(a presentation by Paul Kenley, pastor of First Baptist Church, Dimmitt, to the Sunday evening congregation on April 17, 1994)

A Presupposition

This account begins with a basic presupposition: the Southern Baptist Convention, as we have known and loved it no longer exists. This is a fact that we must accept in our own minds from the outset of this discussion. The SBC is now Baptist in name only. Historical Baptist heritage, polity, and principles are not believed in or practiced by the current SBC leadership. As a result, many of our most familiar terms can no longer be used as we have previously spoken of them. To say you are a “Southern Baptist” is likely to say something about you that is no longer accurate. To speak of the “Cooperative Program” no longer means the same thing that it once did when we spoke of it out of a love for missions. What has happened to so radically alter the makeup of our beloved convention?

A Brief History

Initial Objections

In the 1950s, Southern Baptists were enjoying a boom period. Church growth was at its apex, and the denomination as a whole was attuned to its missions enterprise. But one of Baptists’ great attributes, their toleration of great diversity, ironically provided the environment for a takeover. The champion of fundamentalism in the first half of the 20th century was J. Frank Norris, the fiery pastor of First Baptist Church in Fort Worth. His attitude and spirit was one of blatant contempt for Southern Baptists in general and for Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in his own city of Fort Worth in particular. (He was known to send boxes of rotten fruit as Christmas gifts to seminary professors!) Because of Norris’s well-publicized hot temper and his brash boldness in criticizing other evangelicals, most of those who agreed with him in his fundamentalist views shunned any identity or association with him publicly. He always had his followers within the SBC, but they remained in the closet until someone could legitimize their cause in a more public forum. That opportunity came in the decade of the 1960s when Norris’s charges of liberalism in Baptist schools found a more sympathetic ear among grassroots Southern Baptists. A few well-publicized, but isolated instances of what many considered to be blatant liberalism on SBC school faculties set the stage for fundamentalists to come out of the closet and made their case not for the purpose of cleansing the schools doctrinally, but to take advantage of the unrest caused by the few disturbing cases, to wrest control of the SBC away from those in charge.

A Strategist for the Cause

In the late 1960s a state appeals court judge in Houston by the name of Paul Pressler began to look into the inner organizational structure of the SBC, to see if there was a way for one group to assert its will on the convention by taking over key positions of leadership. Pressler observed that the convention was organized according to the diagram below. He discovered that in the SBC organization, all power is vested in the president, who controls the makeup of the various boards and agencies through the appointment process. (see diagram below)

A description of Pressler’s plan can be heard in his own voice on what is now a famous audio tape entitled “Firestorm Chats,” as he proudly describes his discovery of how the convention’s own structural makeup provided the only procedure necessary to effect a complete takeover of every board and institution. Once he had ascertained how to bring about the takeover, he just needed an inroad to the pastors of the 36,000+ SBC churches and a theological red flag to alarm the grassroots Baptist people.

The Pressler-Patterson Coalition Pressler found the answer to both these needs in the person of Paige Patterson, president of the Criswell Bible College in Dallas, and the two met at the Cafe du Mond in New Orleans in the early 1970s to plan their strategy. Patterson, who had demonstrated an affinity for classical fundamentalism as far back as his college days at Hardin-Simmons, took to pulpits across the convention as a “conservative theologian,” to express his alarm that convention leaders in general and our seminary professors in particular, no longer believed that the Bible was the “inerrant” Word of God — and that if “Bible believers” would join their cause, they would return the Southern Baptist Convention to its “true conservative roots.”

Patterson and Pressler stumped every state of the convention during the months prior to the SBC annual meeting at Houston in June of 1979, and continued to do the same during the early 1980s as their movement gained strength. The end result was the election of the fundamentalists’ first president of the convention at the Summit in Houston, Adrian Rogers of Tennessee. Ironically, this occurred the same year that Southern Baptists adopted Bold Missions Thrust as a plan for spreading the gospel over the whole earth by the year 2000. Since the 1979 convention, each succeeding annual meeting has elected presidents sympathetic to the fundamentalist agenda— Bailey Smith in 1980-81; Jimmy Draper in 1982-83; Charles Stanley in 1984-85; Adrian Rogers AGAIN in 1986-87; Jerry Vines in 1988-89; Morris Chapman in 1990-91; and Ed Young in 1992-93.

The movement has been marked by a great deal of deception along the way — and sometimes included an outright manipulation of the ballot box to protect the plan’s momentum. At the convention in 1985, as in other annual meetings, the practice of registering small children as messengers and then parents voting their ballots was common. Annually, busloads of messengers would arrive for the convention, vote in block with their bus captain, (many making the trip just to vote for president) and then leave. Some convention meetings have required an early adjournment for lack of a quorum because thousands of messengers would arrive on busses on Tuesday morning, vote in the presidential election that afternoon, and then promptly leave.

At San Antonio in 1988, many well-meaning messengers stood outside the convention center long before the doors were open to get a seat in the main hall, only to find that busloads of “sympathetic” messengers had been brought in through the back way and already occupied all the seats near the platform area. At the convention in Dallas in 1985, the vote for president was so close that many suspect that a fallacious tabulation was announced, insuring that the takeover was not derailed.

The convention in New Orleans in 1990 is viewed by many as the completion of the takeover. Moderate-conservatives made one, last-gasp effort to retain control of the presidency. But the platform was totally inaccessible, positioned in isolation in the center of the Superdome floor. Well-meaning speakers voicing valid concerns were silenced in midsentence as their microphones were turned off. Daniel Vestal, then pastoring in Dunwoody, Georgia was defeated by Morris Chapman in the presidential race. And through it all, Paul Pressler was firmly ensconced on the platform, delighting in the success of his takeover plan, now complete.

But how could great preachers, many of whom were well-meaning, fall prey to such devious tactics of outright lies and manipulation? Many had believed that the problem was a single people split into two factions, each trying to gain power over the other. But while power and control was a driving force, it was not the whole issue. Over the years, obvious philosophical and theological issues began to surface, hearkening back to the movement of J. Frank Norris decades before.

Some Tenets of Fundamentalism Counter To Traditional Baptist Principles

“The Ends Justify the Means”

Fundamentalist religious causes from time immemorial have operated by this misguided principle to conduct “holy wars” in the name of religion that have inflicted tremendous injustices on humanity. This principle is what was used to justify ballot manipulation at various SBC meetings to insure control of the outcome.

This principle has also been used to trample and besmirch the reputations and careers of some of Southern Baptists’ finest leaders — starting with the ouster of Lloyd Elder as president of the Sunday School Board, and continuing with the pressured resignations of Randall Lolley as the president of Southeastern Seminary, Keith Parks as president of the Foreign Mission Board, and most recently, the outright firing of Russell Dilday as the president of Southwestern Seminary. All these great men were fired or forced into early retirement— not because they were liberal in their theology, but because they refused to bow to the demands of the political agenda first set out by Pressler and Patterson in the 1970s.

The Definition of a “Liberal”

To a fundamentalist, a “liberal” is anyone who does not agree with him. For instance, a basic tenet of fundamentalism is a premillenialist view of the return of Christ— a view which, while held by many Southern Baptists, is subject to varied interpretation. If one happens not to accept this basic fundamentalist interpretation, then his whole faith and experience is called into question. Classic liberalism denies the virgin birth of Christ, His vicarious death, His bodily resurrecting and His imminent return. By these standards, there is not a true liberal in the entire Southern Baptist Convention!!

The Matter of “Inerrancy”

The fundamentalist claims to be an “inerrantist,” in that he believes that every word of the Scripture — one word following the next — is inspired, and thus penned by men under the direction of God. Most any evangelical will accept a fully inspirational view of Scripture, but the question arises, “What version of the Word is inerrant?” Paige Patterson has set a standard for the fundamentalists by saying that the original manuscripts or autographs were inerrant. The only problem with at is that we have no original autographs! The bottom line is that you are not an “inerrantist” unless you fall in line with certain prescribed interpretations of the Scripture. And since no original autographs are extant, the King James Version, for most fundamentalists, has been substituted for the originals! All this has the effect of turning the scripture into a creed and rules out individual interpretation.

The Priesthood of the Believer and Religious Liberty

Baptists have always believed that each individual Christian can discover the truth of God’s Word under the leadership of His illuminating Holy Spirit. But the fundamentalist believes that the pastor-preacher is to be the sole authority of God’s revelation to His people. The fundamentalist agenda in its purest form discounts the separation of church and state, eschews a free press, and seeks to elevate its own brand of doctrinal and religious bent to the status of the law of the land. It is interwoven into the very fabric of the “Religious Right” on today’s political scene, and is bosom buddies with independent right-wing religious/ political leaders such as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. The Board of Trustees of Falwell’s Liberty University includes no less than six prominent SBC leaders, and he has personally endorsed all that has happened in the Southern Baptist Convention in the last 15 years.

The Pastor as Ruler of the Church

If the pastor is the sole channel through which God conveys His truth, then he obviously is to be the final authority in all matters of faith and practice. This is perhaps the most “non-Baptist” belief of them all. Fundamentalist Baptist churches tend not to have business meetings— and many of them have abolished all committees in favor of pastoral rule.

A Basic Difference in How We Do Missions

Under fundamentalist control, our Foreign Mission Board has departed from traditional approaches to mission work overseas in two basic areas:

Centralized Control - Traditionally, many decisions were made by the missionaries in the field because they know best the local culture and the needs of their particular assignments. The new philosophy is to have headquarters in Richmond make more of these decisions and more closely supervise missionaries. Thus, more decisions are made by people who have less knowledge of local conditions.

The Missionary as Evangelist - The Baptist philosophy has been that local people can witness to their neighbors better than an outsider can. As churches were started, pastors from that area or country were found, and churches were encouraged to start other churches. In foreign countries, seminaries were established to educate leadership. The churches in foreign countries formed their own conventions and played an active role in spreading the Gospel. The new SBC leadership emphasizes the missionaries as evangelists, spreading the gospel by means of mass media, crusades, etc., thereby de-emphasizing local churches, conventions and seminaries. This sends the subtle message to the local people that they are not considered capable of the task. Consequently, the SBC chose to totally defund Ruschlikon Seminary in Switzerland just at the time when the fall of the Berlin Wall signaled a new openness to the Gospel in Europe.

These two key changes in direction, coupled with the replacement of our best mind in foreign missions leadership, Keith Parks, must lead thinking Baptists to question the motivation of the Foreign Mission Board trustees who are the source of all these changes— both functional and philosophical.

A Sad, But Challenging Conclusion

The Southern Baptist Convention has so radically departed from traditional roots that many of us have been led to confess that while we are still Baptists and proud of it, we can no longer be called “Southern Baptists” in terms of denominational affiliation. The real tragedy is that we have allowed the election of leaders who have been willing to instantly surrender principles which were bought with the blood of our early Baptist forefathers, many of whom came to this continent for the very purpose of the free exercise of their faith. For many years we sought to defeat the takeover with our ballots at the convention — but because we were unwilling to use the fundamentalists’ own political tactics, we failed to rescue the convention from its irreversible course toward calamity.

Now we are left to chart a somewhat treacherous course back to our traditional direction that emphasizes cooperation, inclusion, and a celebration of diversity. This journey will likely take at least a generation, and perhaps longer to effect. In the meantime, you and I will be called on to be pioneers in what will probably seem like very unfamiliar territory. Let us not shrink back from it - for we have an opportunity to impact the cause of Christ forever!

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