Excerpt

The Grinches Who Stole the Convention and Southwestern Seminary

At about the time I assumed the presidency of Southwestern in 1978, Paige Patterson, a Dallas minister, and Paul Pressler, a Houston judge, launched their successful scheme to capture control of the SBC in order to reshape it according to their vision. Arousing false fears that the Southern Baptist Convention was slipping into theological liberalism, they set up a precinct-style political organization throughout the South to "turn the convention back to the Bible." The plan was simple: send messengers (delegates in their view) to the annual meeting of the SBC with instructions to elect their handpicked fundamentalist candidate as president. That president would then appoint like-minded committees that in turn would fill the vacancies on the boards of the various convention agencies and seminaries with fundamentalist trustees. In about ten years, each institution would then be in the hands of the Patterson/Pressler faction.

Pressler crudely described this strategy as "going for the jugular." In response to criticism of his remark, Pressler explained, "I was only speaking metaphorically." (I would hope so!) He and Patterson stirred up the anger and fervor of their troops by ridiculing current trustees as "rubber stamps and dumb bunnies," suggesting that people serving on boards like Southwestern Seminary were inept pawns of the administration. The trustees, they claimed, didn’t think for themselves, but blindly did the bidding of the president and faculty. Their lack of courage permitted widespread "liberalism" to flourish in the six SBC theological seminaries. These accusations were not only blatantly untrue, but insults to capable men and women who were unselfishly helping Southwestern achieve its best days.

The Southern Baptist Convention's longstanding system for electing trustees for institutions like Southwestern Seminary was based on openness and trust. The Committee on Boards (appointed by the Committee on Committees, in turn appointed by the president of the SBC) had the responsibility of selecting for Southwestern’s board a trustee from each Baptist state convention. Additional "local" trustees were named from Texas. Trustees could serve two five-year terms and could not be reelected until they had been off the board for at least a year. This system served Baptists well until it was manipulated by the well-organized and well-financed fundamentalist coalition.

In the days before the Patterson/Pressler party took over the procedure, I and other seminary presidents would be invited to make suggestions to the committee about the kind of board members the schools needed. Unless the committee specifically asked for it, this invitation did not include offering names of individuals, only qualities and expertise that would be helpful. However, after the takeover, we were excluded from any input and were not even told who the nominees were until a few days before their election at the annual meeting of the SBC in June.

When I was elected president in November 1977, thirty-four diverse but cooperative trustees served on Southwestern's board. All but one were men, and about half of them were pastors or church staff ministers. Educators, bankers, pastors, musicians, missionaries, business owners, and physicians--they had been chosen from their respective states because they had qualifications and expertise that could strengthen the Seminary. What a privilege it was to work with these trustees on behalf of Baptists to make Southwestern what we believed the Lord wanted it to be!

Admittedly, there were a few on the board who might have been classified as fundamentalists. Their input, representing one segment of our diverse Baptist family, was welcomed in trustee deliberations, but they couldn't dominate or control decisions.

At the board meeting in October 1977 when the presidential search committee recommended my election, one of the fundamentalist trustees, a Dallas lawyer and a member of the First Baptist Church there, led an abortive effort to turn down the committee’s recommendation and elect his brother-in-law instead. Even though he had lobbied hard, his substitute motion failed with only a half-dozen affirmative votes. My election was then affirmed as "unanimous."

One year later, when I named John Newport as vice president of academic affairs and provost of Southwestern, this same trustee was angry that I didn't name his brother-in-law to that position. Frequently, at the end of trustee meetings, his personal resentment would come out. He would refer to some comment I'd made and with vitriolic anger accuse me of speaking out against the takeover effort. When his twelve years on the board ended in 1987 (filling an unexpired term of two years and two more five-year terms) the Seminary family was relieved that this “troublemaker” had finally rotated off the board. But, after a brief reprieve, we were shocked that the Patterson/Pressler organization reappointed him in 1992 for what would be another ten years. It was no surprise that this same Dallas attorney led the conspiracy to fire the president in 1994.

But even with a half-dozen fundamentalists on the board, my first few years with the trustees were a productive time of cooperative teamwork, the kind churches expected of their trustees and administrators. However, as the Patterson/Pressler scheme for taking over the SBC institutions moved into high gear, we began to receive trustees of a different kind. Instead of being chosen for qualifications or expertise that could strengthen the Seminary, this new breed was picked solely on the basis of their loyalty to the fundamentalist party and their willingness to carry out the takeover agenda. Only one or two rare exceptions slipped through the cracks of the Patterson/Pressler network undetected.

These party loyalists resented the accusation that Pressler or Patterson had screened them for appointment, even rebuking me in one meeting for implying as much. Instead, they publicly contended that their appointments were God's will for the Seminary. However, this issue was settled when one trustee was bold enough to say, "Let's be honest, guys. If you say Paige Patterson and Paul Pressler had nothing to do with our appointment to this board, you're either lying or incredibly naïve." He went on to describe how one Texas Baptist layman who was being nominated did not please Pressler and was therefore arbitrarily cut from the nomination list. Often described as "Mr. Southwestern," this man had given much of his life to the Seminary, but he was not one of their party loyalists, so the trustee telling the account was named in his place. The courageous trustee said, "It was only after I was interviewed by the judge and met his approval that I was nominated for the board."

Thankfully, throughout my sixteen years as president, there were always capable, traditional Baptists on the board who resisted the fundamentalist tide. But after 1985, these traditional Baptists were the minority at Southwestern. By 1994, when I was fired, there remained only eight who vocally denounced the effort. One left before the vote was taken; seven voted against it. Now in full control, the Patterson/Pressler trustees have drastically changed the nature and character of the school. As Jerry Falwell (pastor of Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia, which was an independent Baptist congregation before joining the SBC in recent years) boasted recently, "All six Southern Baptist seminaries are now thoroughly fundamentalist." In a celebration held in conjunction with the Indianapolis convention meeting, Falwell declared to the gathering of fundamentalist leaders, "I was not a Southern Baptist when you guys hijacked it, but I joined soon after." Falwell made his first appearance in Southwestern's chapel in fall 2004, making a politically-charged address that received national press in midst of the presidential election campaign.