EDUCATION: Shaping Future Generations
by Charlie McLaughlin,
Associate Coordinator

To be a learner is to be on a quest. A quest begins with a question. Our question was the same as many Baptists. “Where is a good place to eat?”

As a student of fine cuisine, the quest led me to a delicious fajita style dinner. The meat was not the typical fajita beef skirt, but more like a marinated roast that dissolves into flavor with just a slight bit of chewing.

If I would have been alone I never would have experienced this meal, because it is not on the menu, the “new” menu. Instead it was ordered as “old number 50” from the old menu, only veterans of this beautiful Mexican food restaurant would know about. Now, I know about it. Some things you just will not know about until you experience them for yourself.

Jay Swoveland is a student at George W. Truett Theological Seminary at Baylor University. He is the one who taught me about “old number 50.” It was my privilege to eat with him and Lance Freeman and Bill Shiell along with the Dean of Truett Seminary, Brad Creed. We were all attending the Baptist Center for Ethics Conference on Church Growth, in San Antonio.

So when a dinner break came, this Howard Payne grad and trustee joined the Baylor bunch. Far more impressed on my mind than the meal was the quality of these students.

This is the second group of students I have met from Truett Seminary. Each meeting gives me the impression that these are top-of-the-class type students. They are intelligent, spiritually aggressive, seeking ways to improve as persons and ministers, real with a down-to-earth sense of their own humanity. And one of the things I like most in others—they were askers of good questions.

The answers you get in life are most often determined by the questions you ask. Quality education teaches students to think. A product of thinking is asking good questions and realizing you do not have all the answers. These students were free to think and to ask.

I also observed how they expressed a sense of calling in their lives. Part of their response to yielding to God’s call was a zeal for learning.

When I mentioned how impressed I was with these and the other students I have met, Brad Creed, stated with a grin, “Yea, and just think, I get to work with these guys every day.”

Later in the conference I listened to Creed talk about reaching Generation X, the nearly 40 million young people between the ages of 18 and 34. He talked about a former Baylor University student, Chris Seay, who has started an experimental congregation to reach Generation X.

Steve Rabey also reported about this story in an ABP press release. According to Rabey, services were launched in January 1995 and have experienced rapid growth, forcing a move out of the original building because of large attendance.

I also hear good things about Logsdon School of Theology at Hardin Simmons University. Both of these schools will be a part of a bright future in theological education for Texas Baptists. It is important that we support our BGCT schools in light of what is happening at most of our SBC seminaries.

For example, Mark Coppenger, president of Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, made the news recently by attacking women in ministry. According to Bob Allen, ABP, Coppenger stated in a seminary chapel service that he did not know why God created women to be submissive to men, but the Bible teaches that concept in passages that include 1 Timothy 2:11–15.

Coppenger expressed his view that women pastors are contrary to the creation order and an “affront to home and family.” Commenting on a passage referring to righteous women “will be saved through childbearing,” Coppenger commented, “Is this a new way to be saved? Have a baby, go to heaven? I tell you what this is. This is God’s inerrant word.” He later stated “Now that’s not the way of salvation.”

Coppenger paraphrased Paul by saying, “You women have a problem. I tell you what—you go home and raise a family and you may just see God.”

After reading about Coppenger, I talked to a couple of Midwestern graduates. I can understand why, with considerable emotional pain, they have changed their wills to not include Midwestern. With a sense of embarrassment they make comments about what Midwestern “used” to be and what it has now become.

This month I talked to a young minister with moderate views whose home church pastor is an outspoken fundamentalist. This fundamentalist pastor accused the young man of “losing his zeal for the Word of God.”

This statement is symbolic of the differences between fundamentalists and moderates. The Bible is holy, unique, and authoritative to both. However, the fundamentalists’ over-emphasis of the Bible as inerrant results in an under-emphasis of the “main thing” which is personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

The Bible is not a person. It does not love, it did not die on the cross, it did not save me from my sin, yet how I relate to “it” is held as more important than how I relate to “Him.” The Bible helps shape relationship but it is not “THE” relationship.

Focus on relationship results in having a different set of questions to pursue than the questions you pursue when focusing on inerrancy of scripture. Some inerrancy questions are: How can I prove I am right? What are we against? How are we different? Questions which tend to separate.

If the focus is on relationship to Jesus Christ the questions are more reconciling: How do I develop and grow in my walk with Christ? How do I share this relationship with a lost world? How can I cooperate with others who share this relationship in joint ventures of missions, evangelism, and education?

The teachers and mentors of our institutions help create the questions that students ask. My concern about SBC seminaries is the type of questions they will lead their students to pursue. Will they be imbalanced toward inerrancy issues?

My support will go to schools which lead their students to ask balanced questions, not just while they are “in the classroom,” but when they are around the dinner table with their mentor, sharing the aroma and taste of “old number 50” at the La Fogata restaurant.

August 1996