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Back to the interview with Burleson

Interview with John Floyd :

Were you surprised that Burleson resigned?

No, I'm sorry that he did, but I'm not surprised. I think it frees us to move on with our primary purpose. [Burleson] has been the focus of attention for a good, long while. I hoped that he would come back into the board. We had extended an invitation for him to do that. He had acknowledged that he had intentionally violated our rules of conduct and felt he did not want continue.

Why did you reject his apology?

It was not an apology. He just stated why he did what he did. It was not an apology for the rules of conduct he intentionally violated. He has indicated in his earlier letter that that he would stop his blog, but he did not. He continues to criticize the actions of the board on his blog, and that's not acceptable.

Burleson says he wants to have a free and open discussion about board discussion. Why are you hesitant to keep board discussion from the public?

It's sort of like if you have a problem in your family, you don't want the neighborhood to decide for you; you need to keep that within your family. Our decisions were frequently misrepresented on his blog.

I understand that Southern Baptist Convention executive-committee attorneys intervened at the meeting.

They said that we had the authority to make the censure, but that only the SBC could say that he could not participate in the meetings and would be reimbursed for his travels, so we rescinded that part [where we would not allow him to participate].

What is the future of the board?

We have our rules of conduct. Our board has done what it needs to. We don't anticipate further instances like this. There's unity on our board, but it's played way out of focus by Mr. Burleson. We had reached out to him. All he had to do was apologize and he did not want do that, so that's why the action was taken. We wanted him to be on the board in full cooperation.

Back to the interview with Burleson

Back to the interview with Floyd

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Wade Burleson's blog has commentary on the vote to censure him and the reasoning behind his blog.

Christianity Today's previous coverage includes:

Critic Censured | Trustee suspended from mission board for airing closed-door activities.

Costly Complaints | Southern Baptist pastor claims blog criticism led mission board to recommend his removal.

Baptist Press and Associated Baptist Press reported on Burleson's resignation.

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February (Web-only) 2008, Vol. 52