Leaders of Black Church Call for Increased Accountability in Wake of Scandal

Church leaders are demanding that one of the nation’s largest black denominations make far-reaching changes in its financial-management practices in the wake of a sex-and-money scandal that led to the criminal conviction and resignation of the group’s president.

While leaders of the National Baptist Convention USA remain divided on how best to respond to the highly publicized scandal, some local pastors are withholding contributions to the national organization until the group tightens its fiscal and governance controls.

“I’m going to wait and see and make sure there is accountability,” the Rev. Franklin R. Clark, pastor of Mount Olivette Baptist Church, in Miami, says of his decision to stop sending a portion of what he collects from his congregation to the convention’s national office, in Nashville. “We’re not going to send any more money until we see a better system of checks and balances.”

The denomination, which claims 8.5 million members belonging to 33,000 churches in America, Africa, Europe, and the Caribbean, typically collects about $5-million in fees and donations each year. The money pays for the administration of the convention, which has a governing board with more than 200 members, and helps to support, among other things, missionaries and Baptist seminaries.

The convention’s former president, the Rev. Henry J. Lyons, was sentenced last week to five and a half years in prison by a Florida state court. A jury had found him guilty of racketeering and theft in connection with the mishandling of more than $4-million — much of it paid to him by corporations hoping to do business with the convention. Mr. Lyons, who resigned from the elected position but remains a pastor in St. Petersburg, Fla., also has pleaded guilty to related federal charges of fraud and tax evasion. He is set to be sentenced on the federal charges in June.

The scandal started nearly two years ago, when Mr. Lyons’s wife set fire to a $700,000 waterfront home that Mr. Lyons owned with a female official at the convention.

Prosecutors started looking into Mr. Lyons’s finances — a process that would lay bare the church leader’s hidden bank accounts, lavish way of life, adulterous affairs, and lucrative deals that mixed church and personal money.

The case also offered an unusual peek into the inner workings of the National Baptist Convention USA, which critics say has had spotty record keeping, and which, like other religious groups, is not subject to public-disclosure laws.

What emerged was a picture — still hazy from the lack of details about money and membership — of a national church body run largely out of the president’s hip pocket. Indeed, both the prosecutors and the defense team in Mr. Lyons’s criminal trial agreed: Mr. Lyons was allowed to collect and spend millions of dollars with little, if any, oversight.

Mr. Lyons and other of the convention’s top officials did not return telephone calls seeking their comments. Officials at the denomination’s headquarters, the World Baptist Center, also failed to respond to a list of questions, including many about finances, that was submitted by The Chronicle.

The changes being sought at the National Baptist Convention are probably overdue, say several religion scholars. The denomination, they say, has been slow to respond to a general trend among black churches around the country toward the sharing of power and more-formalized fiscal practices.

“There are shifting sands in black-church culture as better-educated African Americans demand that their clergy function like other professionals,” says the Rev. Robert M. Franklin, president of the Interdenominational Theological Center, in Atlanta. “No longer can a pastor be effective without paying attention to shared governance and financial integrity.”

He adds: “The Lyons tragedy is a reminder that there is a non-negotiable learning curve among the black clergy.”

But opinions vary as to how much — or even whether — the Baptist Convention will change now that Mr. Lyons is gone.

For one, not everyone agrees that the denomination’s governance and financial systems are in need of improvement. In fact, some say, Mr. Lyons was the victim of racism — unfairly accused of mishandling money by government officials who do not understand how the black church operates. Others say that Mr. Lyons was simply a corrupt man who took advantage of a good system.

Secondly, even those who say that change is needed admit that it will be hard to come by. Observers inside and outside the church point to long-held attitudes about power and politics within the convention.

“There’s a legacy that the president and his people have all the leverage and all the latitude to do as they want,” says Mr. Clark, in Miami. “Legacies don’t disappear immediately just because a rule is changed.”

In any case, change is not expected to come quickly.

The Rev. S. C. Cureton, a convention vice-president who is serving as president until September, says that long-range planning for the denomination is largely on hold until then. Mr. Lyons’s five-year tenure was due to end in September, when a regularly scheduled election will take place.

“We are democratic-minded,” says Mr. Cureton, pastor of Reedy River Missionary Baptist Church, in Greenville, S.C. “Much of this will depend on what the next leadership wants.”

In the meantime, Mr. Cureton says he has made some promises for his own short tenure:

* To allow the convention’s finance panel to make final decisions about all expenditures.

* To order a financial audit.

* To ban any new deals with for-profit businesses, such as agreements to sponsor a product or help market it to convention members.

In one such deal described by state prosecutors during Mr. Lyons’s six-week-long Florida trial, Mr. Lyons allegedly took more than $3-million from a Canadian funeral-home company, the Loewen Group, in exchange for, among other things, a bogus list of the denomination’s members. The company was interested in selling funeral plots and other services to the millions of people who belong to the church.

Although Mr. Cureton points out that the convention’s board found that Mr. Lyons had not broken any church rules in that and other business deals, he says: “We have gotten in the trouble we’re in by accepting these situations with these companies.”

Black-church leaders around the country say that the revelations about Mr. Lyons and the management of his church have reverberated throughout other black denominations. Although many point out that the Lyons case was an isolated incident at a single denomination, they add that it is a reminder to make sure that their own houses are in order.

“Unfortunately, people begin to look at you with a different eye,” says Richard Allen Lewis, treasurer of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, which says it has as many as three million members. “As a result of things we’ve seen, we need to rethink and make sure we’re strictly business when it comes to any kind of fund raising. We have been in the past, and there’s no reason to break from that method of operation in the future, but it makes sense to make sure that’s the case.”

Bishop Roy L. H. Winbush, a board member of the Church of God in Christ, another black denomination, which says it has more than five million members, says that the Lyons case “challenges us to be more consistent in our review of what we do.”

For one thing, he says, his denomination’s national office is installing a new computer system to improve its financial reporting.

The Rev. Calvin O. Butts III, pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church, in New York, wishes the National Baptist Convention could institute such changes. He and other pastors say they want the convention to give its governing board greater power over the president and to give church members more access to its financial records.

But, Mr. Butts says, it will be hard to overcome what he calls “the 19th-century mentality” of the church, which has left most members out of touch with denomination business.

“From 1972 until this present day, the NBC members have never received a satisfactory financial report of the financial condition of the convention or the convention’s financial activities,” Mr. Butts says. “Where we have received books or minutes, it has been woefully inadequate and poorly put together.”

He suggests that instead of holding an election next fall, the convention should appoint 12 trustees to oversee the denomination for up to two years. Among other duties, he says, the trustees could help rewrite the constitution and bylaws to insure greater power sharing.

Too drastic, say other church officials.

“I don’t think we should be described as irresponsible or in need of emergency care,” says the Rev. Edward V. Hill, pastor of Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church, in Los Angeles, and a member of the convention’s governing board.

Much of the criticism of the convention, he says, comes from pastors who have their own personal agendas — including running for office in September — or who are not fully informed about the way the convention operates.

Mr. Hill says that the only aspect of convention business that needs serious review is the president’s ability to make endorsement deals with companies.

“We just have to decide if we want them and under what conditions,” he says.

Another board member, the Rev. L. C. Menyweather-Woods, says that better communication between the president and the board, and among board members themselves, would take care of many of the concerns voiced by Mr. Butts and others.

“The incident with Lyons is not as devastating as some people would like it to be,” says Mr. Menyweather-Woods, senior pastor at Mt. Moriah Missionary Baptist Church, in Omaha. “I refuse to feel bad. Lyons did it. I didn’t do it. We did what we had to do. We did have oversight, but what happened is that some deals were made in spite of that. Some board members were not properly notified. There was not enough communication.”

How much of a problem Mr. Lyons’s legacy will be for the National Baptist Convention USA remains to be seen.

Supporters of the former president say that his troubles may have actually helped to bring the convention together, especially as many church members saw the case against Mr. Lyons as racially motivated. They also point to the highlights of Mr. Lyons’s administration, including his work to reduce the debt on the church’s $12-million Nashville headquarters.

Other church members say that the denomination is more fractured than ever, and that it has already started losing both money and members.

One thing is for sure, however: people like Mr. Clark, at Mount Olivette, are watching the convention closely.

And, while Mr. Clark says he is optimistic that the convention will eventually change the way it conducts business, if it does not, he says bluntly, Mount Olivette — and maybe other local churches, too — will abandon the national group.