The recently elected chairman of trustees for the North American Mission Board “couldn’t have predicted this scenario,” and while Bill Curtis, elected in May to chair the board of NAMB’s trustees, is “humbled that God would entrust this leadership position to me,” he also is confident that the SBC entity is on the road to recovery from its current crisis.
Newly elected NAMB chairman Bill Curtis of Florence, left, talks with the mission board’s interim COO, Carlos Ferrer, at the trustees’ May 2 meeting in Jersey City, N.J.Selecting a new president is of paramount importance in remaking the embattled mission board in the image intended by the Southern Baptist Convention, and in a rare move for an SBC entity, the trustees have opened the search wide with a public call for resumes to NAMB’s website (www.namb.net) through Sept. 1.
“By making this call for resumes public,” he said in an interview with The Baptist Courier, “we wanted to set an example of a new way of doing business for an SBC entity that is more open.”
Curtis went even further in saying that “by and large, the work of trustees should be open to the sight of all Southern Baptists.” The North American Mission Board, by openly dealing with the current crisis, is, according to Curtis, “trying to model some things that other boards could look to for inspiration.”
He said he is “proud of the way the trustees at NAMB have handled these difficult times.”
After introducing former seminary professor Roy Fish to messengers at the Greensboro Southern Baptist Convention as interim president, Curtis gave assurances that the search committee “will take as much time as necessary to find the man God has for us.”
He specifically referred to Fish’s “relational skills” and said the highly respected SBC leader will be of “great benefit to the staff of NAMB and our state partners as we walk through this time of transition.”
It was a February article appearing in Georgia’s Baptist newspaper, The Christian Index, that first brought to light serious problems in the administration of NAMB. That article led to the release of a trustee task force report and ultimately the resignation of president Bob Reccord. It also put the mission board and its trustees at the center of concern among Southern Baptists.
Curtis, who is in his sixth year as a trustee (he was recently elected to a second four-year term), was a member of the special trustee task force and authored the 19-page response to the Index article. He says the board has “addressed everything we know about” and that “any further revelations would be handled in a forthright manner.”
The South Carolina pastor sees the problem behind NAMB’s present situation as “a combination of a drift in the ministry focus” of the North American Mission Board “coupled with a lack of institutional policies” in areas of fiscal responsibility. He states that both of these areas are currently being addressed by trustees and NAMB staff.
Curtis says the trustees are in the hunt for a president of the North American Mission Board who is “a committed Southern Baptist” and who possesses skills in “building consensus and working with our ministry partners within a system of accountability.”
The new president, he adds, will have to be “comfortable in pouring his life into the vision given to the North American Mission Board by the Southern Baptist Convention.”
Curtis acknowledges that the past months have been difficult ones for the Trustees and staff at NAMB. However, he believes that NAMB’s best days are ahead. “Southern Baptists can have confidence in the North American Mission Board and its commitment to assisting our state partners and churches in reaching North America and Canada with the gospel. Together, we can fulfill the mandates of the Great Commission. On behalf of all of our trustees, I want to ask South Carolina Baptists to pray for us as we seek our next leader and press on into a bright, new future of North American missions.”