Morris Chapman has announced his plans to retire as president and chief executive officer of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee effective Sept. 30, 2010.
Chapman announces his retirement at the SBC Executive Committee meeting.Upon retirement, he will have led the Executive Committee 18 years.
Chapman, 68, announced his retirement in a letter to Executive Committee members on the opening day of their Sept. 21-22 meeting in Nashville, Tenn., writing that after giving “serious and prayerful thought to my retirement date” in recent years, “the time has come.”
His announcement comes on his 50th anniversary in the ministry, Chapman wrote, connecting back to his work on church staffs as a teenager followed by his first pastorate in Rogers, Tex., at age 26.
Addressing the assignment of promoting the Cooperative Program that was placed with the Executive Committee in 1997 and, later, the promotion of stewardship, Chapman wrote, “Although the Executive Committee has not had sufficient dollars always to do everything we needed to do, we have made great strides in both areas. In 1925, God gave our forefathers a vision for the Cooperative Program. The idea was a Godsend and saved the Convention from financial ruin. The Cooperative Program kept our missionaries on the field and seminary students in the classrooms.
“I believe deeply that if the Cooperative Program is ever tossed aside to be replaced by a strong promotion of societal giving (designated funds) or if both undesignated and designated funds from our churches are counted as Cooperative Program gifts, we will have abandoned the greatest vehicle for supporting missions and theological education in the history of Christendom,” Chapman wrote.
“The Cooperative Program represents Southern Baptists at their finest, enabling many of our churches to give voluntarily in order to do together what they could not have done separately. No one entity may have all it wishes at given times, but neither will any entity be forced to declare bankruptcy as long as Southern Baptists embrace the Cooperative Program, a plan intended to be a pipeline through which a percentage of the church’s budget (undesignated gifts) flows to the Southern Baptist Convention.”
Chapman’s tenure has spanned junctures of theological conviction, such as the adoption of the Baptist Faith and Message 2000; heightened denominational effectiveness, such as the streamlining of the SBC’s entities during the mid-1990s and an invigorated emphasis on the Cooperative Program and stewardship; and cultural relevance, such as the SBC’s racial reconciliation resolution in 1995 and a multi-year emphasis on family ministry that began in the latter 1990s.
“To be called of God – in serving all Southern Baptists was one of the greatest honors of my life and yet one of the most humbling challenges I had ever faced,” Chapman wrote of assuming the EC presidency on Oct. 1, 1992.
Each year of service with the Executive Committee, Chapman wrote, “has been a strong affirmation that God led us together.”
Of his tenure at the Executive Committee, Chapman wrote, “I have sought to administer the operations of the Executive Committee in a way that would be pleasing to Christ while advancing his kingdom by facilitating the varied assignments for each and every entity of the SBC. I sought also to educate the churches on the importance of the [Executive] Committee’s ministry assignments. The SBC Bylaws and other legal documents were instituted for the purpose of guiding the work of the Southern Baptist Convention and its various entities. If I have faulted in my interpretation of these official policies, it has been on the side of caution. My question always has been, ‘Why have policies if they are to be ignored?’?”
Chapman was elected as Executive Committee president while concluding two years of service as president of the Southern Baptist Convention (1990-92). He had preached the convention sermon at the 1989 SBC annual meeting in Las Vegas, served as president of the SBC Pastors’ Conference in 1986 in Atlanta and chairman of the SBC Committee on Order of Business for the 1985 SBC meeting in Dallas.
Chapman was pastor of First Baptist Church in Wichita Falls, Tex., from 1979-92 and pastor of First Baptist Church in Albuquerque, N.M., for five years, serving as president of the New Mexico Baptist Convention from 1976-78. Earlier, he had led First Baptist Church of Woodway in Waco, Tex., and First Baptist Church in Rogers, Tex.
He holds doctor of ministry and master of divinity degrees from Southwestern Baptist Seminary in Fort Worth, Tex. He is a native of Kosciusko, Miss., and a graduate of Mississippi College.
He and his wife have a son, Chris; a daughter, Stephanie; and eight grandchildren. – BP