A lawyer says modifying the trustee-selection process for South Carolina Baptist Convention institutions will not compromise the state convention’s legal control over them.
James P. Guenther, a Nashville-based attorney who in the past has provided counsel to both the Southern Baptist Convention and the South Carolina Baptist Convention, said recommendations 8 and 9 of the SCBC’s Great Commission Resurgence Task Force report pose no threat to the convention’s “governance rights” with respect to the institutions.
Guenther’s opinion is available in video form at the GCR task force’s page at the SCBC website (http://www.scbaptist.org/gcr-report/article302253.htm?title=1&body=1).
Citing the convention’s role as a third party under the provisions of the South Carolina Non-Profit Corporation Act, Guenther said the SCBC’s rights are “soundly secured and rooted.”
In addition to the convention’s right to appoint the trustees of the institutions, the SCBC has the right to remove trustees, as well as the right to approve mergers, disposal of major assets or dissolution of an institution, he said.
“All of those provisions giving the convention these governance rights are in the articles of incorporation of each institution,” Guenther said. “What is most significant is that those articles of incorporation may not be amended without the specific consent and approval of the convention.”
“If recommendations 8 and 9 are adopted and if they are implemented, the convention will remain, in my opinion, in its legally established third-party role,” he said. “And it will continue to be legally able to enforce the rights that are granted to it by each of the articles of incorporation of these institutions.”