Calvinist Flyswatter

Who Is NAMB's Aaron Coe?

Who is Aaron Coe?

He's the Vice President of Mobilization at the Southern Baptist Convention's North American Mission Board. He reports directly to NAMB's President Kevin "The Annie Armstrong offering is not important" Ezell. An April 2011 report in SBC Life listed him as having reached the ripe old age of 34.

Based on our sources at NAMB, The Calvinist Flyswatter can now report that Coe is the point man for distributing millions of dollars of SBC money to NAMB's church plants throughout the USA.

What is Coe's qualifications that Ezell would task him to distribute millions of dollars from SBC churches?

Media outlets have described Cole as an "innovative leader with a vision" who planted The Gallery Church in New York City. The church was launched in 2006 "by a team ... at the North American Mission Board, in partnership with NAMB's 'New Hope New York' strategic focus initiative." In other words, NAMB pumped a lot of money into starting this church with Coe as the founding pastor.

In 2006, the Baptist Press reported on Coe's efforts to recruit "college students from across the nation to spend a year in New York taking Christian leadership classes and doing ministry in churches across the metro New York area. The program originally was an initiative of Southern Baptists’ North American Mission Board under its New Hope New York emphasis before moving to The Gallery Church." Coe appeared to be successful in mobilizing college students to come to the Gallery Church and help them in their work.

In addition to college students, various churches sent workers to New York to help Coe and his NAMB-funded church (see, for example, here). In one instance, "Gallery members were scattered among more than 40 ministry sites... Among the most grateful were the health clinics that strive to test residents for HIV/AIDS. Coe said he and other members determined the clinics were ideal places for the volunteers to offer their services."

So the Gallery Church was started by Coe with NAMB's money. Under Coe's leadership, it received free college student labor and free church volunteer labor for years. With all those resources, one would think The Gallery Church would be a model of NAMB's church planting efforts, right? For Kevin Ezell to give him such a high position at NAMB, Aaron Coe must be the next Rick Warren, right?

You be the judge.

SBC Tomorrow recently provided some information on Coe and the profile of him as an "innovative leader with a vision" is not good.

A commenter on SBC Tomorrow writes the following:

Likewise, Aaron Coe, NAMB’s new VP for mobilization, was hailed as "a gifted strategist [who] has demonstrated his mobilization effectiveness through his work in New York City" http://bpnews.net/BPnews.asp?ID=34629, and identified as “a leader among young Southern Baptists for many years,” http://www.bpnews.net/bpnews.asp?id=34606, despite leading a declining Acts 29 church plant. Here are the ACP numbers for Gallery Church in Manhattan while under Coe’s leadership:

2007
Worship attendance 190
Baptisms 14

2008
Worship attendance 125
Baptisms 3

2009
Worship attendance 120
Baptisms 8

2010
Worship attendance 100
Baptisms 6

In other words, Coe is a Deformed Reformed, Acts 29, born-again-before-faith young Calvinist who was good at taking the money and labor from godly SBC churches and then squandered it by planting a Calvinist church which greatly declined under his leadership. Look at the numbers. All that money. All that volunteer labor. All in the most populated city in America.

Amazing, isn't it?

Oh, one other thing. When Kevin Ezell was pastor of Highview Baptist Church, it "partnered" with the planting of The Gallery Church.

Now we have more proof of the type of churches that Kevin Ezell wants to plant and the leader he has selected to give millions of dollars of our money to plant them.

Aaron Coe. Get to know him. Get to know Kevin Ezell. Then pray hard for NAMB. Really hard.

Charles

Labels: Aaron Coe, Calvinist, Ed Stetzer, Gallery Church, Kevin Ezell, LifeWay, NAMB, North American Mission Board, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

posted by Charles @ 12:43 PM