Letters from the board of trustees chairman

Dear Southern Baptist brothers and sisters,

Related Coverage

IMB trustee chairman Hatley sends ‘open letters’ to Southern Baptist pastors, laity explaining decisions Letters from the board of trustees chairman BAPTISM GUIDELINE Position Paper Concerning the IMB Guideline on Baptism TONGUES AND PRAYER LANGUAGE Position Paper Concerning the IMB Policy on Glossolalia Definition of a church

Thank you for your passion for sharing Jesus. These are great days of opportunity and advancement in our work for the Lord. Advances are being made on a scale never before known in the history of Christianity. For this we join together in praise to our Savior.

I have addressed the following letter to pastors because they are the teachers and guardians of the Word for their congregations. Their sacred duty is a calling higher than that of the President of the United States and, as such, I wanted to address them concerning these doctrinal matters. But feel free to look over their shoulders and read this material.

There has been no small controversy concerning some of our recent decisions. However, as I have shared this information with pastors and others, most have expressed joy because information they had previously received was incomplete. Seeing the greater context has helped many to appreciate the decisions recently made. I pray you will have the same experience.

We are on a great adventure together. It stands to reason that our adversary would love to put us against one another. Let’s put all blame on our real enemy and work harder than ever to reach every person with the Gospel in our lifetime.

Thank you so much for your prayers. We are your servants and we appreciate every word you share, even the constructive criticism. I pray our hearts will be obvious as you read these pages.

For His Glory,

Tom Hatley
Chairman, International Mission Board trustees
Southern Baptist Convention

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Dear Pastors,

You are due a report from me concerning recent actions by your International Mission Board trustees concerning the qualifications for new missionaries. This letter is my attempt at giving you historical context and logical reasoning for these actions.

Let me first state that this letter is written from my perspective as your chairman of this board. Further clarification may come from appropriate committees. Because such contextualization might not be formed and delivered to you until April or even June (because of the timing of our next meetings), I thought it best to write and at least give you my perspective.

The need to address these areas (baptism and tongues) has been discussed from time to time for more than a decade. The decisions that were recently made have been matters of review and study for more than two and a half years. Similar precedents adopted by staff in dealing with these issues have been used for years. They were not as strong as the current guideline and policy, but they were the base upon which the current statements were constructed.

Forgive me, but to give you a worthy context for these actions I must brief you on the process through which every candidate for long-term mission service must pass.

Upon completion of an application for service a candidate is assigned a candidate consultant. The consultant is a staff member who walks with the potential IMB missionary through the appointment process.

After forms are completed, interviews are held and testing is processed, the candidate consultant determines whether or not to bring the candidate to the trustee board for interim approval, which usually leads to appointment three to six months later.

To review the hundreds of people who go through appointment each year, the trustee board is broken down into a series of subcommittees. Each subcommittee reviews an assigned group of candidates. The future missionaries do not appear in person at this point, but their lives, ministries, callings, testimonies and core beliefs are presented in writing on green paper (to remind us they contain sensitive material). Trustees read hundreds of pages of these (we call them “green sheets”) every year in order to interact with the staff candidate consultants. Action is taken on advancement of these applicants based on the content of these “green sheets” and the recommendation of the staff candidate consultants. This is usually done as a part of our six annual trustee meetings.

This is a thorough process that we take very seriously because these potential missionaries will be guiding our work around the world. What they believe and practice will be emulated many thousands of times over by those they influence and train.

As a trustee board, working with staff, we see this process as similar in nature to a pastor search committee. You trust us to qualify these career missionaries. Most will carry the ability to influence many national pastors and some will influence entire church-planting movements, affecting millions of lives.

Just as there are higher standards in the Word of God for shepherds, and we insist on such from our American church leaders, there are standards for missionaries that are equally elevated. Serving as a missionary, like serving as a pastor, is not for every church member. Evidence of a clear call, strong commitment, spiritual maturity and doctrinal stability are insisted upon.

After all, these special leaders will be representing Southern Baptists while they are starting churches in the field that are also distinctively Baptist. They will be financially supported by Southern Baptists. Therefore, we are right to expect their ministries to be more in line with our heritage and doctrinal core than those of other denominations or belief systems. We are not an ecumenical movement, determined to send anyone who wants to go to the field. We are Baptists, and therefore we are only sending Baptists.

A problem or two with the “green sheets” process became more apparent a few years ago. It was not a new problem, but it was increasing in frequency. Often a subcommittee reviewing “green sheets” would find the candidate consultant deferring to the committee for a ruling concerning the issue of baptism or of glossolalia in an applicant’s profile. The lack of clear guidelines and policies addressing these areas created an inconsistency between subcommittees. One subcommittee would unknowingly allow what another subcommittee would disapprove. The need for consistency was called for by staff and so the appropriate subcommittee (the Process Review Committee) began almost three years ago to work on clear guidelines that would be adopted by the personnel committee – thus making judgments more consistent.

At the same time that these matters were under consideration, the board completed an extensive, year-long study concerning our approach to missions, which we call “Strategic Directions for the Twenty-first Century” (SD21). This study helped us evaluate our effectiveness on the field in many areas. The study was broken down by geographical regions (I think we had 15 at the time) and was the result of input from multiple sources.

While many positive things about our strategy were affirmed by the study, one thing surfaced that related to doctrine. An addendum to the study was completed by leadership in each region in consultation with the corresponding regional trustee committee chairman. The results of that addendum indicated that there were some doctrinal concerns in some regions. The assessment did not indicate involvement by our personnel, as that was not the purpose of the exercise. It simply helped us to see that some of our ministries in some of our regions were facing doctrinal challenges.

At the same time we were receiving concerns from the field, from pastors and others returning from mission trips, and from trustees visiting the field. The concerns were varied, but the three greatest doctrinal concerns were the need for a consistent definition of a local church, a poor understanding of the importance of scriptural baptism and charismatic problems that would intrude into some of our mission work.

Our doctrinal resolve needed to be affirmed. Our president had already seen the need to assure Southern Baptists of our doctrinal integrity and requested every missionary on the field and those in leadership in Richmond to sign an affirmation of the Baptist Faith & Message 2000. This request was well received by the vast majority of our personnel, and the trustees joined in the effort by also signing the document.

With this task accomplished, the Process Review Committee was working to assure Southern Baptists of the solid beliefs of new missionaries. We already have policies in place to address these issues when they become problematic on the field, and no one on the board thinks we should terminate a missionary for believing something we allowed at the time of their appointment. Therefore, when the new baptism guideline and tongues policy were adopted, they only referenced those who were new applicants (even those already in process were exempt).

These were adopted by the Personnel Committee in May 2005. We were then asked by our president, by some staff and by some members of the trustee board to approve or disapprove these guidelines at full board level.

Many leaders on the board, including myself, suggested otherwise. We favored granting proper authority to the personnel committee and keeping the documents as a guideline rather than a policy (for flexibility and ease in making any needed changes). Another reason is that we saw that the adoption of the policy on glossolalia at the board level would be seen by some as an attempt to embarrass IMB President Jerry Rankin, who has publicly acknowledged that he has a private prayer language.

Trustees have been blamed for having the motive of trying to hurt our president. The force that pushed the issue to this higher level, however, included the president and a few others on staff and on the board.

When voted on by the board, both measures passed by well over two-thirds. Because there have been many misconceptions concerning these policies, I have included them as attachments that can be accessed at our IMB Web site or on Baptist Press. Nothing helps more than seeing the original documents yourself.

Again, I should state that I am writing this from my perspective. Others may have a different view of the evolution of the policy on glossolalia and the guideline on baptism. For your information, this is my seventh year as a trustee and I am nearing the end of my second (and last) year as chairman. Before serving as chairman, I was chairman of the personnel committee. My observations are made after having enjoyed a healthy vantage point from which to see this whole event.

I offer you another assurance. Dr. Rankin and his staff were involved throughout the process. Some of their suggestions were incorporated, and all were seriously considered.

Another key factor in the development of this guideline and policy was the consultation and comparisons we sought with sister SBC entities. North American Mission Board has similar policies; unlike our approach, they made theirs retroactive throughout the organization.

Note as well that we placed into both the guideline and policy an exceptions clause. This affords a measure of flexibility.

As chairman I am asking our personnel committee to take a fresh look at these documents with the intention of providing further clarification. Your suggestions will be passed along to this committee as they are received. You may send them to the International Mission Board, which has an e-mail address for trustees. That address is imbtrustees@imb.org.

Besides the attachments for the guideline on baptism and the policy on glossolalia, I have included an attachment of our definition of a church. Also included are two position papers – one addressing the guideline and one addressing the policy. They were done with the help of several people who have served in key positions as trustees in the last few years. Also consulted were sources considered as specialists in matters of historical theology. The form in which you find them is my edit. They have not been voted on by our board and may not reflect the views even of some who voted for the policy and guideline, but they are the theological points that many reflected upon when working through these issues and I thought them worthy of presentation for your consideration.

I pray this explanation and the included material will shed some light on the process and reasoning for recent trustee action on these matters. I think you should be proud of the tireless and unselfish work of your trustees. Serving on this board is a great honor and requires many days of work and large quantities of passion for the lost in our world.

For His Glory,

Tom Hatley
Chairman, International Mission Board trustees
Southern Baptist Convention