{"id":868,"date":"2010-10-04T05:00:26","date_gmt":"2010-10-04T11:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/?p=868"},"modified":"2011-08-19T09:58:37","modified_gmt":"2011-08-19T15:58:37","slug":"the-new-namb-90-days-goes-by-fast","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/?p=868","title":{"rendered":"The New NAMB: 90 Days Goes By Fast!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>When I was younger, time seemed to stand still.\u00a0 As I have gotten older (44 next month), time goes by faster.\u00a0 Talking with senior adults, they tell me that the older they get, the faster time flies by.\u00a0 Here we are in October, with Thanksgiving and Christmas less than 90 days away.\u00a0 Three months, depending on your vantage point, may or may not seem like a long time.\u00a0 For my boys, Christmas can’t get here fast enough.\u00a0 For others, Christmas was just last week.\u00a0 Perspective matters.<\/p>\n

It will be around Christmas-time this year that Kevin Ezell will have completed his first 90 days as the new President of the North American Mission Board.\u00a0 Recently, Dr. Ezell told the staff of NAMB that “considerable change” was coming down the pike.<\/a>\u00a0 As part of that change, some employees of NAMB will be offered early retirement.\u00a0 Apparently, downsizing at Alpharetta will be necessary\u00a0in order to free up 50% of NAMB’s budget for church planting.\u00a0 In a recent talk to employees of the Mission Board, Dr. Ezell said<\/a>,<\/p>\n

\u201cToday, we\u2019ve got the potential of entering a golden age of church planting. The GCR (Great Commission Resurgence) and Southern Baptists made it very clear that they want us to be about church planting. Fifty percent of NAMB\u2019s budget is to be for church planting. So we need to be building the greatest church planting network in the world. God has given us the resources. We will have the passion. But we must focus and get it done. We can be the greatest church planting network the world has ever seen\u2014to God\u2019s glory, not our own.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The changes\u00a0that Ezell envisions for\u00a0the North American Mission Board will be of such magnitude that he “compared it to company that had been making washing machines and now will be making cars<\/em>.”\u00a0 I don’t know.\u00a0 That sounds pretty radical to me.\u00a0 While I agree that the GCRTF Report made it clear that it wanted NAMB to focus on church planting, I would beg to differ that “Southern Baptists” spoke as clearly as Ezell and the rest of the SBC establishment thinks it did.\u00a0 That is, unless you consider 75% of voting messengers from 10% of\u00a0 the 42,000+ SBC churches\u00a0as speaking clearly\u00a0for ALL Southern Baptists.<\/p>\n

In the radical re-prioritization that Ezell and others within the ruling class of the Convention are advocating, they are increasingly like the\u00a0liberal\u00a0Manhattan elites of the early 1970s.\u00a0 After Richard Nixon was overwhelmingly re-elected as President of the United States in 1972, there were many liberals in posh areas of NYC that were stunned.\u00a0 When asked how this could have happened, they were dumbfounded because they didn’t know anyone who had voted for Nixon.\u00a0 Likewise, many within the SBC establishment do not know anyone who is\u00a0against turning NAMB\u00a0into a church planting network.\u00a0 In fact, I’ve had that very same\u00a0online conversation with one of the younger\u00a0establishment leaders who in essence said that he didn’t know\u00a0anyone who\u00a0wasn’t in favor of church planting being the main focus of the new NAMB.<\/p>\n

Maybe Ezell and others should get out more among the grassroots Southern Baptists that NAMB serves.\u00a0 Maybe the new President of NAMB should\u00a0spend his first few months in office listening to Baptist State Convention Executive Directors and other NAMB partner entities.\u00a0 Oh wait.\u00a0 That’s exactly what Dr. Ezell said that he would do.\u00a0\u00a0In one of his first interviews after his election, Ezell told Lifeway’s Ed Stetzer<\/a>:<\/p>\n

I know there are a lot of expectations, but I want to take the first 90 days and just listen. I don’t want to be someone who starts talking about how to fix the car without even lifting up the hood to get a look inside. That’s what I’d be doing if I tried to outline a strategy for NAMB right now.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That interview,\u00a0posted on Dr. Stetzer’s\u00a0blog on September 24, was conducted during the first week of Ezell’s tenure\u00a0as the new President of the North American Mission Board.\u00a0 If Dr. Ezell wanted to take the “first 90 days and just listen<\/strong>,”\u00a0that would mean that his listening tour would conclude sometime\u00a0in the middle of December.\u00a0 Now, less than two weeks in, Southern Baptists are told that “considerable change” and “a lot of changes” will be coming.\u00a0 What changed in the last few weeks?\u00a0 How did we go from “just listening” during the first 90 days to all these changes, including an incentive for early retirement?<\/p>\n

Don’t misunderstand.\u00a0 I am not at all surprised by these considerable<\/span> radical changes coming to NAMB.\u00a0\u00a0Everyone should have known by reading the GCRTF’s\u00a0Final Report and Recommendations what changes would be coming.\u00a0 But, even more tellingly,\u00a0some of us suspected what would be coming by what we were not told.\u00a0 For those of you who may be new readers to my blog, I would encourage\u00a0you to read two of my earlier posts, Radically Redefining Transparency Within the SBC<\/em> (Part 1 <\/a>and Part 2<\/a>).\u00a0 The GCR Task Force unilaterally sealed ALL their records for 15 years.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 I don’t mean what the spokesmen for the Task Force told us was the reason why.\u00a0 I mean the real reason why ANY and ALL\u00a0records, including any minutes or summation of proceedings from any of the Task Force’s meetings are unavailable for review by rank and file Southern Baptists.<\/p>\n

For many Southern Baptists, there is a weariness to the “say one thing and then do another thing” mentality that characterizes so much of the establishment within the SBC.\u00a0 There is a growing discontent\u00a0with leaders who call for\u00a0a new day of transparency in our Convention, but then practice what\u00a0only President Obama would consider transparency.\u00a0 If\u00a0one of our leaders doesn’t\u00a0have any intention of “just listening” for the first 90 days of his tenure, just say so.\u00a0 Otherwise, I might think that I’m older than I really\u00a0am because those last 90 days were a blur!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I was younger, time seemed to stand still.\u00a0 As I have gotten older (44 next month), time goes by faster.\u00a0 Talking with senior adults, they tell me that the older they get, the faster time flies by.\u00a0 Here we are in October, with Thanksgiving and Christmas less than 90 days away.\u00a0 Three months, depending…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10,24,37],"tags":[583,691,728,819,3392,868,3393],"class_list":["post-868","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cooperative-program","category-great-commission-resurgence","category-southern-baptist-convention","tag-kevin-ezell","tag-namb","tag-north-american-mission-board","tag-radical-change","tag-religion","tag-sbc","tag-southern-baptist-convention"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1LP7G-e0","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/868","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=868"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/868\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2529,"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/868\/revisions\/2529"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=868"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fromlaw2grace.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}