Associated Baptist Press
December 2, 2008 · (08-117)
David Wilkinson, Executive Director
Robert Marus, Acting Managing Editor/Washington Bureau Chief
Bob Allen, Senior Writer
In this issue
Former SBC missionary accused of embezzling now suspected in insurance scam (692 words)
Baptists in Russian city claim bureaucrats restricting religious freedom (551 words)
Longtime Southern Baptist pastor Frank Pollard dies (231 words)
Opinion: Ethiopian eununchs and reading the text from the margins (692 words)
Former SBC missionary accused of embezzling now suspected in insurance scam
By Bob Allen (692 words)
GULF SHORES, Ala. (ABP) -- The International Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention declined to press criminal embezzlement charges in 2005 against a man now accused of stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars in an Alabama insurance scam.
Benton Gray Harvey and an accomplice are suspected of scamming hundreds of thousands of dollars from residents of the Alabama Gulf Coast.
According to legal documents obtained by the Mobile Press-Register, the IMB won a judgment of $359,499.62 against Harvey on March 15, 2005.
The suspect, under the name Gray Harvey, served through the mission board as an accountant for a Baptist outpost in Istanbul.
IMB trustees fired Harvey over allegations that he stole hundreds of thousands of dollars earmarked for earthquake relief and reportedly decided against pressing charges, citing concerns for missionary safety.
The board settled the case for the amount of loss that could be documented -- though some observers believe the amount actually missing could be larger -- and pledged not to talk about the settlement.
Wade Burleson, a former IMB trustee who joined the board after fellow trustees accepted the confidentiality agreement, said he argued vehemently at his first board meeting that the IMB had "a moral obligation" to file criminal charges. But his fellow trustees rejected his argument.
A receptionist answering the phone Dec. 1 at Starfish Insurance Agency in Gulf Shores, Ala., said the business owner had no idea about the IMB's judgment against Harvey when she hired him about two years ago and that if prosecuted he probably would not have been employed because he would be in jail.
According to newspaper reports, Harvey and his alleged partner-in-crime, Jonathan Adams, cannot be located and may be out of the country. The two former Starfish employees vanished last summer from a condo they shared as roommates, leaving food in the refrigerator and toiletries in the bathroom.
Police say the duo swindled coastal residents by selling fake insurance policies for homes that most insurance companies don't want to cover because they are susceptible hurricane damage. Police believe Harvey was the mastermind, forging documents that he downloaded from the Internet.
Wendy Norvelle, an IMB spokesperson, said Oct. 1 that Gray Harvey worked with the mission board from November 1998 until September 2003, but she would have to speak with legal counsel and/or administrators before discussing details of the case.
"What gets my goat is that charges were not filed by the IMB," Burleson, pastor of Emmanuel Baptist Church in Enid, Okla., said Dec. 1.
He said he argued unsuccessfully that Southern Baptists should have been informed of the embezzlement allegations, even if it meant shutting down mission work in a particular area.
"We didn't want people to know," he said of the board majority.
Burleson said IMB administrators stumbled onto the problem by accident, when a visitor to the building managed by Harvey decided to use an elevator for which he remembered approving funds, only to learn that it was never installed.
At the 2006 SBC annual meeting in Greensboro, N.C., Ron McGowin, at the time youth minister at First Baptist Church in Fairfield, Texas, made a motion seeking an "external comprehensive audit" of funds handled by the IMB's Central Asia region between 1995 and 2005 because he had been told the IMB "at best could only account for $372,831.62 of embezzled monies."
The following year the IMB responded to his referred motion by confirming "there was both an audit as well as supplemental procedures accomplished by a qualified certified public accountant regarding Central Asia finances."
"The results of these audit procedures were fully disclosed to the board of trustees of the IMB in November 2004, and appropriate action was taken, the official response continued.
Asked last year in San Antonio why the trustees decided against an external audit, IMB President Jerry Rankin told McGowin and other messengers that that an internal audit had been performed, as well as an audit by an outside firm.
"The trustees were involved in the thorough review of this," Rankin said. "Policies have been put in place to prevent this from happening again."
Rankin assured messengers that the board honored its "fiscal responsibility to the convention."
Bob Allen is senior writer for Associated Baptist Press.
Baptists in Russian city claim bureaucrats restricting religious freedom
By Bob Allen (551 words)
MOSCOW (ABP) -- Baptists in the city of Lipetsk, Russia, claim local authorities are using bureaucratic methods to restrict their activity.
The provincial capital 235 miles southeast of Moscow has in recent years become a focal point of tension between Russian Orthodox and Baptist Christians.
According to Forum 18, a Norway-based news service that monitors religious freedom, two local congregations recently lost legal status for allegedly failing to file tax returns on time -- a charge that Baptist leaders strongly deny. A third lost its rented worship space for failing to have a representative appear at a court hearing that congregation members claim they weren't informed about.
"Soon there won't be a single Baptist church in Lipetsk!" exclaimed a Nov. 28 headline on the Forum 18 website.
Vitaly Vlasenko, director of external church relations for the Russian Union of Evangelical Christians-Baptists, said it is obvious that government officials in Lipetsk are partial to the Orthodox, but he personally does not believe events there represent a campaign aimed specifically at local Baptists.
Vlasenko said the processes of registration, documentation and taxation for churches have become entangled in bureaucracy, and that issues once settled through negotiation with government officials now often wind up in court.
Most Russian Baptist congregations have neither made the effort nor had the funds to hire bookkeepers and lawyers in the past, Vlasenko said, but now they must focus on including such safeguards.
The Russian Baptist union said in a recent news release that tensions between religious groups may revolve largely around money. In 1989, Lipetsk city leaders handed over the former Orthodox Church of the Trinity's Conception for Baptists to renovate and use for worship. Four years later, officials reversed the decision and ordered Baptists to return the building to Orthodox officials in exchange for appropriate compensation.
The Orthodox side did not agree to compensation and accused the Baptists of seizing an Orthodox sanctuary. The 100-member Baptist congregation has said they are willing to return the building for monetary compensation for improvements to the building or use of another building of comparable size and value.
In April the city decreed the Baptists must give up the building without compensation. Officials dissolved the congregation as a legal entity, claiming the church neglected to file required tax statements.
Vladimir Ilovaisky, the church's pastor, accused local officials of deceit.
"We have always handed in our tax reports on time," he said. "If we are guilty of something, then tax offices should inform us accordingly or levy a fine. They have instead taken away our legal status."
Ilovaisky said the Baptists "are not barbarians" and would not resort to defending the building by force, but still hoped for a settlement through legal means.
Not all residents of Lipetsk have shown as much restraint. On Nov. 4 about 200 marchers took part in an annual procession from Lipetsk's central Orthodox cathedral to the outlying Trinity Church now used by Baptists.
The event celebrated National Unity Day, a state holiday introduced in 2005 to commemorate Russia's 1612 expulsion of invading Polish and Lithuanian forces. In recent years, the day has become a forum for demonstrations by nationalist and far-right activists.
Two nights after the march, 28 windows of the Baptist-run structure were broken by vandals thought to be members of the nationalist Slavic Union.
Bob Allen is senior writer for Associated Baptist Press.
Longtime Southern Baptist pastor Frank Pollard dies
By Bob Allen (231 words)
SAN FRANCISCO (ABP) -- Frank Pollard, one of Southern Baptists' best-known preachers and leaders, died Nov. 30 at his home in San Francisco.
Pollard, 74, twice served as pastor of First Baptist Church in Jackson, Miss., for a combined total of 22 years. Between his stints in Jackson he served as pastor of First Baptist Church in San Antonio and as president of Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary in Mill Valley, Calif.
He also was a past president of the Mississippi Baptist Convention and a regular preacher on the Baptist Hour broadcasts produced by the SBC Radio & Television Commission.
Pollard, who suffered from Parkinson's disease, had moved with his wife to San Francisco earlier this year, reportedly to be near his granddaughter.
A memorial service is planned at First Baptist, Jackson, but details are incomplete, according to a statement on the church website.
According to the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, Pollard became pastor at First Baptist, Jackson, in 1976. In 1980, he left for the San Antonio pulpit. In 1983, he went to Golden Gate, but left there in 1986 and became his former church's interim pastor. After three months on that job, the church called him to reprise his role as permanent pastor. He retired in 2002.
After retirement, he served as a visiting professor of homiletics at Baylor University's George W. Truett Theological Seminary.
Time once named Pollard one of seven "Outstanding Protestant Preachers in America." The Mississippi Legislature passed a resolution commending his ministry after his retirement.
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Bob Allen is senior writer for Associated Baptist Press.
Opinion: Ethiopian eununchs and reading the text from the margins
By Miguel De La Torre (692 words)
(ABP) -- As a man of color, I always read the story of the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8 with an emphasis on Africa.
When we think of the gospel message moving beyond the Jews, we usually see the trajectory going toward the center of the dominant empire at the time of the early church -- Rome. Many see the good news as a Eurocentric project that found its fulfillment within the empire.
The first non-Jewish convert to the gospel message was not a European, however, but an African. Ethiopia is an African nation, and it is to the Africans that Christ's message first goes in the biblical account. After Africa, it makes its way to Europe.
This reading through Hispanic eyes unmasks insights about the text that most of my Eurocentric colleagues miss. Nevertheless, I can easily fall into a similar myopia if I solely read the text with heterosexual eyes.
While whites may gain insight from me when I read the text from my particular social location, I myself am in danger of missing all the gems to be mined from a passage if I refuse to learn how to read the text from other marginalized social locations.
That is why people of faith need the GLBT (shorthand for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender) community. It wasn't until my GLBT colleagues shared with me how they read the text from their social location that the Word came alive for me. They challenged me to place as much emphasis on the fact that he was a eunuch as I have been placing on the fact that he was an Ethiopian.
Eunuchs were men who were castrated, usually so that they could be considered safe enough to work for royalty in places of great trust. Because they were unable to be fruitful and multiply, eunuchs were deemed sexual outcasts, unable to enter the assembly of Yahweh according to Deuteronomy 23.
The question we should ask ourselves as we approach Acts 8 are: Who today are the sexual outcasts? Who today, because of their sexual identity, face obstacles in entering or serving in God's house? Who today, in the words of Deuteronomy, are cut off?
For many GLBT scholars, the eunuchs who were the sexual outcasts of yesteryear are the GLBT community who are the sexual outcasts of today. These eunuchs of old are considered to be the predecessors of today's gays and lesbians.
How, then, do we make sense of the exclusive reading of Deuteronomy that prevents the eunuch from entering into God's house?
Whenever we read the biblical text, we read it from our particular social location. What is usually accepted as biblical truth is nothing more than the subjective reading of those in power, who make their interpretations normative and legitimate for the rest of the faith community.
Unfortunately, if we are unaware of readings of the text that come from marginalized perspectives, we ignore how our interpretations justify lifestyles that are at times contradictory to the very essence of the gospel message.
With this in mind, we can return to the Ethiopian eunuch and discover an interpretation ignored by those who wish to keep the GLBT community marginalized.
Here, then, is the good news for all who are sexual outcasts, whether they be the eunuch of old or the homosexual of today.
In spite of Deuteronomy's exclusion, there exists a special place reserved for them in God's house. In the messianic dream in Isaiah 56, the prophet proclaims: "Do not let the eunuch say, 'Behold, I am a dried-up tree,' for thus says Yahweh to the eunuchs who keep my sabbaths, and chooses things with which I am pleased, and take hold of my covenant.
"I will even give them in my house and in my walls a hand and a name better than sons and daughters, I will give them an everlasting name which shall not be cut off." (No doubt the puns were intentional.)
Here, then, is the significance of the story in Acts 8. The first non-Jew to be converted to the faith was a sexual outcast. So-called normative heterosexuals follow the sexual outcast to Jesus.
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-- Miguel De La Torre is associate professor of social ethics at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver.
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