If you're a fan of Woman's Missionary Union's Missions Extravaganza; Baptist Men's missions conference and annual meeting; and the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of North Carolina's spring meeting you will have to decide which one you want to attend in March 2009, because you'll only be able to attend one.

They are all scheduled for March 20-21.

WMU will be again at Ridgecrest; Baptist Men at Hickory Grove Baptist Church in Charlotte; and CBF at Snyder Memorial in Fayetteville. Because they have "overlapping constituencies" it just "wouldn't be smart" to intentionally schedule all three events on the same weekend, according to CBF executive Larry Hovis.

I'm not going to speculate on the opposite of smart but it has happened.

While WMU can legitimately feel their meeting, has been dissed, the leaders of Baptist Men and CBF assure me it was not intentional. There is no conspiracy, collusion or intention to stomp on WMU's annual meeting, even though their date has been set for five years. The other guys just didn't think to check the calendars or with each other when determining their own date.

Once they noticed the conflict a couple weeks ago, they were trapped by limited dates and venues, availability of speakers and contracts already signed. Richard Brunson, executive director, said Baptist Men moved its meeting to March after they twice were snowed out in January. Combine that with 2009 being the year to meet in Charlotte; Hickory Grove the only church in the area with capacity to accommodate the meeting, ACC and CIAA basketball events in Charlotte, Easter and Palm Sunday and the church's schedule, there was really only one weekend to pick and that was March 20-21, Brunson said.

While there is no way to have hard evidence, Brunson feels there is only a small number of WMU Missions Extravaganza participants who would go to the Baptist Men's meeting if it was on a separate weekend. "People who would go to their meeting are not the same people who come to ours," he said.

While distressed WMU staff might feel the Baptist Men's board purposely set their date to conflict with WMU's, Brunson said that is just not so. Brunson said he sets the dates himself, and not the board.

"There was no intent to set a conflicting date," Brunson said. "It's just one of those things that happens."

Hovis said his group was the only one of the three that had a legitimate shot at changing its schedule, and he tried to do it when he learned of the conflicts. But contracts with Fred Craddock, their primary speaker, could not be changed because of his availability and they could not find a suitable different date. CBF has been pretty consistent in its spring date, meeting the third weekend of March for nine of the past 11 years.

"It's terrible," he said. "It hurts everybody." Hovis said he, Brunson and Ruby Fulbright, WMU executive director have talked and all agreed "we'd have to somehow make the best of it."

"We're all sorry, we all love each other and we'll try to communicate better in the future," Hovis said.

Calendaring major events like these is tough enough, without having to go back and make amends to those whose dates you blundered into.