What’s In A Name?
By Bill Perdue,
Pastor, Cranes Mill Baptist, Canyon Lake, Texas

Here’s how the conversation began:

“Pastor, when are we ever going to elect a conservative president of the Baptist General Convention of Texas? I read in The Baptist Standard that conservatives in the North Carolina convention had scored a stunning upset victory and elected a conservative president. Other states have. What’s wrong with Texas that we can’t elect one?” He wasn’t using a capital “C.”

He is a layman and a man who dearly loves our Baptist convention. I know where he stands so I carefully answered him, “Well, we just did and by a big majority of the messengers present in Fort Worth.”

He looked like I had hit him with a two by four.

“There’s something not right in this conversation,” he said. “I sat with you at the convention and I know how you voted. You didn’t vote for the conservative candidate and all the news reports I read said that the conservative candidate was soundly defeated. What’s going on here?”

If I read his thoughts correctly, he was saying “Pastor, please help me understand. I love Texas Baptists.”

“Sit down,” I said, “Let’s see if we can’t better understand who we are and why we are labeled Moderates, Liberals, Conservatives, Fundamentalists, etc. ad infinitum, ad nauseam.” The last two words really impressed him.

I told him when we elected Charles Wade we did elect a conservative president and he will give outstanding leadership to Texas Baptists. He is a good man, Christlike in all things, conservative through and through, with missions burning in his heart and his contagious spirit has made his church an example for all of us.

“Don’t stop now,” he begged, “I am a conservative and you are a conservative, yet we defeated a conservative candidate. I’ve known you for a long time and you are a little to the right of Strom Thurmond and Rush Limbaugh.” He meant that as a compliment, I think.

I wondered. Could he be expressing the thoughts of many of our Texas Baptist faithful who are confused in all this name calling and labeling of people? Here are people who are conservative to the core, and yet they read in their Baptist papers that the conservative candidate was defeated. No wonder he was confused.

“In 1985,” I told him, “we were snookered into this labeling by something called the Peace Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention and we have been reaping the consequences ever since. A suggestion was made that we call one group Fundamentalist/ Conservative and the other Moderate/ Conservative. Today we are Conservatives and Moderates and that’s what I don’t like. I’m not a hyphenated Baptist.”

I told him that I am not a Moderate. I refuse to be called one. I was conservative when I started and I will be conservative when I’m through. I am not a Fundamentalist. I was fundamental when I started and will be fundamental when I’m through.

Maybe it was the third cup of coffee, but he was really getting into it. “Now, we are getting somewhere,” he said. “Why hasn’t someone explained that to me before now? Here I was feeling that we are losing the Baptist General Convention of Texas because we cannot elect a conservative president and now I find out we have been electing one all along. Wait until 1 get home and tell the wife. This will make her day also!”

How many more Baptists are there who think just like my friend? Why can’t we elect a conservative president in Texas. IT IS TIME TO TELL THEM WE JUST DID. I do not prefer labels of any kind and I wish we did not have to use a single one. Why can’t we just leave off these labels, period?

Most people in Texas Baptist life, I believe, are conservative. We take our religion and our politics that way and are proud of it. It’s too bad we have allowed the current malaise in the SBC to “hijack” the word conservative just as author and theologian Tome Sine concludes that Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and Ralph Reed have been allowed to “hijack” American evangelicalism.

If I choose to disagree with the Religious Right, whose agenda it seems to me has little to do with authentic biblical Christianity and more to do with conservative nationalistic politics, does that imply that I’m not conservative? Certainly not!

When I told my wife about my long conversation with this man, she tried to encourage me. “At least,” she said, “he left out Attila the Hun.”

February 1997