[1]NASHVILLE, Tenn. (BP)??The six Southern Baptist Convention seminaries have received $83,768 in unspent monies from the Arson Fund as affirmed by the SBC annual meeting in Dallas in June, according to Morris H. Chapman, president and chief executive officer of the SBC Executive Committee.
The Arson Fund, initiated during the 1996 SBC meeting in New Orleans by then?President Jim Henry, was to help African American churches as an outreach to those congregations which experienced burning of their facilities. More than $700,000, received by the SBC, was channeled through 17 state conventions.
At the June 1997 SBC annual meeting Tom Elliff, SBC president, recommended, and the convention messengers approved, that undisbursed monies remaining in the Arson Fund be redirected to the six seminaries to be used specifically for African American theological education.
Chapman recently notified the seminaries that the $83,768 would be distributed according to the Seminary Funding Formula, used in the SBC Cooperative Program Allocation Budget.
The undistributed funds were from six state conventions which returned unspent Arson Fund monies to the SBC.
Arson funds collected by the SBC were distributed to state convention based on the number of known church burnings of African American churches and special requests from the state conventions. The distribution was directed by the SBC Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission in coordination with the SBC Racial Reconciliation Task Force.