Background checks for the church
Posted on August 10, 2009 at 1:23 pmAn article in Church Executive Magazine points to a report from Nashville’s LifeWay Christian Resources stating that one in eight background checks conducted by the organization revealed criminal histories that could have prevented applicants from volunteering with or working for churches.
Last year LifeWay negotiated an affinity-group discount for screening services for churches with Backgroundchecks.com, a 10-year-old company with 4,500 clients. Since then, according to a news release, about 450 churches requested more than 5,000 background checks on volunteers and prospective employees.
While most screenings returned clean records or only minor traffic offenses, LifeWay said, 80 found serious felony offenses and more than 600 people had some type of criminal history that may have disqualified them from volunteering or working at a church.
While not a statistically representative sample, 450 churches is 1 percent of the 44,848 Southern Baptist congregations claimed in LifeWay’s most recent Annual Church Profile. Projected onto the other 99 percent of Southern Baptist churches, that would add up to 8,000 serious felony offenses and more than 60,000 people with some sort of checkered past in churches across the convention.
It’s probably good for the SBC to be taking this sort of initiative. Other churches around town, are a little more lax.
Ex-LifeWay prez recovering in Texas hospital
Posted on June 9, 2009 at 6:53 am
Jimmy Draper, who led Nashville-based LifeWay for 15 years, was reported this morning to be in much better shape than last week, when he was admitted to hospital for what appears to be a major allergic reaction.
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LifeWay music service off to strong start
Posted on March 19, 2009 at 4:04 pm
More than 12,000 people already have signed up for LifeWayWorship, the Nashville-based organization’s new iTunes-like site for church music.
Harland says the new program helps churches obey the law. A portion of the cost of each song is paid to music publishers and songwriter.
“We want to make it easy for everybody to be legal,” he says.
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Christian economic leader discusses economic Pearl Harbor
Posted on February 13, 2009 at 11:13 amFrom the Christian Post:
“I am not saying the economy can compare to the loss of lives, but, like then, many are asking if there is hope,” he said during a recent meeting of trustees, according to a report by the company. “They are asking where God is in this.”
It was billionaire Warren Buffet who first referred to the turmoil in the markets as an “economic Pearl Harbor,” later predicting on “Dateline NBC” that the nation would come through as it has in the past.
”[B]ut it’s not always a smooth ride,” he said in the interview aired on Jan. 18, three months after he first coined the phrase “economic Pearl Harbor.”
Building off Buffet’s comment, Rainer listed eight lessons that can be learned from the World War II attack, starting first with the importance of being prepared for surprises.
“Last year, we (LifeWay leaders) were looking ahead to what we saw as a devastating economic trend and we had to make some hard decisions regarding personnel deletions,” Rainer recalled. “We wanted to be prepared for this economy. We look back and can see it was not our collective intellect but God’s wisdom. We can say we are not perfect but we have been prepared for what’s happened.”
Secondly, adjustments need to be made quickly. LifeWay’s leadership, for example, has been constantly engaging in conversations to determine whether adjustments are needed across divisions and throughout the company, according to Rainer.
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LifeWay launches online music service
Posted on February 5, 2009 at 1:50 pmWhat started as a digital hymnal has turned “the largest known recording project in Nashville history” into an iTunes-like service that lets users customize the songs they want. From the AP’s report on the launch of SongMap this morning:
“It’s a one-stop worship shop,” Pack said. “There’s nothing of this scale that allows you to do this. There’s software that allows you to compose music, but the ability to move those blocks around, the chorus or the verses, to change the key, that’s not really out there right now.”
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