Christian Leadership Alliance

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Committed to Helping One Another

A look back at the birth of CMA
Outcomes, Jan/Feb 2007

On March 20, 1976, a group of 20 people met for the first time at the Rodger Young Auditorium in Los Angeles. That became the first of many meetings of the Christian Financial Executives Association (after two more name changes, it was renamed the Christian Management Association in 1991). We recently talked with three of the founding members.

Alan Bergstedt, President, Visionary Ventures, and first CMA board chairman and president

Dr. James (Jim) Canning, Associate Professor of the School of Business at Biola University, and second CMA chairman/president

Dean Hazelton, Vice President of Finance, World Vision, and third CMA chairman/president

CMR: What was CMA responding to in the beginning?

Jim: Alan Bergstedt was the chief financial officer of World Vision and I was the outside auditor for World Vision. We'd talk with each other about finance and management issues, and we thought it would be wonderful to do this on a more formal basis with more people.

Alan: Before CMA, I'd always been a part of some formal or informal professional networking group. When I was CFO of a national advertising agency, we had a professional group of CFOs from Chicago. Then, when I was the financial officer with Wycliffe in the Philippines, Bob Reynolds [currently serving as treasurer of the CMA Los Angeles Chapter] invited me to be involved in a missions association in Manila. Now, fast-forward about 6 years: I was CFO at World Vision and Bob was treasurer at Far East Broadcasting, also in California. I called Bob and asked, "Is there any group meeting in LA like we had in Manila?" There wasn't. So I talked to Jim [Canning] to see if we could get a group together. We contacted Dean Hazelton and about 30 other people from organizations in the area.

Dean: At the time, there were specific accounting and reporting changes impacting nonprofit organizations which we were all trying to understand how to implement. As we started getting together, we found a real desire to learn from each other, which resulted in our first motto from Living Proverbs: "Good men (and women) long to help each other."

Jim: In the 1970s, I worked with several Christian organizations. I found that many of the people in those organizations were not aware of certain financial principles or modern management issues and techniques. Part of the reason was that they simply were not exposed to these topics in the Bible schools and Christian colleges where they were trained. One of the real reasons for starting CMA was to try to provide practical training from a biblical perspective on how to run Christian organizations.