Tennessee Baptists haven't learned much about 'control'

The Belmont University vs. Tennessee Baptist Convention mess will be discussed again at this year's TBC annual meeting in Kingsport next week. Lonnie Wilkey tries to be fair in dealing with the extremes in opinion on this subject and wrote about that effort just recently...it is as balanced a report that any employee representing an opposing side in a lawsuit could write and still keep his job. Thanks, Lonnie (I guess).

How the Tennessee Baptist Convention lost 'control?'
The core of the argument in the lawsuit is that the Tennessee Baptist Convention no longer has 'control' over the university. More specifically, the TBC no longer votes (or affirms) the list of trustees provided to the convention during the annual meeting. The delegates/messengers to the TBC have approved the list submitted by Belmont every year since that process began (and I doubt that many delegates have any recollection of the rubber-stamp process). The Belmont University board of trustees runs with the ball after that, making all sorts of management, financial, academic program, and operating decisions. One of those duly elected, 100% Baptist, boards ultimately voted to change the charter of the non-profit organization known as Belmont University to allow 40% of the board to come from other Christian denominations besides Baptists.

Let's review that last paragraph just a moment and ask/answer a few questions:
1. Who is it that 'elected' the trustees who made the decision to alter the board's composition?
Answer: The Tennessee Baptist Convention messengers who had 100% control of the 'vote' during the annual meeting.
2. What percentage of that Belmont Board of Trustees who made the decision (i.e. controlled the decision) to change the composition was Baptist?
Answer: 100%
3. What percentage of a Board of Trustees would it take to 'control' the decision-making process on Belmont University's board?
Answer: Somewhere between 50% and 60%
4. What percentage of Belmont's Board of Trustees is currently Baptist (and mostly Tennessee Baptist) and controls the decision making process?
Answer: 60%

All of that question and answer information leads me to one point: Tennessee Baptists (particularly the politically organized, conservative resurgent parts) have forgotten how to seize real 'control' over an organization. It requires a strategy of patience, something like 20 years in the case of the Southern Baptist Convention.

Control Lessons Not Learned
Here is a similar Tennessee Baptist takeover strategy: form a group (let's call them Belmont University Board-Busting Accountability Saints - BUBBAS for short) and take the following steps:
1. Gradually replace members of the TBC Education Committee with fellow BUBBAS... that is fairly easy: call some of them doctrinally unaccountable, do a little back-room innuendo backstabbing and you're on your way.
2. Make sure the TBC executive board is controlled by a majority of BUBBAS. That is a little tougher...the BUBBAS might have to resort to name calling, labeling people as CBF'ers, calling them uncooperative, etc. in order to replace those members.
3. Over a period of time (remember patience?), replace Belmont Board of Trustee member nominations (via a BUBBAS controlled Education Committee and Excutive Board) with more and more BUBBAS until the BUBBAS have a voting majority on Belmont's board. And what percentage of a Board of Trustees does that take? Hmmm, something like 50-60%? Right?

Strategy Complete...Checkmate
There you go. With a BUBBAS majority on the Belmont Board of Trustees it is a simple matter to revert the non-profit charter back to its original status and return the board's composition to 100% Baptist. The current problem isn't Tennessee Baptist control over Belmont's board of trustees, the problem is the Tennessee BUBBAS do not have control over Belmont's board of trustees.

Forget Strategy, Let's Go to Court
Unfortunately, the current generation of conservative resurgent-ists failed to learn the 'control' lessons of the Patterson-Pressler era of SBC politics and decided instead, to skip steps one through three in the above strategy, and go right straight to court. That same group isn't even honest enough to admit that the litigation-as-last-resort posturing at the TBC meeting at Jerry's place was nothing more than a sanctimonious sham. It was easier for one Tennessee Baptist pastor (high on passion, short on facts and out-of-control), to stand before the TBC and call Belmont's Board of Trustees "Liars and Thieves" than it was to recognize all of the facts from a process that has been in the works for nearly 10 years and resolve this in a Christ-like manner.

And you wonder why there are Refugee Baptists among us...

This one fact you will never see in the Baptist and Reflector: The Belmont Board of Trustees is still, to this very day, controlled by Baptists...but evidently not the right kind of Baptists.