November 18, 2002
Shorter College parting ways with Georgia Baptist Convention
___By John Pierce
___Baptists Today
___ATLANTA--Shorter College and the Georgia Baptist Convention appear to be parting company, after they could not agree on a new slate of trustees for the college.
___Messengers to the GBC annual meeting elected eight new trustees for Shorter, a Georgia Baptist school in Rome. However, none of the trustees came from a list of 16 candidates submitted by Shorter's board of trustees.
___Consequently, none of the trustees elected by the GBC will be accepted, Shorter President Ed Schrader said.
___That's because the GBC action violates a bylaw change adopted earlier this year by Shorter trustees, Schrader said. The bylaw requires all new trustees to be approved by the current board prior to election.
___Rejection of the GBC's slate of trustees is expected to signal the end of a 44-year relationship between the college and convention. The two parties disagree on how trustees are to be elected as well as the reason why the college made the bylaw change.
___Schrader insisted the college responded to an accreditation concern over the independence of the trustee board and said he has provided supporting documents to GBC leaders. GBC Executive Director Bob White, however, tied the action to an unfounded fear of a fundamentalist takeover of the school.
___"There is no intent on the convention's part to take over the college," White told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
___This summer, however, White wrote an open letter regarding Shorter that was mailed to pastors and printed in the state Baptist newspaper, The Christian Index. He disclosed that one GBC leader visited Schrader last fall to discuss trustee candidates and "matters that concerned him regarding the faithfulness of Shorter College's leadership and faculty to Baptist heritage, faith and practice."
___Mike Everson, pastor of Prays Mill Baptist Church in Douglasville, Ga., and chairman of the GBC nominating committee, later was identified as the person who made that visit. Everson presented the slate of trustees to this year's GBC messengers.
___Everson described his committee's nominees as loyal Georgia Baptists who support convention mission causes. The 16 candidates suggested by the college trustees, he said, were less committed to GBC causes.
___ One of the college's nominees rarely attends church, while another joined a Baptist church recently in order to serve as a trustee at Shorter, Everson claimed. Some candidates are members of churches that support the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, he added.
___Schrader strongly disagreed with those characterizations of Shorter's slate of candidates. Everson "spread untruths about two devoted Christians," he insisted. "What he said was not only untrue, but malicious."
___Several of the 16 candidates attend churches that contribute more than 10 percent of their budgets to convention causes, Schrader said. Everson "doesn't have his facts right" about a woman who recently moved back to Georgia from out of state and joined a Baptist church where she had previously been a member, he reported.
___"Why would you reject 16 good Baptists without going back to talk to us or negotiate unless you have another agenda?" Schrader asked.
___The convention recently released some funds to Shorter designated as scholarships for Baptist students. The remaining funds are being held in escrow and are expected to be redistributed to another GBC entity.
___An additional $8 million in capital improvement funds for the college are being held by the Georgia Baptist Foundation. Determining whether the college or the convention gets that money might require legal action.
___The Shorter trustee board's executive committee met Nov. 13 to draft a response to the GBC election. The full board of trustees is to meet and respond in late November, Schrader said.
___Refusal to seat the new GBC-elected trustees would result in Shorter no longer being a Baptist college, White told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
___Schrader contended the school has been a Baptist college since 1873 and plans to remain one.
___"Whether someone at the GBC endorses it has no bearing on whether we will be a Baptist college," he said. "We will be a Baptist college."
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