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The group may still face lawsuits resulting from the ex-president's financial dealings. A $2.8 million debt burdens the NBC's Nashville-based World Baptist Center headquarters, an impressive but some say impractical structure commissioned by Lyons's immediate predecessor. American Baptist College, the NBC's only educational institution, sits a block down the road in visible disrepair, another victim of the group's crippled cash flow.

Meanwhile, grassroots debates about women in the pulpit and the archaic structure of the NBC's administration bring strong murmurs of discontent among pastors and lay leaders. "The convention is more of a social club than an organization that is 'other-directed,' " says lifelong NBC member Riggins Earl, a professor of ethics at ITC. "It has so much potential to reform and rehabilitate black America, yet we get bogged down in convention politics and foolishness."

For the casual critic, it's easy to target Lyons as the root cause of the NBC's problems. But informed observers, such as Earl, know that the convention's current crisis has been brewing for a long time. This reformation, they say, is both necessary and overdue. As Franklin has suggested, Lyons may be the "wake-up call" that the National Baptists needed.

This year's NBC annual session was supposed to be a sort of hometown celebration for Henry Lyons. While still president, he scheduled the event for Tampa, just across the bay from his St. Petersburg church. It should have been a glowing tribute to his first five years as the NBC head and, presumably, the site of his reelection. However, he was left to ponder the "what ifs" from his prison cell, more than 100 miles north in Ocala, while the NBC delegates selected his replacement.

Despite his absence, the specter of Lyons stubbornly hovered over the Tampa meeting. He was regularly invoked from the platform by NBC leaders in both sympathetic and disparaging terms. "[Lyons] needs our prayers," said Stewart C. Cureton, a venerable South Carolina pastor who stepped in as interim president after Lyons resigned. "In spite of the mistakes he made, he is still our brother." Cureton then decreed that buckets be passed for an offering to help defray Lyons's legal bills. After a long, awkward pause, some delegates opened their wallets; others continued to sit on them. It was just one of many uncomfortable "Lyons moments."

The lingering tragedy of the scandal, however, could not dampen the naturally exuberant spirit that National Baptists bring to an annual session. They came from all parts, not only to elect a new leader but also to "have church": for fellowship, preaching, praise, and prayer. About 40,000 of them swarmed downtown Tampa, braving the thick humidity and sporadic rains and pumping an estimated $46 million into the Tampa economy.

Electing a new NBC president is high drama by itself, but this first post-Lyons election added an even greater theatrical quality. In front of the Tampa Convention Center, dozens of men and women distributed campaign fliers, buttons, banners, and T-shirts that touted their man for president. A woman stood next to a life-size cutout of candidate Russell Awkard, the pastor of New Zion Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky. "The real dealis Dr. Hill!" shouted one man in a strained rhyme about candidate E. V. Hill, the prominent pastor of Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles, who played a key role in the NBC's initial pardoning of Lyons. "Richardson will bring us together!" declared another man, speaking of W. Franklyn Richardson, the progressive minister of Grace Baptist Church in Mount Vernon, New York, who lost to Lyons by a narrow margin in 1994. After that election, Richardson's supporters cried foul and filed a lawsuit, charging election fraud. The judge ultimately ruled in Lyons's favor but advised NBC members to "use the internal mechanisms [of the denomination] to resolve such disputes."

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December 6 1999, Vol. 43, No. 14