Friday, February 25, 2011

Baby NAMBS, stealing from the church, SBC annual meeting

No Baby NAMBS? In a spirit of comity and cooperation Plodder will reconsider his dubbing the five regional NAMBs as “Baby NAMBS” in light of NAMB leader Kevin Ezell’s statement that, "We're not looking to build little 'NAMBies' all over North America. We'll start small, not glamorous, and move from there." I’m a cooperative and get-along kind of guy.

No Way! Would it be possible for a church secretary to get the proper church people to sign checks made to cash, go back to her office and type in her name, take the checks to the bank and cash them? Would it be possible for her to do this about a dozen times per week in amounts around a couple of thousand dollars each and steal half a million? Yep. Read about it here. And, no one who signed the checks, no one at the bank who cashed the checks, thought it odd? The lady should go to jail with her accomplice son. The church may have suffered enough with the staggering loss of money, estimated at $1.5 million.

Our SBC Executive Committee refused to adopt a blanket policy to kick out any church that affiliates with the Alliance of Baptists, the most liberal of the post-Conservative Resurgence splinter groups. The Alliance supports gay marriage and welcomes members regardless of sexual identity, things that are sufficient to get a church quickly jettisoned from the SBC. I don’t know but that this is a proper response but an outsider might need some sort of guide to navigate this “friendly cooperation” stuff. Plodder offers a rash conjecture that any church that jointly affiliates with both the SBC and the Alliance has an identity crisis raging.

Dead on Arrival: Motion at the annual meeting that the Executive Committee consider holding the SBC Annual Meeting being only every other year. It didn't take long for the EC to dispatch this one. SBCers, especially pastors and SBC employees with expense accounts, do like to get away, slap backs with old friends, push their resumes, and eat like pigs.

Republican legislators in my state a generally pathetic, exceeded in that only by their Democratic collegues. Holding a huge majority in both houses and with a GOP governor, they appear poised, it seems, to permit some businesses to deface public property for private profit. Billboard companies will be able to cut trees on public rights-of-way. While Christians are encouraging their solons in other states to tackle such issues as predatory payday lending, not a peep on such things here. Our guys know that the payday paymasters use some of their predatory proceeds for wining and dining elected officials. Pathetic.

Have a nice weekend.

3 comments:

Doug Hibbard said...

I've worked for a church where that had happened. It's been 10 years ago, but it was a church in Georgia that hired a person fresh out of jail for check fraud to handle the books.

Individual cashed out a CD the church held among other things. Wasn't prosecuted because a trustee of the church had signed everything, but he hadn't read it.

I, for one, would love to see the bi-annual meeting. Or multi-site so it would be less expensive for some of us to attend and bring church folks with us. The same people that consistently block that are all for multi-site churches. How can we do that with worship but not with business?

Doug

William said...

I'm guessing that some changes will come in the annual meeting, but not to make it less frequent. Would we want to give the XComm a two-year run on things? Nah.

jTHanks for the comment.

Dave Miller said...

Doug said, "it was a church in Georgia that hired a person fresh out of jail for check fraud to handle the books."

Dave says, NO WAY. They did not. Really?