I have no idea who said the following quote. But, somewhere in my young Texas Baptist life, I heard someone say: “Texas is the wallet on which the Southern Baptist Convention sits.”
OK, I cleaned up the grammar on that. It was probably: “Texas is the wallet Southern Baptists sit on.”
But the big idea was that there were so many Baptists in the Lone Star state — and so many different KINDS of Southern Baptists — that nothing could happen in the national SBC without taking into account the financial and statistical clout of Texas. Baptist diversity? Once upon a time, more than a few Texas Baptist preachers were basically Universalists with better preaching skills.
Thus, it’s important that, for the past quarter century or so, there have been TWO competing Southern Baptist conventions in the state — the conservative Southern Baptists of Texas and the old-guard Baptist General Convention of Texas. My father worked for the BGCT when I was in elementary school.
I can remember the old days when the state’s ink-on-paper Baptist Standard newspaper had legions of out-of-state subscribers, because many pastors wanted to scan the announcement pages to see when there were open jobs in Texas pulpits. Most of those readers were, logically enough, graduates of the then-massive Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.
This brings me to a much-discussed headline in the Nashville Tennessean: “Why a prominent Southern Baptist seminary is on the verge of 'crisis' after leadership upheaval.” This is a calm, factual story that, well, shows admirable restraint when it comes to some hot-button issues causing SBC tensions. These two names are missing, for example — Donald Trump and retired Judge Paul Pressler. But there is also a rather important hole linked to the Texas Baptist clout I mentioned earlier. Hold that thought.
First, here is the overture:
A prominent Southern Baptist seminary is taking corrective action as it reels from a cascade of financial mismanagement and reputational hits spanning several presidential administrations.
Interim leadership at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, disclosed to its board and the public last week details of its predicament following the resignation of President Adam Greenway in late September.
“Southwestern is not in a crisis, but our challenges could quickly escalate to a crisis if we do not aggressively move to address them,” Southwestern interim president David Dockery said in a statement Tuesday.
Southern Baptists’ demands for transparency from Southwestern has intensified in recent weeks. In response, the seminary announced significant cost-saving measures, leadership changes and details about conflict between Greenway and the board.
Meanwhile, leaders acknowledged the blame also falls to Greenway’s predecessor, Paige Patterson, who is considered one of the most influential Southern Baptist Convention leaders over at least the past four decades.
Time for another confession: Dockery is a friend of mine, dating back to my journalism professor days in the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities. His administrative skills are big-league. The kind of guy who can rebuild a college campus in less than a year after its been hit by a tornado.
This is a different kind of challenge. So what is going on in Fort Worth?
Once, Southwestern was the largest Protestant seminary in the world, and certainly the Big Dog among the SBC’s six Cooperative Program funded seminaries. But times have changed.
That’s the big question that this story never asks experts, on the SBC left and right, to answer: Where did all those Southwestern seminary students go? Let’s read on a bit:
Southwestern has historically been one of the two largest SBC seminaries. However, it’s now the fourth largest after recent declines in full-time student enrollment, according to most recent data from the Association of Theological Schools.
“We pledge that we are going to work hard to earn the trust of all our SBC churches going forward and give a proper accounting of Cooperative Program dollars entrusted to us,” O.S. Hawkins, Southwestern’s senior adviser and ambassador-at-large, said in a statement. …
The seminary will reduce its operational budget by at least 10%, or about $3.6 million, and has already listed for sale a 24-acre student housing village. Also, it appointed two new interim administrators: a provost and chief financial officer. In addition, trustees authorized administrators to negotiate a line of credit, and to reevaluate policies for hiring and firing senior officers, according to a news release.
The Tennessean story makes it clear that this conflict is not about Greenway, alone. There were big issues involved in the media storm surrounding the earlier fall of Patterson. Thus, readers are told:
Greenway stepped in after the board fired Patterson, who was Southwestern’s president from 2003-2018, when reports emerged that Patterson mishandled claims of sexual assault at Southwestern and Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in North Carolina, where Patterson also served as president.
A trial in a federal lawsuit against Patterson and Southwestern related to one of those incidents was recently rescheduled for February.
Patterson is considered the architect of the Conservative Resurgence, a movement that started in the late 1970s that dramatically altered the SBC, and he was SBC president from 1998-2000.
Patterson’s dismissal from Southwestern in 2018 was in the early stages of the heightened awareness within the SBC about leaders’ response to reports of clergy sexual abuse and care for abuse survivors.
The other big player in the Conservative Resurgence was, of course, Judge Pressler. Let’s keep reading:
But it wasn’t just Southwestern’s reputation at stake when Patterson left. The seminary had also been losing students, or its key source of revenue, while spending went up.
Between the 2003-04 to 2017-18 school years, total full-time student enrollment dropped by 48%, according to Association of Theological Schools data. Meanwhile, the seminary’s operating budget increased by 34%, according to SBC records. …
In contrast, enrollment at similarly sized Southern Baptist seminaries went up along with their respective operating budgets.
What is going on in Fort Worth? I would argue that there is a small, but crucial, word (I added italics) in that earlier Hawkins quote: “We pledge that we are going to work hard to earn the trust of all our SBC churches going forward. …”
We are back to the diversity found among Texas Baptists. I would argue that Southwestern was controversial with one choir of Baptists during the Patterson years and then with a different choir of Baptists under Greenway.
So why not talk to leaders of the two competing state conventions and ask them what they think happened to draw so many students away from the once almost all powerful campus in Fort Worth? What churches distrusted Southwestern during the Patterson years and what churches pulled away from this seminary during the Greenway years?
Trust me, a few clicks at YouTube will offer plenty of clues.
For sure, the population of Texas isn’t shrinking (although lots of Baptists may have gone nondenominational). Where did all those students go?
That’s the question at the heart of a Texas-sized story.
FIRST IMAGE: A needlepoint Texas flag wallet for sale at the County Club Prep website.