Adam Greenway files lawsuit against Southwestern Seminary

OK, to put things in perspective, Pecan Manor is big; 8757 square feet in 2007. Clearly a show place and place for hosting events, not just a residence. I hope. So $1.5 million in renovations is a little bit rich, but not that out of line for something that size. That cost is especially understandable if there was extensive mold damage, meaning you've got to tear the place down basically to the studs to remove everything. You have to wonder if somebody was taking lessons from Heritage USA, which also had horrendous quality problems.

(basic plan for reducing mold, by the way, is simple; vapor barriers and insulation. It's really, really cheap. But when you let it spread, then it gets really expensive, tear it down to the studs and all)

Regarding Christmas decorations and that espresso bar, I can't speak for top line Christmas decorations, but I do know that if you want to serve espresso drinks to a hundred or so guests, you don't do that with a Keurig, and commercial food service equipment is expensive. I don't think $11k is necessarily way out of line unless they're not actually serving that quantity of people.

More or less, the problem does not appear to be as much with Greenway as it is with the logic that got Pecan Manor built in the first place, and with SWBTS's financial accountability structures. If you're doing a huge amount of mold remediation, you ought to have some documentation of the mold, its extent, etc.. There should be no debate on this, and quite frankly, even the President of a school doesn't get to say "that's icky" and spend seven figures. Or....shouldn't.

The problem at the end of the day is board accountability. Unfortunately it is pretty absent in many of these types of cases. It isn't that the board isn't trying. It is that too many of these institutions prize pastorship as the qualifying mark of a board member. If you look at SWBTS, the chairman of the Board is a 41 year old pastor from New Mexico. I am not sure what corporate board experience he has or the others, but most of them appear to be leaders of churches or Christians schools. As pastors many of these individuals view the relationship with University staff, as one of a ministry and not as one of a business. But the purpose of the board is to establish and maintain oversight. The fact that they did an audit and found these items and brought them up as a reason to remove the president is oversight on their part. How on earth were they not aware of a $1.5M spend on the main residence on campus? Based on their tuition and room & board fees as well as their enrollment, I would guess that the budget is somewhere around $65M. I would assume that they should be aware of something that was 2% of the budget. How would that level of cost be hidden? Not sure it was.

OK, if I'm reading things right, then SWBTS (actual budget about $30 million annually, endowment about $150 million) has both a lawsuit from a former President accused of overspending, and then on the flip side, they've got an EFCA/accreditation nighmare with the possibility/likelihood that they have no credible financial controls. Suffice it to say that I'm glad I'm not Dale Ford (the interim CFO) or one of the accounting team right now.

From my experience handling quality crises, I'd encourage them to figure out quickly what went wrong, and then approach the accrediting agency with a written plan to fix the problems. Then they probably need to apologize to Greenway. He may have been a big spender, but the key issue is a lack of financial controls.

$30M? My budget at work is many times greater than that, and I can tell you that I would surely know if $1.5M was being spent on something. Most churches deal with small budgets, limited financial controls... So leaders of those institutions lead and run boards and they are way outside of their depth of field.