G. Frink's

Southern Baptist Pastor Wade Burleson suggests that an unduly privileged International Mission Board (IMB) trustees oversee publication of inflated, sometimes fabricated statistics of missionary accomplishment.

The IMB, which has missionary operations in virtually every country in the world other than the U.S. and Canada, is not new to controversy. IMB Baptism numbers were challenged in 2005 by Tony Cupit, then Baptist World Alliance evangelism director. He and others indicated that the IMB had claimed work done by indigenous pastors, missionaries and church planters with which it had some relationship. He also raised questions about the capacity of the available staff to achieve the reported numbers, saying:

The actual number that may be baptizing is quite a small percentage. In that light, each of these would have to be doing little else but baptizing, and that is not happening.

Burleson's analysis is similar to Cupit's. Blogging the Southern Baptist Convention's IMB with almost the facts-first attitude of newspaper local government reporter, the Oklahoma pastor and former IMB trustee explains that it isn't at all likely that in 2007 each of 5,551 missionaries abroad:

• Planted on average five new churches each in 2007.
• Baptised on average 120 new members each in 2007.

The Baptist Planet team writes:

The numbers defy belief, he and some of those who commented on the blog suggested, and are not supported by the documenting data required to answer questions like:

"Where do these churches exist?", "How many people attend?", "Who pastors them?", "How many are still in existence?" etc . . .

He reports having inquired:

I have asked some of our SBC missionary personnel to give me the names of those baptized under their care as reported on the Annual Statistical Report - only to be given a blank stare by many. It seems there is no record of either the names of those baptized or churches they attend. The baptism number is simply that - a number.

The 89 IMB Trustees who are ultimately responsible for the statistics serve, Burleson reports, eight-year terms rich in expense-paid travel whose "costs are in the hundreds of thousands of dollars a year."

That's a high price for overseeing a system fraught with slipshod reporting, and Burleson wants to see it reformed.

He wrote that during his time as an IMB Board member:

The waste associated with such an archaic system of oversight caused me and a handful of other trustees to advocate the reduction of trustees meetings to two a year; the first would be in January and held in Richmond and the second would be in June in conjunction with the Southern Baptist Convention. I further argued that the "commissioning" service for each missionary should be held at missionary's "home" church, and that the "selection" of qualified Southern Baptist applicants should be up to the professional missiologists at the IMB who are paid to interview, train, and support missionaries across the Convention.

The money-saving proposals got nowhere:

Trustees opposed to such a radical reduction in trustee meetings and numbers argued against it by spiritualizing, as is the Southern Baptist habit, by saying: "We have such a HUGE ministry at the IMB that we have to constantly meet to provide proper oversight."

As a result, Burleson's report clearly says, the IMB retains an unnecessarily expensive trustee structure and process whose results are unreliably measured.