My involvement with Texas Baptists Committed has extended over several years. I have served on the board for at least two terms and now a part of the Advisory Council.

Being associated with the TBC has given me opportunity to say, with a large group of other Texas Baptists, that some things are haywire with regard to Baptist life.

Enough time has gone by that students I have in class now at Logsdon School of Theology have no idea what has happened over the last quarter of a century. The Baptist ministry context and political context has shifted. What is, is not what it has always been. The claims are that a conservative resurgence has occurred and was a necessary correction of course. My observations, though, are rather something more akin to ultraconservative input has been made and the dynamic has been more of an insurgence.

Erosion has come with regard to Baptists’ historical perspective on separation of church and state. An even deeper and more time honored principle of religious liberty has been increasingly abridged.

The ramifications are that more culturally based, than biblically based, mechanisms of mission and evangelism are implemented. Address of certain social issues have become litmus tests of authenticity of Christian profession.

Texas Baptists Committed is an organization formed to resist this insurgency— to serve and protect particularly Texas Baptists from further erosion of Baptist distinctives of theology, ethics, and polity. Moreover, the TBC has put itself forward to assist in educating the generations that have followed the take over mentality that swept through Baptist life.

Such endeavors are quite compatible with what I have declared is my life’s work—Baptist theological education. The TBC provides me a reference point and a support group with common cause. How could I but be associated with them?

(Bill Tillman is the T. B. Maston Professor of Christian Ethics at Logsdon School of Theology, Hardin-Simmons University. He has worked as coordinator of theological education for the BGCT; was on faculty at Southwestern Seminary for 17 years and on the staff of the SBC Christian Life Commission for 3-1/2 years.)