Our North American Mission Board squandered millions, millions of our dollars.It is hard to argue with our new leader's assessment that NAMB did a world of things, none terribly well.
For a stretch trustees were asleep at the wheel with respect to watching our penultimate agency.
Trustees hired, praised, then forced a leader to resign. Who knows how much we lost on that.
NAMB built a showpiece HQ in suburburn Atlanta and filled it, packed it, with perfectly good people for the most part, so much so that critics imply that the happy HQ was sucking the air and funding out of their primary role.
NAMB seemed to me to be a classic case of unchecked bureaucratic inertia. What were we getting for $140+ million dollars? Not what we should.
The jury is still out on all the spiffy new strategies and policies. After a time let's see if, (a) Annie goes up indicating increased confidence in NAMB from churches (I have predicted that this year will not yield an Annie increase), and (b) there is any significant increase in North American missions in a statistically honest assessment of such.
NAMB did a good job of squandering the trust of many of us. It will take time to regain it. I'm all for trying something different that NAMB has tried the past decade or so.
3 comments:
Pessimist alert:
How much does the new president need to show the dysfunctional state of NAMB to justify the church he pastored not supporting her?
Some years ago, while in TX, I was told by NAMB they did not do church plants that I would have to work through my state convention and local association.
I've been a baptist all my life and this was news to me. Didn't NAMB have to approve her missionaries (those who received our money from them)? Were not these people church planters? Nope, most of them were state convention office personnel.
Gonna be interesting to see if the new president can and will do all those things he says.
jle
NAMB's system for church plants and church planting was byzantine, still may be. I've asked some quesitons of NAMB about the new policies.
I have a mtg Tuesday with one of our state guys in reference to how our state will be doing church plants. The email I received on it was very vague and left more questions than gave answers.
Ought to be interesting.
jle
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