Paul Kim is the Chair of the Regional Coordinators Committee. Click here to view other members of the committee. 

Regions Administration and Structure

Regional gatherings have long been integral to the Society’s activities and its members’ interests, and they have grown and evolved in numerous ways. They, however, were confronted with the need to change their mode of operation in 2002 with the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. While these regulations challenged the decentralization of the Society that the regions favored, the Society’s Council and Executive Director committed themselves to maintaining the independence and distinctiveness of the North American regions and to supporting regional ownership and creativity. In this regard, Council appointed a Task Force on Regions in its October 2009 fall council meeting and charged the task force with making recommendations on how to comply with federal mandates while preserving the strengths of the regions.

The Task Force committed itself to several objectives:

• to promote SBL’s engagement on a regional level in North America in order to foster biblical scholarship
• to reduce risk and liability issues confronted in the course of such engagement
• to enable the Society to allocate resource dollars more effectively on regional programs
• to encourage and promote the independence and distinctiveness of the regions
• to support regional ownership and creativity; and
• to help scale and replicate regional initiatives and programs in other regions and at the national and international levels