Reform advocate issues scathing rebuke of Southern Baptist Executive Committee and its “gross mismanagement” of SBC assets
“The SBC leadership class has long scoffed at the wisdom of local church pastors and lay leaders. Instead of listening to those of us who rightly warned we were on an unsustainable path, they’ve eaten up what prior generations meant for us to preserve as an inheritance. Social justice public relations campaigns that try to make the SBC attractive to the woke and infamous have devoured the tithes of hard-working Baptists,” wrote Jon Whitehead, Missouri attorney and SBC reform advocate, for the Center of Baptist Leadership.
Last week, the Executive Committee announced that it has spent more than $12.1 million on the 2021-2022 Guidepost Solutions investigation and subsequent legal expenses dating back to the 2021 fiscal year.
Whitehead, a trustee at the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, said the liquidation of long-held Southern Baptist assets such as the SBC building in downtown Nashville by the SBC Executive Committee to cover mounting legal expenses from the denomination’s abuse crisis is essentially the result of “gross mismanagement.”
Jeff Iorg, the new president and CEO of the Executive Committee “of course, famously presided over the sale of ‘Golden Gate’ Seminary’s iconic property near the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. Now, ‘Gateway’ Seminary sits in a nondescript office park near Ontario, California’s airport runways,” Whitehead notes.
SBC leaders “apparently believe they can transfer money to any cause and for any purpose without the required approval and necessary oversight. They are all complicit in this act of self-dealing to fund their own agenda in their own way – with accountability to the (SBC) Messengers sacrificed on the altar of inconspicuous financial and political maneuvers,” wrote Whitehead.
Not only is the SBC on the hook for its expenses related to abuse litigation, Whitehead said, but it agreed to pay litigation expenses incurred by Guidepost Solutions which authored a “bombshell investigation” that included – among other things – allegations against former pastor and SBC president Johnny Hunt accusing him of abusing a woman in 2010. Hunt is suing the SBC, the Executive Committee, and Guidepost Solutions, with a trial scheduled in Nashville on Nov. 12.
Read “Liquidating the Assets of our SBC Fathers to Finance the Power Plays of the Sons” by Whitehead