8 Months In: Kevin Ezell Reflects On His Tenure Thus Far

I found the article written by North American Mission Board Kevin Ezell reflecting on his first 8 months as the President of the organization.  Without a doubt, it has been a difficult time and Ezell has lead NAMB through a lot of changes.  I have been encouraged by his leadership and continue to wish him the best and pray that Southern Baptists do take local and foreign missions more seriously and apply the gospel to their lives changing the world.  Ezell, I know, seeks the same. 

Consider the following paragraph from Ezell:



NAMB’s focus 

When I arrived at NAMB last September, I told our trustees I would embark on a process to bring focus to NAMB and build a strategy that would help Southern Baptists reach North America for Christ in the most effective way possible. We are well down the road to completing that process, and I would like to share some of that progress here.

Throughout its history, NAMB has been plagued with the reputation of being a well-meaning ministry with lots of good intentions but not very much focus. Over the years, the effort to respond to a long list of valid ministry needs resulted in an organization that was trying to move in too many directions at once, doing a lot of good things, but not so many great things.

Since September, we have aimed NAMB squarely at the goal of helping Southern Baptists plant thousands of effective, evangelistic churches in North America that will be lighthouses for the gospel in their communities for years to come.

The first step toward prioritizing church planting was to transition more money to the field so we can place churches where they are needed most. We took a big step in that direction by offering our staff in Alpharetta a retirement incentive late last year. The result was a 37 percent downsizing of our in-house staff. Even after retirement benefits are paid, that translates into a $6 million savings each year.

I don’t believe that you can judge the effectiveness of an organization by the size of its staff. We intend to stay lean and accomplish more with less infrastructure.

After staff reductions we cut internal operating budgets—including a 50 percent reduction in travel—which brought additional millions in savings. All of this money is going into our Send North America church planting fund.

These budget shifts have not been easy. It’s never an easy process to move an organization through the process of downsizing more than a third of its staff. And cutting operating budgets requires finding new ways of accomplishing things and saying no to many requests. 

But the budget changes have positioned us to quickly put many more resources on the field for new churches. NAMB will put an additional $9 million toward regional church planting in 2011. That number will grow to $15 million in 2012.

I like to see the various wings of the Southern Baptist Convention make necessary cuts that frees up money in order to direct more towards missions.  Without a doubt the SBC has become as much a beurocracy as state governments or even the federal government.  Sometimes leadership and work is more politicaly driven than gospel driven.  Ezell seems to understand this and wants to use his budget wisely.

I encourage you to read the rest.


North American Mission Board (Kevin Ezell) - My eight-month review and a look at the future 


For more:
Theology - SBTS: A Conversation With Kevin Ezell