PAIGE PATTERSON TO BE NOMINATED AS SBC PRESIDENT
By Bob Allen

JACKSONVILLE, Fla.(ABP) — Paige Patterson, the theologian who helped engineer a conservative takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention during the 1980s, will be nominated as the convention’s next president.

Patterson, president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C., will be nominated for the unpaid leadership post when the SBC meets June 9-11 in Salt Lake City. If elected, he will succeed Tom Elliff, an Oklahoma pastor who is ineligible for re-election.

Patterson’s candidacy was announced Feb. 3 at an annual pastors’ conference at First Baptist Church in Jacksonville, Fla., and reported by Baptist Press. He will be nominated to the post by James Merritt, who chairs the influential SBC Executive Committee.

“It is time to say to the world that we believe in our seminaries and do not hesitate to select as president a man who has put his life and ministry on the line because of his commitment to the fidelity of the Word of God,” said Merritt, pastor of First Baptist Church in Snellville, Ga.

Patterson and Texas layman Paul Pressler are credited with devising the “conservative resurgence” which displaced moderates from leadership of the nation’s largest non-Catholic faith group during the 1980s. Patterson, who at the time taught at Criswell College in Dallas, and Pressler, an appeals-court judge from Houston, first met in the 1960s to discuss their frustration with a perceived liberal drift in the SBC. They hit on the idea of mobilizing conservatives to capture and retain the SBC presidency, using the office’s appointive powers to gradually return the convention to what they considered its conservative roots.

Traveling at their own expense, Patterson and Pressler visited churches across the country to urge other disenchanted conservatives to come in force to the 1979 Southern Baptist Convention in Houston. Memphis, Tenn., pastor Adrian Rogers won the SBC presidency that year, setting off a string of conservative presidencies that continues today.

The only interruption in the juggernaut came when Florida pastor Jim Henry won the office in 1994 and 1995. Henry, pastor of First Baptist Church in Orlando, is a conservative but sought the presidency without the blessing of party leaders. Henry was succeeded by Elliff, pastor of First Southern Baptist Church in Del City, Okla., who was elected in 1996 and again last year.

Elliff was unopposed for the office and was presented as a compromise candidate between conservative-resurgence hardliners and those who affirmed Henry’s more moderate stance. In his presidential appointments, however, Elliff returned closer to recent practice of demanding strict adherence to biblical inerrancy and loyalty to the conservative resurgence than to less-rigid criteria used by Henry.

Patterson would be the sixth sitting president of an SBC seminary to serve as the convention’s president and the first since 1942.

Patterson said his election as SBC president would not create a conflict of interest with his role as an agency head. The convention president serves ex officio on convention boards, including the powerful SBC Executive Committee, which conducts business for the convention between annual meetings, including development of the SBC’s budget. Patterson said he would not vote and would speak to issues at board meetings only when asked.

Due to “wise foresight of the SBC fathers,” Patterson also noted, the convention president has only an indirect role in nominating members of trustee boards. The SBC president appoints a Committee on Committees, which in turn recommends a Committee on Nominations. The Committee on Nominations is elected by the convention to nominate individuals to SBC boards of trustees. Those nominees must be ratified by the full convention.

Patterson and Pressler’s genius was to manipulate that process by running presidential candidates who pledged to name like-minded conservatives to the Committee on Committees. Those appointees in turn nominated fellow conservatives to the nominating committee, who recommended only conservatives to leadership posts. Conservative majorities attending SBC annual meetings kept the string of presidential wins going and voted down attempts to challenge nominees from the floor.

Most moderates withdrew from the 12-year battle for convention control after a devastating defeat in New Orleans in 1990. The next year, they formed the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, which is not technically a new convention but appoints its own missionaries and supports a variety of moderate ministries.

Merritt cited historical precedent for nominating a sitting seminary president. Between 1939 and 1942, the convention elected presidents of three seminaries to successive terms as SBC president.

Earlier, James Boyce, founding president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, served as SBC president in the 1800s, and E.Y. Mullins, was elected to the post while he was also president at Southern Seminary in the 1920s.

Other individuals have served both as SBC president and as employed leaders, but not at the same time. For example, James Sullivan presided as SBC president in 1977 after retiring as president of the Baptist Sunday School Board. Jimmy Draper, who now holds that job, was SBC president in 1993- 94, before he was hired by the convention agency.

March 1998