucracies like NAMB have in this world where the only constant is change, but I do know that they ought to talk with Gary Hamel and see what he thinks about which way they should go. That guy is brilliant. Of course, he must be, because he is saying the same stuff that I've been saying since about 2003 about network theory! :-) Um, plus he teaches for the London School of Business or something and has written books and speaks all over and stuff. In other words, he's really smart. And right. Southern Baptists ought to start paying attention to what is actually happening in our world instead of continuing to lead organizations as though we are living in the Industrial Age.
What is going on in the NAMB (and I have no inside information) is merely a symptom of the sickness we see throughout our Convention (and repeated in thousands of our churches). When an organization loses sight of it,s purpose and begins to exist only to maintain itself, infighting and grappling over control is inevitable and will eventually kill the organization we claim to love.
Posted by: Doug | August 07, 2009 at 08:18 AM
Alan, Thank you for sharing from the conference. Fascinating stuff. Really got me thinking - ouch that hurts! lol
Posted by: Doug | August 07, 2009 at 08:26 AM
I'm not sure NAMB needs to exist at all. Not be combined with IMB, etc ... I really mean exist at all.
What NAMB does can be handled by local churches .. provided the local church has its head on straight, and realizes its part of the deal. Kind of like my Dad's old mantra about personal responsibility, expressed in all-two-lettered words: "If it is to be, it is up to me".
After all, NAMB seems to be about planting local churches, and the best people to do that, in my experience, is local churches themselves. Seems to me a couple guys with checkbooks, and maybe a list of guys interested in planting churches ... sort of a "clearing-house" ... could do what NAMB does. Or needs to do.
It's certainly not like finding and training people to leave their native country and job, learn a new language, move to some foreign country, and plant a church where they're nationally the outsiders.
Or not. Just an opinion.
Posted by: Bob Cleveland | August 07, 2009 at 10:43 AM