Selby and Lee have expressed hopes that continuing litigation involving defendants not part of the current settlements, including Symetra Life Insurance Co. and Harris’ estate, could recoup more of the lost funds for plan participants or their beneficiaries, if the court rules in their favor. A trial is set for April 2026.
The parties involved in the partial settlements, which include Newport as well as AME Church defendants such as its Council of Bishops, General Board and Department of Retirement Services, have not admitted liability.
The Rev. Brian K. Blackwell. (Photo courtesy of AME Church)
Since Blackwell was elected as the department’s executive director in 2024, he said most of his time has been spent talking with elderly plan participants who have been seeking answers about the mishandled funds for the last four years.
“One of the challenges is that, with the majority of the persons being impacted being older, they want to talk to you,” he said. “So, you can send emails, you can send posts through the internet, but they still want to call you and say, ‘I want to hear for myself,’ or ‘I want someone to explain this to me.’”
But, at some point over the next few years, Blackwell will no longer be answering such questions. Another part of the settlement agreement calls for the closure of the church’s Department of Retirement Services by July 31, 2028, and outsourcing retirement plan management.
“A big part of what we needed to accomplish in this litigation is reform,” said Lee, when asked about the pending end of the department. “We need to do whatever we can do to make sure that something like this cannot ever happen again at the AME Church. Moving the services performed by the church, mostly by folks with little, if any, experience running a retirement plan, to professionals who focus their business on managing retirement plans was an important step towards that goal and should bring a critical level of professionalism and accountability to the plan administration.”
For his part, Blackwell, a pastor of a Birmingham, Alabama, church, said he hopes he and the sole other staffer currently in the department have skills that can be used in other church settings. The retirement section of the department’s duties will be handled by a third-party administrator and, for now, the remaining staff will continue to address life insurance matters.
“Part of our responsibility is to put adequate systems and controls in place so that the function that the department serves right now can be reduced by the time that we get to 2028,” Blackwell said. “And that those resources, both financial and human, can be reallocated elsewhere and doing different things.”
This article originally appeared here.
