When Wayne Pederson moved to Virginia last month to assume his duties as president and chief operating officer of the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB), he kept his family's home in Minneapolis.

By Saturday evening, Pederson will know if he'll be returning to Minneapolis sooner than he had anticipated.

After his comments in a January 5 article in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune generated a controversy in the 1,300-member organization, Pederson submitted his resignation to Chairman and CEO Glenn Plummer on February 8. Saturday, the 93-member board of directors will vote on whether to accept Pederson's resignation during its annual convention in Nashville. Pederson was to have been inaugurated Saturday.

Pederson suggested to the Star-Tribune that the NRB should be known more for its evangelical theology than its conservative stance on political and public policy issues. Pederson said that people automatically associate Christian broadcasters with the Religious Right.

Shortly after the article was published, several prominent members of the organization publicly called for his resignation.

"I think what I was saying has been misunderstood," Pederson told CT. "I wasn't saying that Christian broadcasters shouldn't be speaking to the moral issues of the day. What I was trying to say [was that] our theology, evangelism, and discipleship should always take priority over our political positions, and we ought to be more known for our gospel than for our politics. But in no way was I trying to distance NRB from religious conservatives or saying that they shouldn't use their broadcasts to speak to the moral and cultural issues of the day."

Still, Pederson's remarks have ignited a public and private controversy in the 59-year-old organization, ...