The Exiled Generations : Legacies of the Southern Baptist Convention Holy Wars [1 ed.] 9781621901334, 9781621901129

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THE EXILED GENERATIONS

THE EXILED GENERATIONS Legacies of the Southern Baptist Convention Holy War

EDITED BY CARL L. KELL Postscript by Molly T. Marshall

THE UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE PRESS

Knoxville

Copyright © 2014 by The University of Tennessee Press / Knoxville. All Rights Reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America. FIRST EDITION.

Obituary of Kenneth Chafin, January 8, 2001, is reprinted by permission of the Baptist Standard (TX). Obituary of Duke Kimbrough McCall, April 9, 2013, is reprinted by permssion of Associated Baptist Press. Appendix 1, Molly Marshall: A Woman of Faith and Courage, by Pamela R. Durso is used with permission of the William H. Whitsitt Baptist Heritage Society. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

The exiled generations : legacies of the Southern Baptist Convention holy war / edited by Carl L. Kell ; postscript by Molly T. Marshall. — First edition. pages cm Includes index. ISBN 978-1-62190-133-4 1. Southern Baptist Convention—History—20th century. 2. Southern Baptist Convention—History—21st century. 3. Baptists—United States—Biography. 4. Baptists—United States—History—20th century. 5. Baptists—United States—History—21st century. 6. Church controversies—Baptists—History—20th century. 7. Church controversies—Southern Baptist Convention—History—20th century. 8. Conservatism—Religious aspects—Baptists—History—20th century. 9. Conservatism—Religious aspects—Southern Baptist Convention—History— 20th century. I. Kell, Carl L. BX6462.3.E97 2014 286'.132—dc23 2014024546

In memory of KENNETH L. CHAFIN Who, in the first days of the research process, lent his name to the rhetorical study of the takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention and who, by his courage and faith in this work, opened the door for others to tell their stories.

In memory of DUKE KIMBROUGH McCALL Who, in the last days of the research process, lent his name to the rhetorical study of the takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention and who, by his leadership and integrity, was the twentieth century’s finest Southern Baptist denominational administrator.

CONTENTS Preface: In Memory of Kenneth L. Chafin. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Acknowledgments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xix Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxi Witness to the Exile. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 James I. Williamson I Never Thought I Couldn’t Be Ordained. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Kristen Redford The Purging . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 G. Wesley Shotwell I Was Supposed to Be a Baptist. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Millie Patterson When Trouble Comes Home . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Ken Satterfield She Ironed Our Underwear. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Elizabeth Emerson Hancock The Spawn of Lavonn Brown. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 Nathan Brown The Road Back. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 R. Kevin Johnson God, Women, and Mayberry. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 Bailey Edwards Nelson Faith of Our Fathers? No Way! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 R. Scott Pollard Two Griefs and a Hope. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 Denise Dinkens Ascending into Exile. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 Dave McNeely Twenty-first Century Churchin’ in Alabama. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 Stephen M. Fox

When Identity Falls Apart . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 James Hill Jr. The Winding Road Away . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 Brian Kaylor Set on Edge. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 Geoff Davidson The Day the Music Died. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 Mark A. Bowdidge A Wandering Aramean. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119 Martin Davis Editor’s Notebook: From Exiled: Voices to The Exiled Generations. . . . . 127 Postscript: Crafting a New Baptist Narrative. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129 Molly T. Marshall Appendix 1. Molly Marshall: A Woman of Faith and Courage . . . . . . . . . Pamela R. Durso Appendix 2. Deep in the Heart of Texas. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Don Wilkey Jr. Appendix 3. In Memory of Duke Kimbrough McCall, the Last Denominationalist, September 1, 1914–April 2, 2013. . . . . . . . . . Bill Leonard Contributors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

135 145

159 163 169

PREFACE IN MEMORY OF KENNETH L. CHAFIN

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n In the Name of the Father: The Rhetoric of the New Southern Baptist Convention, Ken Chafin wrote: “The victims who touch my heart most are people whose lives have been, and still are being damaged. What happens to people is always important. One reason the takeover movement was so successful was in how it dealt with those who dissented. Those who disagreed with the takeover leaders were attacked, labeled, isolated, and banned. There was no serious dialogue on the issues, only an effort to smear those who dared to disagree.”1 Kenneth L. Chafin passed away January 3, 2001, following a lengthy illness—leukemia. Were he still with us, he would be saddened to know, but not surprised, that the fallout from the takeover (or take-back) of the Southern Baptist Convention is still claiming lives today, now generations removed and relegated to the pages of Baptist history. In 1995, Ray Camp and I were busily preparing and repairing our analyses of the rhetorics of the new Southern Baptist Convention. Despite our best efforts, we knew that even if a university press were to publish the manuscript, most readers of In the Name would have no idea who we were and little interest in what two academics had to say. In a word, Ray and I needed help. Enter Ken Chafin. Ken came to Bowling Green, Kentucky, in the fall of 1995 to perform an ordination service for one of his former students, then on staff with an area Southern Baptist church. The service was conducted at a downtown church of another denomination. Prior to the service, I made my way to the small choir room where Ken, the honoree, and others were in discussion about the ceremony for the evening. Knowing no other way, I entered the room uninvited, reintroduced myself to Ken and others on the program, and boldly asked a man I barely knew, and who knew me even less, to write for me. Without hesitation, as if he was expecting me that night, he said, “Yes, I’d be glad to. Tell me about what you are doing,” or words to that effect. On that night, Ken Chafin became the first of many Southern Baptist luminaries who agreed to write for my three books In the Name of the Father:

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The Rhetoric of the New Southern Baptist Convention (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999); Exiled: Voices of the Southern Baptist Convention Holy War (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006), and Against the Wind: The Moderate Voice in Baptist Life (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2009). Along with those in the pantheon of Southern Baptist life are other memorable Southern Baptists known only to family, friends, and their local church who agreed to tell their stories in Exiled: Voices of the Southern Baptist Convention Holy War. Together, the disenchanted and disenfranchised wrote about the denomination they no longer knew, or sadly, wished to rejoin. As for The Exiled Generations, the brutal truth about second- and even third-generation Southern Baptists is that they viewed the SBC territorial war as their parents’ problem, a problem that would not affect them and one about which they would never “have a dog in the fight.” What they didn’t count on was that the SBC does not know when to quit nor how to let go of such issues as homosexuality, the subordination of women in marriage, and church leadership. Whether experiencing the SBC takeover in their family history or witnessing the ongoing battle as a church member, it is a given that some of today’s young Southern Baptists will know or at least have heard about the takeover. What is to be done about the continuing struggle for denominational leadership in the SBC may well be a lasting concern for young men and women in the Baptist community. The Southern Baptist controversy has now been underground for many years, far from the glare of the national media. A Southern Baptist individual, couple, or family, when new to a city and looking for a church home, soon learns after a few Sundays of church hoppin’ and church shoppin’ which church is “most comfortable,” and perhaps which church is their brand of Southern Baptist. In truth, comfort always trumps theology. For second- and third-generation Baptists, there is a long history of abuse, or something akin to it, which has driven many away from their Southern Baptist heritage to explore different forms of worship—both non-denominational and in other denominations—or to give up worship altogether. At the same time, there are countless members of today’s generation who are completely unaware of the stories and history of the SBC conservative resurgence. One young man, who did not participate in this book (much to my regret), best described the ongoing, present day exile: I grew up in a small, rural Southern Baptist church that was removed from the controversies of Baptist life. I wasn’t even aware that a split had occurred until I was in college and took a class on Southern Baptist life and work. I attended the Baptist College of Florida where I majored in biblical studies. While there, I became acquainted with moderate theology and, as I studied, I found myself

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firmly in the moderate camp. I became known as the “campus liberal” and was told by one student that he thought “we got rid of all the liberals during the conservative resurgence.” Even though the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship is twenty years old, I experienced what many people went through during the fundamentalist takeover. . . . I would like to tell my story as a way of highlighting that the controversies of the fundamentalist takeover are still being played out among young Baptists as many in my age group are rejecting the conservative ideology we were taught as children.

The writers in The Exiled Generations echo this voice and the voices of Ken Chafin in In the Name, Exiled: Voices, and Against the Wind, as all make their way in or out of Baptist life. The published studies of the rhetorical history of the Southern Baptist Convention controversy started with the incomparable foreword by Kenneth Chafin in In the Name. The Exiled Generations starts its journey with an obituary documenting his career. KENNETH CHAFIN

November 18, 1926 January 3, 2001 Baptist pastor, professor, evangelist and strategist Kenneth Chafin died January 3, 2001, of leukemia. He was 74. Chafin enjoyed one of the most varied and influential careers of any Baptist minister in the twentieth century. He taught at the Southern Baptist Convention’s two largest seminaries, served as pastor of two influential inner-city congregations, directed the convention’s evangelism efforts and worked with international evangelist Billy Graham. He first taught at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, where he was instructor in preaching, 1957–59, and associate professor of evangelism and head of the evangelism department, 1960–65. Later, he taught at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, where he was associate professor and held the Billy Graham Chair of Evangelism, 1965–69, and professor and held the Carl Bates Chair of Preaching, 1984–87. Chafin led Southern Baptists’ outreach efforts as director of evangelism for the SBC Home Mission Board, 1969–72. His long association with Graham included serving as dean of the Billy Graham Schools of Evangelism, held in conjunction with crusades around the globe, 1967–83. He was pastor of South Main Baptist church, Houston, from 1972–84 and Walnut Street Baptist Church, Louisville, Kentucky from 1988–92. Chafin also was known for his denominational leadership. He was a member of the Southwestern Seminary Board of Trustees and served as its chairman. He xi

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has been a trustee of Houston Baptist University and also served on the Executive Board and Administrative Committee of the Baptist General Convention of Texas. Chafin provided leadership for moderate Baptists, particularly during the 20-year controversy between so-called conservatives and moderates. He was a leader of the “Gatlinburg Gang,” a group of pastors who organized the first resistance to the “conservative resurgence” in the SBC in the late 1970s and early ’80s. The group pleaded with SBC agency leaders to join in the resistance but was criticized by moderates and conservatives alike for “politicizing” the convention. A decade later, after conservatives gained control of the national convention, he helped organize the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, a paradenominational organization for moderates disaffected by the emerging SBC leadership. News of Chafin’s death prompted admiration from Baptist leaders who have known him for decades. “I would call him one of those watershed people in Baptist life in the South who saw transitions in the old Southern Baptist Convention and spoke about them before a lot of people did and who paid dearly for it at times,” said historian Bill Leonard. “He was not only an outstanding pastor, but he was a grand teacher,” added Leonard, a former colleague of Chafin’s at Southern Seminary. “I’ll remember him as a person who mentored several generations of students in Texas and Kentucky.” Leonard said one thing he loved about Chafin is “there was not a passiveaggressive bone in his body.” “He said it straight and direct, but gently. You always knew where he stood,” Leonard said. “And that terrified some people.” Charles Wade, executive director of the Baptist General Convention of Texas, noted how Chafin shaped his own life, both as a professor and a friend. “Dr. Chafin helped me greatly in his class on personal evangelism,” said Wade, who was a student of Chafin’s in the 1960s. “He was a man of enormous conviction and courage. Baptists everywhere have lost a great friend.” Words that describe Chafin’s life and ministry include “calling, commitment, creativity, courage, compassion and consistency,” said Roy Honeycutt, former president of Southern Seminary. “He bound all life together with unswerving commitment to Jesus Christ and his church,” Honeycutt said. “He was a man for all seasons, a Renaissance person for a generation in transition.” A native of Oklahoma, Chafin was a graduate of the University of New Mexico and Southwestern Seminary, where he earned two degrees.

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He wrote six books, including volumes on evangelistic witnessing, marriage enrichment and biblical commentary. In retirement, he became a published poet and wrote devotions for “The Daily Guidepost.” He also founded a Sunday School class for young couples at South Main Baptist Church. Chafin is survived by his wife, Barbara, of Houston; two daughters, Nancy Chafin of Boulder, Colo., and Ellen Wavro of Houston; a son, Troy of Austin; and a grandson, Daniel Wavro, of Houston.* *** During the last ten years of his life (including in his essay for In the Name), Ken spoke to the themes of family, childhood, and friendship, expressing strong opinions on many subjects, including his frustration with the denominational developments among Baptists. Two of his poems, reflective of his denominational angst, are reprinted here courtesy of Ms. Ellen Chafin Wavro, daughter of Dr. Chafin. The collection from which these poems are extracted is A Rhythm for My Life, Kenneth L. Chafin (Edmond, OK: Greystone Press, 2003).

A Rhythm for My Life Help me to find a rhythm for my life in keeping with my strength, my gifts, my opportunities, my commitments, and the larger purpose. Let there be a celebration of life, the building of relationships, and the nurturing of others. Let there be unhurried strolls in the woods, quiet mornings spent on the pond, poking around country roads, Afternoon naps in the porch swing, leisurely meals with friends, chickadees fed and zinnias grown. Let there come to me a quietness of soul, a relaxed body, an alert mind, a gentle touch, an inner peace, an integrity of being. *Baptist Standard (TX), January 8, 2001

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Rage! “To be sane in a mad time is bad for the mind, worse for the heart.” —Wendell Berry Doctor Laman Cray sawed open my chest, Found three arteries clogged with rage, Not cholesterol from too much animal fat But the residue from staying mad for a decade. I’m angry at the arrogance of Those who’ve grasped power Who treat the laity as children Professors as natural enemies Women as second-class citizens Diversity as a disease. They confuse perception with reality Think the truth is established By a secret ballot in A stacked convention and are More comfortable with right wing politicians Than at the Lord’s table with the whole church. They capture institutions which they can’t run Dismantle what took generations to build Thinking they’re doing God a favor. I’m angry about the mood of our society, Frightened by change and complexity Hunting scapegoats for situations Which are its own creation, Wanting simpler answers Than reality affords, Filling the air with rhetoric About freedom and Traditional values, All the time hunting New enemies to attack, Closing the doors on Compassion for the poor, And help for the powerless.

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I’m angry at heads of institutions Who keep trying to believe The appetite of their enemies Can be satisfied with compromise, Who trade long term freedom For short term stability, Who are more angry With friends who contend For academic freedom for all Than with those who sought control, And those who become apologists for Those who imprison them. I’m angry at good people Captured by slogans They never understand, Hypnotized by holy talk, Not shocked by unholy action, Finding their significance In the mindless herd Which organizes itself Around fear and hatred Of an enemy it created. I’m angry at individual congregations Who learned mindless loyalty too well With no capacity for confrontation, Lacking spiritual discernment, Who can’t discern a prophet from a con-man, Continuing to sacrifice the truth On the altar of the gods Of growth and success, Worshiping the handmaidens Of an easy peace. I’m angry at those pastors Who develop calluses On the insides of their legs From straddling fences On critical issues, Who test the winds Before setting their goals,

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Guided more by ambition Than deep conviction. I’m angry at myself For being so slow In discerning the danger, For not upsetting more people With the painful truth And keeping them upset Until they had to act, For worrying too much What others thought, For fretting too much About doors which closed. Surgery reopened my arteries. Diet keeps the cholesterol low. Exercise rebuilds my body. I keep struggling with anger. I suppose I always will. January, 1992

Baptists in Babylon “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?” (Psalm 137:4) If you are angry because Russell Dilday was terminated, especially by the way it was done—high marks on one day with the offer of a lucrative golden parachute, then fired without cause on the following day while Watergate-line burglars changed his office locks, I have a word especially for you. Welcome to Babylon and the captivity! If you were actually surprised by the trustees’ action then go stand in the corner and wear a dunce cap. God send several Jeremiahs to sound the alarm but you turned your back on friends who told you the truth. You couldn’t believe that folks who talked so holy could be so ruthless in their exercise of political power,

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forgetting their predecessors who orchestrated the murder of the Galilean while fretting over keeping petty Sabbath laws. It is the saddest of days for all theological education. Welcome to Babylon and the captivity! It should have been obvious to all but the slow learners when outstanding professors began hunting healthier climates, the good ones who stayed began dealing with depression while some of the rest became apologists for their captors, the new trustees resembled left-overs from the Reagan years, a statesman was replaced by an inexperienced boy president, and new faculty added to make promises they shouldn’t keep. What once was education is becoming mindless indoctrination and the churches of tomorrow will be the losers. Welcome to Babylon and the captivity! Right now everyone is furious and wants to do something, but there’s too little discernment to know what to do, and not enough moral courage to stay mad long enough to act. Those who have been outraged enough to speak out will be made to feel guilty by the “holy talkers” whose mindless clones will isolate those who question and make them feel as strangers in their own house. Welcome to Babylon and the captivity! But as Israel learned, all is not lost in captivity! We discover that God’s presence is not limited to Jerusalem, or Nashville. Here God calls us to repent for making idols of the institutions we built where in pride and arrogance we bowed down and worshiped our own worldly successes. You can sing the Songs of Zion in a strange land and it’s easier to celebrate Christ’s freedom in captivity than to learn “double speak” and conformity back home. Welcome to Babylon and the captivity! Thank you, Dr. Chafin, and your family, for a life well lived. In your honor The Exiled Generations: Legacies of the Southern Baptist Convention Holy War is dedicated. From your porch swing at Windy Hill, the Chafin family home near Brenham, Texas, the rhythms of your life still hum in the Texas air and in our hearts.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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am grateful to my Western Kentucky University colleagues and agencies who have supported the continuing work of rhetorical scholarship in the study of the takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention, the aftermath of lost churches, the exiled church members, the present day struggles of the identity crisis within the SBC, and the takeover’s ongoing fallout on current generations. The resources required to maintain this current research agenda have been provided, in part, by Dean David Lee, Potter College of Arts and Letters, and Dr. Helen Sterk, head of the Department of Communication, Western Kentucky University. For all of the books on the rhetorical history of the takeover of the SBC and the subsequent exilic journey of those affected, there is an extraordinary professional guiding each essay and editing each line. My thanks to Laura Wagoner, Department of Communication, Western Kentucky University, for her outstanding work. There are four voices in The Exiled Generations whose mother or father told their own stories of the SBC controversy in Exiled: Voices. Now it is the sons and daughters who recount their experiences, with my thanks. James I. Williamson’s “Witness to the Exile” picks up his mother’s lament: Eleanor B. Williamson’s “Southern Baptist Woman In Exile.” “Miss Eleanor” was the first to agree to write for Exiled: Voices. Now, James has written the final chapter of the Williamson family’s story of being Southern Baptist in Missouri. Elizabeth Hancock’s “She Ironed Our Underwear” is a follow-up to her father Greg Hancock’s essay, “A Lot Like Dying” in Exiled: Voices. “Ms. Emy” (a moniker from her childhood) is an extraordinary talent, gifted with the arts of writing in way that few authors can match. Her book Trespassers Will be Baptized is a must read. Nathan Brown’s “The Spawn of Lavonn Brown” is a whimsical, sardonic look at a Baptist life in Oklahoma that translated into a life of music and poetry for Nathan, the son of one of the Sooner State’s finest Baptist

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ministers, Lavonn Brown, whose essay “Yesterday’s Dreams, Today’s Realities” appeared in Exiled: Voices. For Lavonn Brown, “Something died behind the walls of the Southern Baptist Convention.” For Nathan, history has never covered the smell. Millie Patterson’s “I Was Supposed to Be a Baptist” is a joyful paean to the upbringing of her family, particularly her father, E.C. Watson, whose essay “Exiled: South Carolina-Style” appeared in Exiled: Voices. Millie Patterson credits her family with giving her the freedom to find her spiritual and church home in another denomination, even if she was really “supposed” to remain a Baptist. By as many different ways as there are writers, the remaining contributors to the book came to be among those “scattered” across the American denominational landscape. Whether these contributors fairly represent the diverse peoples who have left the SBC in the last thirty years is a judgment that readers will have to make for themselves. However, there will be a moment, perhaps many moments, in one or more of these narratives that will speak to every reader. All here alike acknowledge their responsibility to broadcast the story of their twenty-first century journey of faith and encounter with division and discord in their denominational families’ ancestral church home: the Southern Baptist Convention.

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INTRODUCTION Not all those who wander are lost. —J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, vol. 1 Then again, I know I will never go back to the days of an automatically shared identity within the Baptist family. I will always be critical. I will always be suspicious. —James Hill Jr., “When Identity Falls Apart”

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t was in another lifetime, this civil war in America’s largest non-Catholic religious denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, pitting brothers and sisters of the same house against one another. For the victors, time has sweetened the defense of their rhetoric: the inerrancy of scripture. For the vanquished, time has deepened the loss of their home church, old friends, and a national convention, all now transformed and unrecognizable. The victors, in their own minds, will always remain the watchman at the gate. The vanquished, their heirs—are weary from the struggle; it’s time to move on. It has been thirty years and counting since the game-changing 1980 Southern Baptist Convention. By all estimates, the election of Adrian Rogers, the finest orator among the conservatives, heralded a ten-year regime of rhetorically gifted and like-minded presidents who slowly, but surely, installed men and some women on the Convention’s boards, commissions, and seats of influence to promote the conservative agenda, eventually reaching into every area of Southern Baptist life. After decades of the spread of the message of inerrancy to its member states, the “new” Southern Baptist Convention is now firmly established as the nation’s leading denominational voice for conservative values. In the backwash of the conservative resurgence in the SBC are many Southern Baptists churches and countless church members who have been exiled in profoundly direct and indirect ways. As a way to give voice to the laity, the

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pastorate, Baptist seminary leadership, and the leaders and officers of the church whether women or men, Exiled: Voices of the Southern Baptist Convention Holy War became a part of the national conversation on the Southern Baptist experience, community, and people. Exiled: Voices is a compilation of thirty-one first-person narratives by first generation conservative and moderate ministers as well as lay leaders who were stripped of their positions and made pariahs in the churches to which they had devoted their lives. In The Exiled Generations: Legacies of the Southern Baptist Convention Holy War, the familial and denominational sons and daughters of the 1980s and 1990s Southern Baptist conflict tell their stories of exile, wandering, and more often than not, fresh longing for religious authenticity and cultural engagement. Recorded here are second and third generation Baptists who lived through and have mirrored the experiences of their moderate- and progressive-leaning parents, who themselves left their own churches, pastoral positions, administrative posts, and seminary professorships. Moreover, the contributors in The Exiled Generations, from all parts of Southern Baptist life, continue to struggle and drift in their own experiences of emotional and religious exile. In a larger context, beyond the Southern Baptist Convention conflict, yet reflective of current changes, religious affiliation in the United States is now more diverse and fluid than ever before in American history. Indeed, there have been significant changes in both church attendance and in overall views of religion in the present day. In an extensive survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, more than one fourth of American adults—28 percent—have left the faiths in which they were raised in favor of other religions, or no religion at all.1 It is a given that today’s exiles from the Southern Baptist Convention can be found among the 44 percent of adults who have switched religious affiliation, or dropped any connection to a specific religious tradition altogether.2 Inclusive of Southern Baptists, the Protestant tradition in the United States now stands at 51 percent of church membership. As such, the Protestant population is characterized by significant diversity and fragmentation, so much so that if the trend continues, changes in religious affiliation in the not-distant future will be about a decline in the number of Protestants, and about growth in the unaffiliated.3 The Southern Baptist Convention’s response to diversity in the American religious landscape has been a renewed focus on and defense of fundamental truths. In particular, the central leadership and member churches of the Southern Baptist Convention have reaffirmed a born-again-through-Jesus-Christ standard as the only way to be saved from one’s sins and to enter heaven.

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In related religious and cultural spheres, the Southern Baptist Convention continues its opposition to gay marriage, its opposition to women as senior pastors, and its affirmation of the Bible as inerrant—God-breathed and true, every word. And yet, flying in the face of defending fundamental truths as a way to maintain one’s religious identity, there are several alarming trends just below the surface of denominational life. LifeWay Research, a Christian research agency affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention, analyzed demographic trends among Protestants between 1972 and 2010, using data collected in the General Social Survey of the National Opinion Research Center. They found that of young adults age 23–45, members of mainline Protestant denominations had plunged from 24 percent to 6 percent, and that the proportion of them who attended services shrank for 4 to 2 percent.4 Moreover, the Pew Forum’s study revealed that 32 percent of young adults under age 30 now claim no religious identity. Among those who do claim a religious identity, LifeWay found fewer than 10 percent under age 30 who regularly attend worship services.5 With Southern Baptists at odds with their denomination and with the number of young adults growing, both in and out of a Protestant community, American’s growing interest in spirituality may well drown out its religious voices. Futurist David Brown writes convincingly that “spirituality is the web that holds one’s life together. . . . People seek meaning. This does not mean they are rejecting religion for spirituality. A recent survey indicated that 57 percent of Americans say they are both religious and spiritual. . . . As ideas about God and religion change, the human need for coherence and purpose most likely will not change.”6 If these statistics were not enough, American mainline Protestant denominations are engaged in fierce internal struggles over issues related to human sexuality and what it means to be human. The “Who am I? Why am I here? Where do I fit in?” questions all combine to challenge the popular notion that religion is witnessing a resurgence in the United States. In truth, traditional beliefs and practices are barely surviving at all, and they are certainly declining. Robert Wuthnow’s After the Baby Boomers: How Twenty and Thirty Somethings Are Shaping the Future of American Religion argues that today’s younger adults remain single longer than ever before. In short, conditions are grim for mainline Protestant churches in America, with a decline in confidence, a decline in the number of young believers, a growing number under thirty who claim no religious identity, and an alarming decline in worship attendance. Tucked away in a corner of the American Protestant landscape is the Southern Baptist question. The writers in The Exiled Generations, voices from an unknown population of current and former Southern Baptists, address here the

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uncompromising attitude of the Southern Baptist Convention: “You’re either with us or against us, and if you oppose our standards, you’re against us.” In the grand sweep of Southern Baptist history, the heroes of the 1979– 1990 takeover are passing from the scene; their successors are now dealing with new issues and new cultural divisions, as if the takeover controversy were not enough of a game changer. Bill Leonard, in his “Foreword II” for Against the Wind: The Moderate Voice in Baptist Life, wrote convincingly about the former issue—the takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention: In a sense, it seems unending, the infamous “controversy” that has gripped the Southern Baptist Convention for almost three decades. True enough, the conservatives dominate the Convention and most of the moderates have opted out, investing their energy in new Baptist groups, individual congregations, or entirely different denominations. Conservatives control the national denominational mechanism, the six seminaries, the mission and publishing agencies, and the public pronouncements of the Convention. But as Larry McSwain, professor at Mercer University’s McAfee School of Theology, once noted, the controversy remains “unceasingly systemic,” continuing to work its way through the old Southern Baptist networks of colleges and universities, state conventions, churches, and even families. Two moderate-dominated Baptist state conventions—Texas and Virginia— have experienced full-fledged schisms, evident in the formation of a separate conservative-related convention organization in each state. Other state conventions—Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida—are solidly in conservative control, while North Carolina and Kentucky are headed for the conservative camp. Some Baptist-related universities, such as Furman, Wake Forest, Meredith, and Richmond, have ended their official Baptist affiliation, while others, such as Carson-Newman, Belmont, and Shorter College, continue to struggle with issues of doctrine, governance, and control. While some churches are clearly conservative and others decisively moderate, still others continue to divide over denominational funding, program, and identity. Many pastors and professors still walk a thin line between conservative and moderate factions in their churches, schools, and communities. As the controversy continues to work its way through the old SBC system, many of the protagonists seem stuck with one another, not really happy to be together, differing on issues of doctrine and praxis, but bound together by bygone loyalties, traditions, pension funds, giving plans, and institutional commitments that will not let them go.7

As if these uncomfortable alliances were not enough, there is the troubling issue of Calvinism—the teachings of the sixteenth-century reformer John Calvin that threatens to upend the nation’s largest non-Catholic Christian denomination. At stake is the doctrine of predestination—the teaching that a person’s salvation is not only foreknown, but predetermined. Traditional Baptist beliefs center on Jesus’s death on the cross as an atonement for the sins of humanity—past, present, and future. It seems to many Baptists that if predestination is true, then the crucifixion was meaningless and evangelism xxiv

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is pointless. Because each SBC congregation is autonomous, pastors must be honest about their beliefs for or against Calvinism.8 To be sure, there is widespread disagreement in the SBC over the idea, but it is already shaping present and future generations of Southern Baptist ministers. About thirty percent of Southern Baptist churches consider their congregations Calvinist, according to a poll by LifeWay Research.9 When the issues of gender roles are considered in the national Baptist conversation, the stakes are even higher. The SBC’s 2000 Baptist Faith and Message asserts a form of “complementarianism” that has made life uncomfortable for young Southern Baptists and those who might opt in or out of a Baptist church. The doctrine of complementarianism affirms that men and women are equal, but that they have different roles both in the church and the family. But many neo-Calvinist complementarians view women’s subordination and male leadership as applying to all parts of society. In a word, women are to be submissive in every sector of life. And it is within the subject of gender roles that Southern Baptists are forced to address deeper issues, like the nature of marriage—whether it is only for a man and a women, whether same-sex weddings should be allowed, whether the homosexual lifestyle is acceptable, or whether a gay person must repent of it like any other sin in order to be a Christian. On August 31, 2013, in what may become a landmark decision regarding the sin of homosexuality and same-sex weddings, the Southern Baptist Convention, through its North American Mission Board (NAMB), issued a major directive to SBC chaplains serving in the American armed forces. The Associated Press reported on the directive as follows: The Southern Baptist Convention, which provides the largest share of activeduty military chaplains, has barred members from taking part in weddings, counseling sessions and couples retreats for same-sex couples. The North American Mission Board, an arm of the Nashville, Tenn.-based SBC, also prohibits chaplains from participating in any services that would appear to endorse or accept same-sex unions. The group issued the decision in the wake of the U.S. Department of Defense recognizing same-sex marriages and extending benefits to gay spouses. “Our chaplains want to uphold the authority and relevancy of Scripture while continuing to serve in a very diverse setting,” Dough Carver, a retired Army major general who leads NAMB’s chaplaincy efforts, said in a statement August 29. “We believe these updated guidelines will help them do that while still sharing the love and the hope of Christ with everyone.” Mike Ebert, a spokesman for the Atlanta-based NAMB, said the Southern Baptist Convention spoke with defense officials before issuing the guidelines. A Defense Department spokesman did not immediately return a message. xxv

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The Pentagon, following a Supreme Court decision on the Defense of Marriage Act, said last month same-sex spouses of troops will be eligible for the same health care, housing and other benefits as heterosexual spouses. The policy went into effect September 3, 2013. In August, 2012, Congress approved conscience protections for military members, which allows them to express their personal beliefs without fear of punishment. “We were getting questions from our chaplains, can you please clarify what we can and cannot do. We wanted to provide clarity to our guys,” Ebert said. NAMB-affiliated chaplains will not conduct or attend a wedding ceremony for a same-sex couple, bless such a marriage or perform counseling before a same-sex union. The guidelines also prohibit chaplains from supporting same-sex events, including relationship training or retreats, whether they are on or off a military base, if participation “gives the appearance of accepting the homosexual lifestyle or sexual wrongdoing.” Chaplains are “free to lead or participate in a worship service” as long as the service isn’t with a chaplain, volunteer or contractor who “personally practices or affirms a homosexual lifestyle or such conduct.” Chaplains are expected to “treat all service members, regardless of rank or behavior, with Christ-centered dignity, honor and respect while assisting the institutional leadership in its religious mission requirements and responsibilities as guaranteed by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution,” the guidance notes. The military has 439 active-duty chaplains and 268 reserve-duty chaplains affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention. That makes it the largest affiliation among the services, according to the latest date from March. The military has a total of 2,884 active-duty chaplains, with another 2,375 in the reserves. About 140,000 active-duty service members identity themselves as Baptists, with about 13,000 saying they are part of the Southern Baptist Convention.10

Given all of these observations about Southern Baptist life in the last quarter of the twentieth century, and now well into the second decade of the twenty-first century, it is fair to assume that Southern Baptists everywhere are deeply concerned about their personal, religious, and denominational future; this while they still worry whether they can pay their bills, and fund the general budget of their local church. With the average age of Southern Baptists hovering at fifty-five, prospects of growth in the church become more doubtful with each passing Sunday offering. In a far-reaching interview with Pope Francis, the spiritual leader of the Catholic Church, the pontiff perhaps spoke not only for the world’s largest faith community, but for mainline Protestant churches and the Southern Baptist Convention as well when he proclaimed that the Church has sometimes

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locked itself up in small things, in small-minded rules: “We have to find a new balance; otherwise even the moral edifice of the church is likely to fall like a house of cards.”11 Indeed, the Southern Baptist Convention is experiencing its own “house of cards” problem. The stark reality is that the “house” of Southern Baptists is getting smaller with each passing year. The internal problems of the SBC —the conservative takeover or take-back, the Convention’s ongoing opposition to women in roles of church leadership—are overshadowed by an even larger concern: the sixty-five year decline in baptisms. In 2012 the Convention’s Annual Church Profile recorded a drop of more than 5 percent in the number of baptisms in Southern Baptist churches. The study marked the first time since 1948 that baptisms had fallen below 315,000 per year.12 From 1950 to 2011, an annual average of 379,711 people received SBC baptism; the decline in 2012 reached thirteen percent below the average—the worst drop in sixtytwo years.13 Southern Baptists of varying convictions are beginning to learn that while the fussing and in-fighting went on from year to year, the country was going off in many directions they are not now prepared to understand. Unfortunately, preaching the Bible has not been enough to attract the nonbeliever or turn the tide of declining numbers. In the maelstrom of what scholars have deemed a “perfect storm” in the SBC—a moderate leadership bent on doing things by a corporate business model, challenged by a conservative, militant, rhetorically savvy pastoral leadership—erupted into an all-out religious war. Gaining the high ground in religious rhetoric—the Bible is true, word-for-word—the conservative insurgents won the day in a little more than a decade. To document that war as correspondents and as students of rhetoric, Ray Camp and I wrote In the Name of the Father: The Rhetoric of the Southern Baptist Convention Holy War. As we researched and wrote In the Name, numerous Southern Baptists came to us with their stories of exile. Unfortunately, there was no place for their contributions in that book. After a time of reflection and research, Ray and I became determined to document these stories from the known and unknown “exiles” of the Baptist battles. But the initial plans were derailed. Ray suffered a debilitating stroke in early 2000. Plans for a second Southern Baptist book, an edited compilation of stories about the exiled, were put on hold. Research projects of substance and value tend to find a way to see the light of day. Within five years, Exiled: Voices of the Southern Baptist Convention Holy War presented the stories of thirty-one distinguished Southern Baptists who were stripped of their positions as lay leaders, church members, pastors, and prominent officers of the SBC.

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A nagging question for this writer, nearing the end of a thirty-year research trajectory, was where and from whence moderate and progressive Southern Baptists could trace their heritage. In Against the Wind: The Moderate Voice in Baptist Life (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2009), I argued that the twentieth and twenty-first century Baptist diaspora originated, inadvertently, after World War II in the youth revival movement at Baylor University, Waco, Texas. Young men and women, with little or no training in preaching or religious organizational skills, would, in due time, became a distinctive community of so-called moderate Southern Baptists in their adult lives. Armed with the spirit of evangelism and a heart for missions, these men and women were almost to a person in the first wave of exiles and martyrs of the fundamentalist takeover occurring years later. With the publication of Against the Wind, the third of three books on the rhetorical strategies of the SBC takeover was over. Battered, beaten, and discarded, Baptist exiles shed the cloak of “Southern” from their shoulders, and went their own way. It was time for this student of the Baptist battles to do the same. All that could be said was now “between the boards” (the term my graduate mentor, Dr. Ralph T. Eubanks, taught me to describe the printing of a cloth-bound, hard-cover book). As Exiled: Voices made its way by sales, book signings, and college library accessions, reviews made their way into relevant journals and blogs. In what turned out to be a brief appearance on the Web before it disappeared, a review of the book appeared on the home page of a female SBC foreign missionary, complete with a digital reproduction of the cover of Exiled: Voices and a picture of the woman, shielding her face with the flag of an African nation. The seeming purpose of her blog post was to praise the book. But, indirectly addressing me as the editor, she said, “My Dad lost his church because he would not acquiesce to the fundamentalists. We moved from place to place like gypsies. Yet, my call to be a missionary never wavered. I lived through the controversy while living at home. I saw what it did to my family and I know what it did to me.” I heard her say to me: “You have to find a way to tell my story.” For reasons unknown, the website was taken down as soon as it was posted. Simply put, I had been called back to active duty. In any form of church life, a call to service is never about the one called making a decision by weighing profit and loss. A call to service is answered with a no or a yes. I said yes. The Exiled Generations languished in its initial calls for contributors for three years (2008–11). Without a national media platform for promotion, calls for writers were limited to friends and relatives of the thirty-one authors in Exiled: Voices. It was not until July 22, 2011, when an Associated Baptist Press story promoted the call for contributors, that I could find a significant number

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INTRODUCTION

of them, many of whom are now included in this book. After that, there were twists and turns that added even more contributors to the fold. But there were new problems never encountered in the first book. The general pattern of these stories is familiar, and goes like this: the conservatives and fundamentalists used various rhetorical strategies and tactics to control or expel undesirable Southern Baptists who would not toe the line on biblical inerrancy, the denial of women as ordained leaders, the acceptance of homosexuals, African American as church members, and so on. What is not known is that many moderate leaders, in order to placate their conservative leaders, would turn on their weakest member to make themselves look better in the eyes of the conservative culture. Two potential contributors who should have told their story declined to do so because those who were supposed to be their friends turned out to be their enemies.14 It is my deep regret that these voices will remain silent. Over several months, I tried my best to persuade them, but to no avail. Now that The Exiled Generations was moving forward, there was a need for a major name in the twentieth century pantheon of Southern Baptists to write for the book. There was only one choice: Dr. Molly T. Marshall, president of Central Baptist Theological Seminary in Shawnee, Kansas. In 1994, Dr. Marshall was at the center of one of the most significant moments in Southern Baptist history: her forced resignation from the faculty of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, Kentucky. (For a detailed biography of Dr. Marshall, see Pamela R. Durso’s Molly Marshall: A Woman of Faith and Courage in Appendix 1.) Dr. Marshall agreed to participate, and you will find her “Crafting a New Baptist Narrative” an uplifting read in the postscript. What emerges in The Exiled Generations are discoveries created by and in the backwash of the writer’s mothers, their fathers, and their own experiences in denominational exile. Several writers speak of the excitement of searching for new faith communities where “they take me just as I am.” Some express an uncomfortable weariness with the exclusive “sin-save” rhetoric and go looking for another church home. All of the contributors to The Exiled Generations long for religious instruction on Sunday morning, coupled with the growing pains and joyful struggle of developing as a maturing Christian. These writers tell raw stories of rejection and self-discovery. On one hand, there are sections in these stories tuned to the language of a recovering addict. On the other hand, the new exiles of the twenty-first century community of former Southern Baptists look forward to the paths away from exile and towards fresh, new faith communities, in both non-denominational and denominational churches.

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ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

There are eighteen essays in the book, with a nineteenth entry commissioned for The Exiled Generations from a first-generation Southern Baptist contributor—Don Wilkey Jr., Onalaska, Texas—that covers the on-going story of the pre- and post-takeover movement still raging across the Lone Star State. The saga of the Southern Baptist Convention experience in Texas begs for a thorough analysis of past, present, and possible future trends in church polity. It is fair to say that everything good and bad about the Southern Baptist Convention started in Texas and will most likely end in Texas. For an edited, blind-access book like The Exiled Generations, as well as the earlier Exiled: Voices of the Southern Baptist Convention Holy War, an editor never knows what he will get until the submissions arrive across several media platforms. For the earlier book, several prominent Southern Baptists were solicited, while the bulk of the essays came in for blind review.14 For The Exiled Generations, the process began by reconnecting to every living contributor to the earlier book. As noted earlier, the thirty-one essay writers, four siblings responded to tell their story, for reasons tied to the intimacy of a father and/or mother’s life while they were still living at home at the time of the takeover from the 1970s to the 1990s. The first person to offer her story for Exiled: Voices was Ms. Eleanor B. Williamson, of Springfield, Missouri. Ms. Eleanor was that book’s “Everywoman.” As an homage to her legacy, her son James I. Williamson requested and was granted the lead essay position for the present book. In the three-year process of reviewing essays and losing potential writers to time and circumstance, it was decided that this book’s stories would be bookended with, at the front, Mr. Williamson’s paean to his mother, and at the end with what can only be termed a literary gift of grace—Martin Davis’s A Wandering Aramean. There is no other way to put it: over several months, Martin turned down two appeals to write. He finally agreed to tell his story. What now concludes this book is a powerful chronicle of discovery. A Wandering Aramean tells the story of moving beyond the agony of loss to the hope of a fresh start in a journey that no Southern Baptist would have imagined in their lifetime. In all of these essays, there is a mixture of “crying over spilled milk” and “tomorrow is another day.” Kristen Redford, Wesley Shotwell, Millie Patterson, and Ken Satterfield voice the stories of what they mean when they say, “I am a Southern Baptist,” and what burned their Southern Baptist houses down to the ground. Elizabeth Hancock and Nathan Brown strike a fanciful, humorous theme in their essays because sometimes, you just have to see the amusing

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in the absurd. Kevin Johnson, James Hill Jr., Denise Dinkins, Brian Kaylor, Geoff Davidson, and R. Scott Pollard tell the stories of the bitter, anguished interactions of family, church, and convention that brought the controversy to their doorsteps. There are independent, stand-alone essays that require their own category. First is Stephen M. Fox’s “Twenty-first Century Churchin’ in Alabama.” If you don’t know what “churchin’” is, you are in for an education in Southern Baptist polity. During the period of accessing essays, Bailey Edwards Nelson was Pastor of Flat Rock Baptist Church, Mount Airy, North Carolina. Her “God, Woman, and Mayberry” is a modern-day classic story of a woman senior pastor and the troubles thereunto, albeit with an unfortunate ending. The SBC controversy waxed and waned for many second- and thirdgeneration Southern Baptists, especially if they learned of the Baptist battles when they were young. Among these writers is Dave McNeely, who tells his story from the days of his youth in Children’s Choirs. Barely able to distinguish one Baptist concept from another, but embracing the child-like joy of singing in “Big Church,” Dave’s “Ascending into Exile” traces his journey from early school to adulthood, which shaped his reality and informed his Baptist history through the eyes of a child. Then there is Mark Bowdidge’s "The Day the Music Died.” Without apology, Mark’s essay is the longest in this book as well as any essay in Exiled: Voices. For its honesty and detail, “The Day the Music Died” will be a landmark monograph, relating how a church school destroyed a music department and faculty over the clash of academic freedom and fundamentalist dogma. Without question, there will be those who read the variety of stories found here and only wish they had known in time to submit their own story, because their own experiences were unlike any of these writers. Perhaps for another day or another media platform. The tributes to Kenneth L. Chafin and Duke Kimbrough McCall honor two champions of Southern Baptist history who had a profound impact on the editor. Without Ken Chafin, others in the pantheon of eminent Southen Baptists would not have lent their name and voice to the rhetorical history of the takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention. Without Duke McCall, there would have been no senior voice at the turn of the twenty-first century to grace these studies. To these men—thank you. The first book, Exiled: Voices, related stories of casualties as well as of renewal and release for these first generation, front-line heroes of Southern Baptist life. In this book, second- and third-generation former Southern Baptists extend the stories of their mothers, fathers, and the churches of their

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youth to the present day. Neither book is a “pretty” book. Each in its own way is an acknowledgement of loss, abuse, anger, and eventually resolution. The first generation of Southern Baptist exiles went looking for a smaller version of the system from which they were expelled. The second and third generations of former Southern Baptist exiles are looking for any church they can call home—no matter the name, or how long they may stay in one place. For the foreseeable future, it is anyone’s guess as to the next systemic change in Southern Baptist life. It is not a matter of if, but a matter of when. The next twenty years will likely tell if the Southern Baptist Convention is worth saving or not. For now, here are the stories of today’s generation of former Southern Baptist exiles. Throughout these pages can be found perspectives and promises about the writers’ continuing lives as Baptist Christians, or whatever mantle they may choose to wear. RECOMMENDED BOOKS

There are over 100 books on the takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention. Among them is the classic study by Nancy Tatom Ammerman, a must read: Baptist Battles: Social Change and Religious Conflict in the Southern Baptist Convention (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990). In a broader frame, the following books provide a blend of religious survey data and incisive analysis on American religion and the future of the nonCatholic church. They are: Mark Chave, American Religion: Contemporary Trends (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); Robert Wuthnow, After the Baby Boomers: How Twenty-and-Thirty Somethings Are Shaping the Future of American Religion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); and Randall J. Stevens and Karl W. Giberson, The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011). NOTES 1. Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, “Summary of Key Findings,” in U.S. Religious Landscape Survey: Religious Affiliation; Diverse and Dynamic, Pew Research Center’s Religion & Public Life Project. Religions.pewforum.org/reports. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Cathy Lynn Grossman, “Millennials at Church: A Small but Passionate Flock.” USA Today, December 27, 2012, News 7A. 5. Ibid.

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6. David Brown, “Future Trends in American Religion,” Futurist.com, 2001, futurist. com/articles-archive/future-trends-in-american-religion. 7. Carl L. Kell, Against the Wind: The Moderate Voice in Baptist Life (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2009), xxvii. 8. Greg Horton, “How Calvinism is Dividing The Southern Baptist Convention,” Huffington Post, September 20, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/06/ how-calvinism-is-dividing-the-southern-baptist-convention_n_3399504.html 9. Ibid. 10. Associated Press, “Baptist Group Bars Chaplains from Same-Sex Rituals,” The Big Story, September 6, 2013, http://bigstory.ap.org/article/baptist-groupbars-chaplains-same-sex-rituals-0. 11. “A Big Heart Open to God: The Exclusive Interview with Pope Francis,” by Antonio Spadaro, S.J., America, September 30, 2013. http://www.americamagazine.org/ pope-interview. 12. Joe Conway, “Decline in SBC Baptisms Being Studied by Pastor’s Task Force,” BP News, September 21, 2013, http://www.bpnews.net/BPnews.asp?ID=41128. 13. Ibid. 14. There are two prospective contributors who declined an offer to participate in this project because their “moderate” superiors disciplined them so as to keep their own in line in order to keep their jobs as supervisors. One potential contributor called it “serial rape by those I thought were my friends.” The loss of these two people is the saddest moment in this project.

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WITNESS TO THE EXILE James I. Williamson

ublished in 2006, Exiled: Voices of the Southern Baptist Convention Holy War began with an essay by my mother, Eleanor B. Williamson of Springfield, Missouri. Our family appreciated seeing her work recognized, as Eleanor had passed from this life in 2004. When asked to contribute to the second Exiled publication, I accepted the challenge. As a child of an “exiled” Southern Baptist woman, I witnessed the leadership changes within the Southern Baptist Convention and saw firsthand the effects of divisive ideologies such as the subservient role of women, biblical inerrancy, and the clampdown on the thoughts and practices of missionaries. My Baptist heritage came from my mother. She would take our family to Sunday school and worship services every Sunday at First Baptist Church of Springfield, Missouri. On Wednesday nights, we had dinner at church, participated in choir practice, and enjoyed youth activities. I felt at home within the embrace of the church. At age seven, I accepted God’s plan of salvation and joined First Baptist. God moved my soul then and continues to do so to this day. I had wonderful experiences at my church: as a Christian, as a Boy Scout (our church sponsored Troop 5), and as a sports team member. I had fun at church; my friends were church friends. True to spirit, I graduated in 1980 from William Jewell University, a Baptist college. Through extensive reading and careful listening, I became familiar with the divisions stirring within the Southern Baptist Convention that marked the late 1980s and early 1990s. I watched “moderates” and “fundamentalist conservatives” harden their irreconcilable positions within the Southern Baptist Convention. As a delegate from my home church in San Jose, California, to the 1990 Southern Baptist Convention in New Orleans, I joined my mother, representing First Baptist Church of Springfield, and fellow Baptists from around the nation in coming face-to-face with these two factions. Sitting in the Superdome

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that week changed me as a Southern Baptist. Observing, participating, and voting enlightened my understanding of the evolving mandate undertaken by the leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention. Divisions became succinct and definitive. Each side sought to portray its stance as critical to the continuation of the organization. An outsider may have concluded that this Convention resembled more of a political slugfest than an objective means to formulate resolution of any religious beliefs that were in question. The role of women in the church became a worrisome topic for my mother. In Exiled: Voices, she addressed the subject: Another existing tradition in the Southern Baptist Convention was the role of women in missions work, which functioned as a separate entity. Through the years, it was not uncommon for Southern Baptist clergy to resent the strong and auspicious Women’s Missionary Union. When the fundamentalists gained authority, it was extremely painful for them to share their new power with anything controlled by women. Subsequently, the structure of the century-old WMU began to crumble. When they dusted off Blackstone’s old English Law book and added the statement “Women should submit to their husbands” in the 2000 Baptist Faith and Message, it also meant women were to remain “silent in the church even on the subject of missions.”

This issue in particular was particularly hard for me, a moderate Baptist, to fathom given the times in which we lived. Women had been increasingly accepted in society as equal partners and were assuming decision-making and leadership roles in business and politics. It was becoming painfully clear that those in the “new Southern Baptist Convention” wanted to turn back the clock and ignore history. Battle lines soon formed over the issue of Biblical inerrancy. My mother stated in her essay: Another new test for Southern Baptist women and men at that time was to affirm the inerrancy or belief that the Bible is without error. Any debate over access to scripture interpretation was overruled. This mandate was a strong repudiation of religious liberty as Southern Baptists previously knew it. When the rumor spread that the fundamentalist movement sought to infiltrate and take over the First church in every city, I became frightened. Even more frightening was the fact that my church peers didn’t seem to care. They just “wanted to keep the church pure and as it had always been.” It didn’t matter that the autonomy of local churches grew less important each year and that our seminaries and other agencies were being taken over by the strong arm of fundamentalism.

In my heart, I respectfully believe that the Bible may not be factually correct 100% of the time. Any book with 37 authors and 66 stories is bound to generate some disagreement over its historical accuracy. Another consid-

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eration was the effect that this and other decisions by the SBC leadership would have on its member churches. Fissures soon formed and fellow Baptists began to question each other’s faith. Our family was affected when my mother decided to leave the church where her children had grown from toddlers to teenagers and her faith had been strengthened over 30 years. My parents divorced when I was three, so I had always known my mother as a single parent steadfastly protecting her family. Her unwavering willingness to support her children made me want to, in turn, support my mother in her convictions. My mother agonized over the move, but I fully backed her painful decision to leave First Baptist Church and move to University Heights Baptist Church, a moderate church connected to American Baptists and the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. That move to another church felt like another divorce. I was “in exile” from the church of my youth and the congregation which had nurtured me in the spirit. On my return visits to Springfield, I literally cried when I had to go to University Heights because I held such fond memories of growing up a “Christ child” (my birthday is on Christmas) at First Baptist. Despite my personal loss, I realized the schism between moderates and fundamentalists within the Southern Baptist Convention would last for years. Springfield’s First Baptist Church was and will always be a church home to me. One of my sisters is a member of that congregation even today. I had found within my heart God’s plan for salvation there. In many ways, I shall always remain a Southern Baptist child of the congregation of women and men at First Baptist. I shall always consider them a part of my family. My mother’s decision to leave was hers to make and I respected her choice. Through the decades, First Baptist Church has always been there for my family and me. I still love that church with all my heart. When the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship missions issue arose in the mid-1980s, my mother again cried for weeks, her heart aching for the fellowship and freedom she had once enjoyed with First Baptist, the Southern Baptist Convention, and the Missouri Baptist Convention, now challenged by the fundamental factions within these entities. I refrain from revisiting this issue because others have so adequately described it beforehand. I do wish to expound upon my own personal belief system. My mother, a lifelong educator, also was my first Bible teacher. She instilled in me her great belief in the Lord Jesus Christ and offered me up to God to be loved and especially to be protected as I grew. Her faith was strong and her love for me was intense. Today, her core beliefs—in the Bible, in the separation of church and state, in the priesthood of the believer, and in local-congregation autonomy—are guiding principles for my faith. I firmly

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believe that men and women are equal in God’s sight; I think women should be deacons. I believe that God speaks to me through the Bible. I also believe in the objective of mission work. I continue to reflect upon the meaning of the split in the Southern Baptist Convention. My never-ending quest for salvation swells every Sunday morning in the worship service. I ask God to allow me to speak his truth to others and to sustain me within my beliefs. As an educator within the California State prison system, I am called upon to live my beliefs every day. I consistently lean upon the strength of the Holy Spirit to guide my dealings with prisoners, and I ask God to come into their hearts. When I am rewarded by the occasional “God bless,” I recognize God’s power at work, and that vision moves me greatly. I remember to praise God daily “at the top of the hour” to sustain me in my work environment. Those events of some twenty years ago shaped my own belief system. I fondly remember my mother’s service to God and bear in mind her influence upon my Christianity. During the last decade of her life, I know that she found herself “exiled” from the SBC mainstream because of the beliefs she held fast and refused to deny. As a child of an exiled Southern Baptist woman, when I drive past First Baptist Church these days, I often wonder what if . . . but deep inside, I know I am traveling with God, and in that I find all the strength that I need in this life.

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I NEVER THOUGHT I COULDN’T BE ORDAINED Kristen Redford

am a born-and-bred Baptist. I was dedicated in a Southern Baptist church in a suburb of Jackson, Mississippi; the same church where my parents were wed. I grew up hearing about all the activities within Baptist life that my parents, grandparents, and extended-family members had done as children and adults. For example, my mother went on a trip to Argentina as a teen with Girls in Action. My great-grandfather is Courts Redford, a prominent Southern Baptist minister most known for his ten-year span on the Southern Baptist Home Mission Board (now the North American Mission Board) and his presidency of Southwestern Baptist University in Bolivar, Missouri. My dad went on a European choir tour as a youth. Being Baptist was deeply entrenched within our family and the area of Mississippi in which we lived. My parents changed church membership to a different Southern Baptist church in Jackson in the early 1990s. It was a rather large building in what was considered a not-so-great part of Jackson. I remember attending a Passion Play and being scared by the actor playing Jesus as he walked through the aisles with a cross on his back and fake blood staining his forehead. I remember asking my mom why the pastor yelled so much in his sermon—was he always angry? Then, when I was in kindergarten, we changed churches again. I don’t remember this process of church shopping, but in the process, my maternal grandparents also moved from the First Baptist Church in their small rural Mississippi town to a relatively young church in North Jackson—Northminster Baptist Church. My parents decided we’d visit it as well. It is this church that I consider the church of my childhood. My family joined Northminster in 1993, a church that was affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention, the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, and the Alliance of Baptists. I participated in all activities offered for children and youth, was baptized in the church, joined the usher committee and the adult choir—all before I was 15. Like all my friends from school, I was a

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KRISTEN REDFORD

church-going child. This church was certainly different from the other Baptist churches I had attended, though. The pastors wore robes. There were female pastors. The baptismal font was off to the side of the sanctuary, not in the middle. The communion table was in the middle and the choir sat opposite the baptistery. There was no stained glass. There was no balcony. There was silence built into services. The preacher was engaging and personable; he didn’t yell in his sermons. *** It was later in life that I realized the significance of that change in church membership. As a young child, I was obviously and understandably unaware of denominational polity and politics. My parents, on the other hand, having both been raised active Southern Baptists, knew exactly what was going on. My mom told me when I was older, “We changed churches [from the Jackson Southern Baptist church to the one that became the church of my childhood] because on the day Brother Ken came back from the SBC convention, he told us of the change in leadership. He told us all the liberals were being kicked out of the SBC and that those who disagreed could leave. So we did.” The SBC conservative takeover greatly troubled both my parents and my maternal grandparents. My mother had felt a call to ministry while in college, but was advised that the environment in Baptist seminaries was undergoing some change and that she should probably wait until the dust had settled. This was sage advice, as Baptist seminaries that remained Southern Baptist banned women from pursuing and receiving ordination-track degrees. That bit of advice saved my mother from being removed from a degree program she might have otherwise already half-finished. My grandmother felt aggravation over the explicitly patriarchal bent the SBC had taken. When my grandparents met, my grandfather was a Missouri Synod Lutheran and my grandmother a Southern Baptist. My grandmother, uncomfortable with the idea of losing her voting privileges in the Lutheran church, refused to convert. My grandfather, therefore, became Baptist, including experiencing believer’s baptism as a 20-something, and became an active member in the church. The conservative takeover equally rattled my grandmother, as this shift in polity and practice seemed to move closer to the Missouri Synod Lutherans than the Baptist lifestyle in which she’d been raised. I was completely unaware of these struggles as they were happening, though. I was only five when it all happened. Thus, I was raised in Northminster Baptist Church. This church was formed in the 1970s in response to issues in Jackson around segregation and religious tolerance. Initially, Northminster members met in the Mississippi School for

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I Never Thought I Couldn’t Be Ordained

the Blind and then in the Jewish Synagogue. They finally built their current building in Jackson, and even housed the synagogue services, when in the late 1970s, the synagogue was bombed. The mission of the church had always been to truly hold the doors open to all peoples, and that is still the mission of the church today. They also cut ties with the Southern Baptist Convention when the SBC required all churches desirous of affiliation to sign the Baptist Faith and Message. Northminster felt this went against the non-creedal tenant her members held dear. This was the church I was raised in. I never thought I couldn’t be ordained. I never thought any one race was better or worse than another. I never thought any one religion (or even denomination) was better or worse than another. I never thought homosexuals needed to be “straightened out.” I was raised to believe God was in each person, even those who bullied others or committed heinous crimes. I was raised to believe each person was called to serve their community in some form or another—a Protestant, not just a Baptist, belief. I was raised to believe we’re all born innocent and pure and should come to embrace a relationship with God and Jesus in our own time. Instead, I was raised singing “Jesus Loves Me,” going to Vacation Bible School, memorizing John 3:16, Psalm 23, and the Lord’s Prayer. I had several Bibles, a cross on my door, and prayed before meals with my family. I knew things were a little different when I said I was giving up chocolate for Lent one year and a Baptist friend from school asked when I had become Catholic. Baptists didn’t practice Lent, at least not her kind of Baptist. The notion of the Baptist faith’s being founded on religious liberty, the priesthood of the believer, and an individual relationship with God didn’t extend to liturgical practices. I knew what the CBF was and that it was different from the SBC, which made me different from my friends. My parents took me with them to CBF conventions in the late 1990s. I’ve been to many parts of America because of those conventions—Dallas, Orlando, St. Louis, Greensboro, Louisville, Richmond. I befriended several MK’s (missionary kids) whom I often only saw at these conferences. While I was not raised as a Southern Baptist, I was completely surrounded by them. I lived in Clinton, Mississippi, home of the private Southern Baptist Mississippi College; Southern Baptists were my closest friends and my worst enemies. My friends didn’t understand why, if I was a Baptist, I went to church out in Jackson. There were at least five Baptist churches in Clinton. Why weren’t any of them good enough? When revivals and Vacation Bible School time rolled around, why couldn’t I go with them? I became an evangelism target to most of my friends, and because I didn’t understand the point of

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KRISTEN REDFORD

revivals or that the theology espoused in a Southern Baptist VBS would be diametrically opposed to the theology of Northminster, I just thought my parents were mean when they wouldn’t let me go with my friends. Even when I was in junior high and understood better the differences between our churches, I still wanted to hang out with my friends, which included going to church activities together. I could go to my friend’s baptism, but not Disciple Now. I could go to morning Bible study twice a week at the First Baptist Church, but not to my friend’s youth night during revival. It all seemed hypocritical. Looking back even now, at twenty-four, I understand much better why my parents said what they did, but still somewhat wish I had gone. By seventh grade I was occasionally getting into debates at the lunch table over women ministers and homosexuality. I remember one event where I challenged a friend to find me a passage where Jesus condemned homosexuals. I hadn’t read the Bible cover-to-cover, but everything I had been taught about Jesus was that he wanted people to love others and accept them as they were. A couple of days later, she found me in the hall, said she’d talked to her pastor, and he had directed her to Matthew 19. He had said Jesus supported other passages on marriage, and so by extension, he supported heterosexual marriage. I asked her what she thought. She looked at me blankly. This is the first time I remember realizing the church environment in which I was raised was unique. I was encouraged to read and interpret scripture on my own. I was involved in discussions over what scripture meant from middle school on. I wasn’t told what to believe or what a particular passage meant in absolute terms. By my freshman year in high school, I had a core group of friends, almost all of whom were Southern Baptist, and all of whose religious and political beliefs I knew I stood far leftward of. We’d found a way to respectfully put those differences aside. At least that’s what it seemed like. It is possible they just hoped I’d see the light and the error of my parents’ corrupted thinking one day and be born again, or something. But I was rooted in what felt true about my faith and religions in general: they’re all different, and the three main religions share a common ancestry. It made no sense to assume Islam was wrong, as it was also an offshoot of Judaism. And if any of them were truly right, it was likely Judaism, and Jesus wasn’t actually the Messiah. But love and respect lay at the root of all three. Loving and respecting others felt like the truest adherence for any religious person. I also didn’t believe in going to church just to go. Being a warm body in a seat defeated the purpose and misled the other congregants. It became obvious when people were not in church voluntarily. This was partially why my parents opted to travel a ways in order to attend a church they enjoyed—what was theologically espoused and practiced mattered more than the convenience

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I Never Thought I Couldn’t Be Ordained

of the location. Thus, when my dad got a job in Boston and we moved to Massachusetts in 2003, my parents respected my decision not to participate in the youth group of the United Church of Christ (UCC) church we joined. We tried to find a Baptist church in Massachusetts, particularly a CBF- or Alliance-affiliated church. When those efforts failed, we found a UCC church a couple of towns away that had recently voted to become open and affirming. This made us optimistic, and though it was distinctly different from the worship style we were used to, we felt welcomed by the pastor and other members. The youth group offered opportunities for trips and game nights and free meals, but not much exploration of scripture or discussion of living our faith in our everyday lives. Also, I enjoyed singing in the choir, and the youth-group Sunday school met during worship. So I was going to have to pick one or the other. I chose choir. In college, I looked for a church group that resonated with me and found none. So I didn’t go. Today, I’m living in Austin, Texas, and attending First Baptist Church, Austin—a downtown church twenty-five minutes away from my apartment. At least three other Baptist churches are closer to my home, including two Alliance-affiliated churches. But FBC Austin has, since its formation in the 1800s, been a different kind of Baptist church. It opened its doors to all races at a time when doing so could have been social suicide. It ministers to the poor and hungry of the downtown area without proselytizing to them or treating them as if they have brought their struggles on themselves. It values the participation of women, hymns, a number of choirs, and wrestling with scripture and current events. It is affiliated with the CBF and takes people as they are, wherever they are in their life’s journey. It’s the type of church I would want to raise my child in and is a necessary presence in a country where being religious automatically implies being conservative and judgmental. I’m a twenty-four-year-old, single woman who enjoys going to church, and I’m also a liberal Democrat. I know I’m a minority. But, my hope is for others to realize that being religious does not equal being judgmental. This has shaped my current career goal, which is to get my master of divinity and work with teens and young adults to make religion more relevant and accessible. I will not seek to proselytize or force people into a particular denominational or religious box. Rather, I want them to find a space where they feel at peace and fulfilled. That may be with no religion. That may be in a fundamentalist mega-church. That may be in an Alliance-affiliated Baptist church. All options are fine, so long as you are content and have a sense of agency in the decision. This feeling of mine is certainly idealistic and certainly a side effect of growing up in Northminster. But idealistic things are not always impossible, and we don’t choose a Christian life because it’s easy.

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THE PURGING G. Wesley Shotwell

n June of 1979, I was a tall, skinny seventeen-year old-about to enter senior year in high school. I was also a proud Southern Baptist. My father, Larry Shotwell, had been a successful minister of education in several Southern Baptist churches, but in 1976 felt the call of God to broaden his ministry by joining the staff of what was then known as the Baptist Sunday School Board in Nashville, Tennessee. As a part of his new job, our family had the opportunity to spend six weeks of every summer at Glorieta and Ridgecrest where he was leading conferences for adult Sunday school workers. Those experiences gave me a new appreciation for the large body of Baptist believers known as the Southern Baptist Convention. I met and grew to love the great leaders and churchmen of the day: A.V. Washburn, Harry Piland, and Lloyd Elder. Later, I got to know James Sullivan. These great men, and others like them, led Southern Baptists to be the great missionary and evangelistic force that it became and made it the largest non-Catholic ecclesiastical body in the United States. I remember well when Bold Mission Thrust was announced at Glorieta. I think it was the summer of 1977 when I heard A.V. Washburn announce to the congregation that Southern Baptists were establishing a goal to speak the Gospel to every living human being on the face of the earth by the year 2000. I had absolutely no doubt that it would happen. After all, we were Southern Baptists, we could do anything! Furthermore, my dad was helping lead the charge! By 1979, I had decided to commit myself to being involved in the work. That was the summer I announced to my home church that I was entering the ministry. My church blessed me and encouraged me. That great Southern Baptist congregation pledged their support for me. I knew that as long as Southern Baptist people like these were holding the ropes, those of us on the front lines would preach the Gospel to every person in the world by the year 2000. After all, I was a Southern Baptist, and together we could do anything.

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G. WESLEY SHOTWELL

But in June of 1979, the election of Adrian Rogers as president of the Southern Baptist Convention would change the course of our Convention and ultimately the course of my life. I did not know it at the time, of course. I remember seeing the announcement on the evening news and being proud that Southern Baptists were deemed worthy of making news on the national stage. It was not until later that I realized the Convention that I loved was changing forever. I went to Baylor University in 1980, and heard rumblings that some Southern Baptists were unhappy with the religion department there. By 1984, when I went to Southwestern Seminary, I found myself in the middle of a firestorm. I remember seminary professors outlawing tape recordings of lectures because they were afraid their words would be diced and spliced and used out of context to prove heresy. I recall professors who would not teach all sides of an issue because they thought it would be safer to speak only the party line. I felt like fear had truncated my education. It was clear things were changing. In 1985, I went to the Southern Baptist Convention meeting in Dallas and saw first-hand the measures taken by some to ensure they retained power. I saw tricky parliamentary procedures that short-circuited the expression of the people. I saw fights in the hallways. Worse, my hopes that Bold Mission Thrust would succeed were destroyed. The Convention I had loved and trusted was no longer worthy of love or trust. I began to understand what the Hebrew people must have felt when the temple was destroyed. The institution I had trusted was being torn down by modern day Babylonians and I would soon be sent into exile. The same happened when I attended the 1988 convention in San Antonio. The great and venerated preacher W.A. Criswell called me a skunk. The Convention voted the priesthood of the believer out of existence. And once again, the fundamentalist candidate for president was elected by only a slim margin, and still took over everything. It was the last Southern Baptist Convention I would ever attend. In the meantime, my father was continuing his work at the Sunday School Board. He had become a well-known figure across the Convention through conferences and books, and his work was fruitful despite the political wrangling of the era. I had become a pastor in Tennessee and completed my doctorate at Vanderbilt Divinity School, where real liberals existed. The association with Vanderbilt sealed my fate as a Southern Baptist liberal, although, in reality, I was and remain very conservative. I kept a pretty low profile in SBC politics at that time, mainly because I did not want to cause political problems for my dad in his ministry.

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The Purging

However, after eighteen years of faithful and fruitful service at the Sunday School Board, my dad was “purged.” I remember getting the phone call from my mom one morning. “Your dad called,” she said. “They have asked him to go to lunch.” Everyone knew what that meant. It was code for, “They are going to let him go.” At least they took him to lunch to break the news. Many, many people did not get that courtesy. They called it a “retirement,” but he was only 60 years old in 1994 and had no plans to retire yet. He had intended to retire from the Sunday School Board at age 65 and live out his years in a place he loved. But it was not to be so. Of course, he was not alone. By the mid-1990s I was pastor of a church in the Nashville Baptist Association. Every week at Pastor’s Conference some poor soul who had been recently “retired” would give a plea to the brethren for a job. I bet in those years I saw fifty people plead for work in Pastors’ Conference. My dad was fortunate. His reputation allowed him to receive several job offers from local churches. He eventually went to First Baptist Church, San Angelo, Texas, as the minister to median and senior adults. He held a variety of positions at First Baptist until his sudden death in July 2008. In fact, he visited the nursing home for the church on the day he died. So in the end, everything worked out fine. He was able to fulfill his calling until the end of his life and never did really retire. Our family is grateful for the church in San Angelo. Although things ended well, it certainly left a bitter taste in my mouth. Even though the wrong was done to my dad, he was less bitter. He just followed God’s leadership, even when God led to unexpected places, and was happy with the way things turned out. For that I am grateful. However, my trust in Southern Baptists was completely destroyed. In retrospect, there is a great silver lining to all that happened. Growing up, I was under the mistaken impression that the Southern Baptist Convention was synonymous with the Kingdom of God. The SBC had become an idol, not just for me, but for thousands, perhaps millions of Baptists. I had trusted the denomination when I should have been trusting God. I was captivated by the Convention when God wanted to capture me for the Kingdom. It was not until my idol was wrested away from me that I realized that the Kingdom was bigger than Southern Baptists. Conventions may serve the Kingdom, but they are not the Kingdom. If the Convention collapses, it is not the end of the Kingdom of God. In fact, God may use the destruction of idols to set the Kingdom free. So, I have been “purged.” I am purged of the idolatry of days gone by. I am purged from putting ultimate trust in human institutions. I still work in institutional systems, but only with the knowledge that institutions exist to serve the Kingdom, not become the Kingdom. I am thankful for my purging.

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I WAS SUPPOSED TO BE A BAPTIST Millie Patterson

here is that old saying that nothing is constant but change itself. We grew up thinking the one constant in our lives would be our Baptist faith. I found the support of that belief taken from me, and it took me by surprise! As a Baptist minister’s daughter in the 1950s and 1960s, my life was all about GA, Sunday school, choir, Wednesday night suppers, youth group, Ridgecrest, Glorietta, and more. I was carefully trained to be a thoughtful person, to think about my faith, to read, to pray, to ask questions, and look for answers. The priesthood of the believer was a firm part of that instruction. College consumed my life in the late sixties and seventies. Like many college students, I attended church when I was home with my family and, infrequently, the nearest church on our campus. When I graduated in 1972, I worked in Atlanta and over the next few years looked for a church home. At first I was not aware of the changes within the Southern Baptist Convention. As I visited the mega-churches in Atlanta, I did not understand the messages I heard. Repeatedly, I heard that the minister was the person who would tell all the members how and what to believe and how to act on those beliefs. That was the acceptable model of the Southern Baptist church. As a single young woman, I was unwelcome in many of these churches. On the whole, I was not welcomed or encouraged to return to worship at any of the large Southern Baptist churches in Atlanta. Eventually, I found a small Methodist church where the members were quite accepting and kind. I could not bring myself to join, but only to attend. I was supposed to be a Baptist. Over the next few years, my mother and father had church problems as well. Whenever I visited their home and their community church, I saw these problems for myself. My father worked as assistant to the executive director of the South Carolina Baptist Convention. He was respected and secure in his position, but his greatest struggle against fundamentalism grew from the conservative influence in the Christian Life and Public Affairs Committee. My father presented policy statements to the news media and legislature.

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MILLIE PATTERSON

Conservative influences within this committee attempted to stifle or redirect Baptist policy statements he made on behalf of the Convention. My father retired in 1990 and continued to be active within his local church. Unfortunately, my mother was not able to remain active. Gradually, she was not allowed to volunteer in the church, or even to work with children in Sunday school or Vacation Bible School. She and my dad wondered why she was taken off volunteer lists after she signed them. I believed she was restricted because she might not instruct children in the conservative agenda. My parents supported the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. Our church, after many arguments, refused to allow money to be given to the CBF at all. My parents searched for their own church home. After my husband and I married and had children, we tried again to be Southern Baptists. This time we attended a large church in Gwinnett County, Georgia. This church was known for community service and outreach programs. But every Sunday the sermons were the same. We were told that we were going to hell and needed to be saved or to rededicate. The message left no instruction for growth for our children or for us. Finally we moved on to a small country church. It was so much like the churches of my childhood. We were overjoyed! Then we moved to Florida and discovered only more conservative Southern Baptist mega-churches. When we moved back to the Atlanta area, our minister had left our wonderful small church. We did not know his replacement, and we were no longer willing to take risks with our children’s religious upbringing. After a lot of reading and attending classes, we joined Duluth United Methodist Church, with Dr. Harvey West as senior minister. We raised our children as Methodists. We taught Sunday school and volunteered in children’s choir, and we attended our own Sunday school classes. Our children were active and involved throughout their lives in our home. It is now all they remember. Although we have moved on to a new home and church, we remain Methodists. Today, my parents have a church home active in the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. Our daughters are looking for their own church homes. One remains Methodist. Our older daughter says she wants a church focusing on life lessons and service to the community and the world. She attends a nondenominational church. As for me, I can’t say that I have ever really felt as if I belonged in any church as an adult. I struggled to acclimate to Methodism and now find myself more comfortable in that church setting than the Baptist services of my childhood, but it never felt quite like home. I pray that our children will have like-minded Christians and a church home for all their lives, a church family that accepts them and allows them to grow in faith.

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WHEN TROUBLE COMES HOME Ken Satterfield

eorge Satterfield experienced a variety of setbacks during his lifetime, e.g., business setbacks, getting burned severely, and cancer. But it was when my father dealt with his church that he experienced some of his deepest grief. It really started back when I entered Southern Seminary in the fall of 1981. It was exciting to be exposed to new ideas, but they didn’t always translate well when I explained them to my parents during my weekly Sunday night phone calls to South Carolina. So it probably didn’t sound very believable when I also shared stories I was hearing about efforts to take over the Southern Baptist Convention. Their reaction was probably a little bit of patronizing with a healthy dose of skepticism. But then the “conservative resurgence” moved closer to home. The hometown pastor I had grown up with left for another church after fifteen years. Although I didn’t know it at the time, I was later told that part of the reason he left was pressure from a group not happy with the church’s direction. Dad is not a wallflower, but he also isn’t a person who throws rocks from the sidelines. He had been a deacon, a long-time Sunday school teacher for various age groups, and was deeply involved in the life of the church. When the church found their next pastor, my Dad was troubled. He found evidence of money moved around, not so much in an illegal way, but in a way to disguise the church’s money flow. There seemed to be secrecy and a reluctance to the answer questions he asked. The new pastor steered the church into a hard right, conservative turn. It was seen in the worship and in the sudden influx of students from a conservative Bible college across town. And the church’s slogan became “the church where love abounds.” My father began being told rumors that, in the midst of the church’s early search for a pastor, prominent leadership in the new conservative SBC

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KEN SATTERFIELD

contacted the search committee, telling them that God had revealed who should be the next pastor. My folks began designating their tithes completely to missions, and saw others were doing the same, as a protest that would still allow them to maintain their tithe. The weekly phone conversations became less about family, business, and the Gamecocks and more about church matters, about frustrations and no replies, and about friends that did not see things as my parents did. It was during this time that my father had his first cancer scare, and an indication of how bad the situation had gotten. It seemed that throughout his life he had had a fear of cancer, partially because of childhood medical treatments—UV radiation—that had a high cancer rate in adults. He told me that while waiting for a cancer biopsy, he was visited by a fellow deacon, one who also was a professor at the fundamentalist school. He came by and my dad assumed that he was coming by out of concern over the biopsy. In fact, he came by to ask my father to stop causing trouble at the church, and during the conversation he asked about the biopsy, “Did you ever think that maybe God is trying to tell you something?” I don’t believe God treats people like ants under a magnifying glass like some sort of cosmic bully. However, I did find myself wondering if the professor would have asked himself the same question when his own father died a few weeks later. When people ask a lot of questions, there is usually one of two responses. One is that others start asking questions too. The other is that the questioner gets ostracized. Unfortunately for my father, he had the second experience. The pastor began proceedings to have him removed as a deacon because of his disloyalty to the church. A hearing was held—“trial” was what my father called it—and the church chose to remove my father as a deacon, a position he treasured. That’s not quite being kicked out of the church, but the effect was the same. My parents had been members of the church for forty years. When you have spent most of your life in a house, a job, a town, in a marriage or as a church member, the transition out is incredibly difficult and almost impossible to comprehend. My father had served the church in just about everything but the Women’s Missionary Union. When he was burned over 75 percent of his body in second- and third-degree burns and miraculously survived just a week before I left for college, the church rallied around him, giving blood, helping keep his business going, taking care of my younger siblings, and inundating us with cards, letters, gifts, and prayers. This was the church that rejected him. These were the friends my parents had worshipped next to who would not stand beside him now. The frustration

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When Trouble Comes Home

consumed him for years. My Sunday night calls became more difficult as they seemed less like conversations and more like grief therapy. Life was not fair. If this were the end of the story, it would be sad, maybe tragic, or maybe just sour grapes. But I tell this story because of the ending, not the beginning. Dad and Mom were not the only ones who left the church. They gathered with people from another church experiencing a split and together started what my mom called “the Pig church” in an abandoned Piggly Wiggly storefront. That church had a power struggle in its early stage and the church split. The new “split-of-a-split” church eventually established itself, began to find its identity, and is today pastored by a former missionary with a growing congregation, good location, and a developing youth program. Dad died of cancer in 2005. In going through his old papers (and he kept a lot of them!), I found materials from leaders in the fledgling Cooperative Baptist Fellowship trying to encourage him to take a leadership role locally. In fact, they attended the first gathering as part of their search for closure. They may have left the church behind, but they never left “the Church,” or abandon the denomination that had given so much to them. George Satterfield found a new purpose in birthing a church. He once again served as a deacon, a teacher, and a respected church leader. I admired how he enjoyed pouring over materials for each week’s lesson and asked really difficult and deep questions to me, the seminary graduate. He may have had scars from his experiences—some literal—but he found happiness in once again worshipping alongside old friends, finding new ones, and serving God. I recently came across a set of audiotapes from “the trial.” I don’t believe I will be listening to them. What purpose would it serve? But I can be inspired by them, knowing that they represent the price of trying to do the right thing.

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SHE IRONED OUR UNDERWEAR Elizabeth Emerson Hancock

y father, sister, and I stood over the still-warm basket of freshly laundered linens prepared by one of the greatest Baptist church ladies ever to strut an aisle. We stared at her careful handiwork, and though none of us said a thing, we were all in awe of the neat stack of my father’s boxer shorts, sitting starched and seam-perfect in the center of the basket. It was an out-of-place touch, for sure; like some accidental drop-off by a misguided concierge who got lost on the way to the Hilton. Our hotel was the Penny Pincher, and we’d been staying there for the first two weeks of my father’s service as pastor to the Latonia Baptist Church in Covington, Kentucky. We didn’t have a home yet, and my parents weren’t optimistic about finding one we could afford. To make matters worse, my mother had injured her back just prior to the move, and wound up in the traction ward of our new city’s hospital. That left poor Dad on his own with a new flock, an unsold home in another town, and a pair of little girls whose toys were all in storage. (And I insist, when I recall his patience and faith during those times, that even Job himself never managed a Barbie bed out of a hanky, a bar of motel soap, and a pair of men’s wingtips.) But my memories from that “hardest” period of my life as a PK aren’t hard at all. I think of that time, and I think of how a church snapped-to for a family it had never met, to cushion our fall into a new, urban community and to tighter financial circumstances than we’d ever known. Frances Roark had led the charge, offering to do as much laundry as we could produce, out of her own basement (yes, right down to starching and ironing the underwear of our holy patriarch). Pat Tucker, who ran a day care from her home, kept my little sister during the day, while I went to church with Dad, and his secretaries threw me tea parties on the office floor. We had sumptuous meals every night, all baked in the kitchens of Kentucky Baptist women with so much love and butter that we barely had to chew the cornbread. On the weekends, we went as guests to the pool at Highlands Country Club, or to tour the extraordinary

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ELIZABETH EMERSON HANCOCK

toy train collection that a deacon had set up on his dining room table, or to the living room of Mr. Curran, who owned the largest television set in the whole congregation, and who spoke of my father in terms of such reverence, of such honor and delight, that I felt like a revered princess in his home. We learned the meaning of living fellowship, and I began to understand the concept of church membership not as an antiquated rite of passage, but as an invitation to the warmest of dances. The carpets were elegant and the food was mouth-watering, but the door was open to everyone. If you couldn’t get there, someone drove you to the door and carried you in, from the day you were born till the day you died. And if you ever needed clean underwear, well, that wasn’t a problem, either. I never contemplated why anyone would want to leave the pastor’s life. My attitude wasn’t shared by other PK’s I knew. In fact, it was partly their whining tirades about all the “pressure” of growing up holy that eventually lead me to publish my own memoir: Trespassers Will Be Baptized: The Unordained Memoir of a Preacher’s Daughter. My life wasn’t perfect; I don’t think the child has been born who is completely enthusiastic about her father’s boss all the time. But I recognized early that I, and other pastors’ children, were born with a peculiar complex that I like to call “the Manger Syndrome.” When you’re in the manger, yes, it’s true, everyone’s looking at you. Everyone expects great things. But there’s an upside—you are, in fact, the one in the manger. And from the day you set foot in the nursery, if you need a new diaper, someone’s going to rush in and change it before even the Good Lord knows it’s dirty. I was less-than-enthusiastic about leaving the manger life. My father made his choice official in the early 1990s, after he’d followed his term at Latonia Baptist with a term as communications director for the Kentucky Baptist Convention, punctuated by several interims (and there was cornbread, a congregant with a country club, and laundry service—if we wanted it—at every one of them). I’d spent my life until that point expecting a full balcony’s worth of seats, just for church family, at all my school plays. My sister got the same treatment at her basketball games, where sports became an extension of Sunday service, and church ladies who’d held little Meg on her dedication day showed up to whoop and hallelujah as she made her baskets. Their dedication was more than a matter of goodwill, I understood—there, on the court, was the daughter of the man who’d baptized their own sons, who’d married off their little girls, who’d held their shaking shoulders when their own husbands passed on. We were all partners in that masterfully choreographed dance, rip-roaring in its joy and painful in its long, bittersweet interludes. I had never even contemplated what would happen if my father, always a grand caller at

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She Ironed Our Underwear

the center of it all, just left; and I hadn’t envisioned a circumstance that would make him do it. At the time, the answer he gave us was “family.” He gave it up because of us, because of a need to tend to our personal needs with attention that he said had always been stretched thin by the ever-present demands of some congregation. I said, through tears, that I understood. And from a practical standpoint I did. His explanation made sense. I accepted it as best I could, and forced my mind to skate past the confusion I felt when I observed my father’s fallen demeanor as he approached any Southern Baptist church, the places that used to invigorate his steps so strongly that we all struggled to keep pace. And I didn’t know, and didn’t dare ask, why he’d come home in tears from what would be the last Convention he’d ever attend. The Convention, as I’d always seen it, was the red carpet moment of my father’s year; a time when the church shook all the starch out of its petticoats and even some of the choir robes had sequins. Dad’s change in attitude toward it was inexplicable. When I asked what had happened, Dad always referred, obliquely, to “forces at work,” monsters that he hoped would be quieted before I ever had to learn that they existed. And he hoped I never would. Years passed, and Dad did, with the cushion of distance between him and his Convention years, talk a little more about his decision to leave. It was, he emphasized, a decision. Dad was not forced to leave, though many of his friends and colleagues were, as the fundamentalist movement snaked its way through the SBC. Still, he said, it was not a matter of choice for him. Any organization that banned the opportunity for women to preach out from the pulpit, that would find his own daughters (one of whom already led a regular weekly service for her stuffed animals and had baptized many a neighborhood Catholic in our inflatable pool) unfit to preach the Word of God, simply did not meld with his understanding of that Word. So the Reverend Gregory Hancock had walked out, left the dance before they’d thrown him out—for me, for Mom, for Meg. For Frances Roark, who, too shy to preach, set forth her own ministry in the perfect seams of boxer shorts, ironed to a degree that was probably painful in its perfection, with her arthritic little hands. My father had been out of the pastorate for a decade when I came faceto-face with what had really driven his heart from its pulpit. I was in my first year of law school in Washington D.C., hundreds of miles away from the last Southern Baptist church I’d known (and certainly further from any decent church lady cornbread), when I began to feel a familiar nag to get myself into a pew again. The nation’s capital, with its glowing monuments to melting-pot culture, and engraved mottoes that spoke of rights for every inhabitant, still

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felt like an exclusionary place to me. I was terribly homesick, struggling academically, and for the first time, completely unsure about whether I was in the right place. Fortunately, in my life experience, which by that point had already included five years in the frozen north of Boston, I’d learned that there was a cure for that. I’d put on a pair of my scratchiest wool tights (the kind my mother had had to shake me down into every Sunday morning of my girlhood), I’d find a spot between two old ladies who sang off-key, and I’d get my sorry rear end onto a Southern Baptist pew. Gradually, I knew the warmth would find its way back into my body. Then something about the vibration of the hymns and the faint scent of oak polish would set off a chemical reaction that reversed time and cynicism and put me back where I belonged. It happened every time. It had to happen every time, I was confident, because a Southern Baptist church was a Southern Baptist church. No matter what anyone said, no matter even what my father had told me, in their hearts, they loved and believed in the same thing. I was sure of it. As sure as the steps in that grand dance of fellowship that didn’t seem to change from sanctuary to sanctuary, I was sure of it. But then I stepped into the sanctuary of a place that seemed never to have been touched by music at all. Convinced my Internet search had led me astray in its list of Southern Baptist churches near my law school, I stepped outside the vestibule and checked, again, the name on the marquee. It was SBC, all right. The Sunday bulletin, handed to me by a withered little man with shaking hands, said so too. And as he asked me, in a strained whisper, whether anything was wrong, I shook my head and allowed him to show me to a seat. In a row with theater-style seats. There were no pews. There was no choir. And all of this might have been okay had I not looked to the bottom of my bulletin and noticed another omission. Dad had always trained me to mark the invitation hymn before the service began so that I would be thinking of the point of the service throughout its duration. But there was no invitation hymn. Probably because there was also no invitation. As the worship leader (I confess, I’d never seen one of those before, and this one looked like a boy of about fifteen) chimed the hour from an electronic keyboard, alarm bells sounded from every angle of my soul. Could this be what Daddy had been talking about? No, surely not. I shook my head and bowed in prayer with everyone else. I’d simply been out of the dance too long, I decided, and this was God’s way of telling me that I needed to stay ingratiated. There was simply no such thing as a Southern Baptist preacher’s daughter’s not being at home in a Southern

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She Ironed Our Underwear

Baptist church. The whole idea was ludicrous. I’d simply been devoting way too much time to my schoolwork; so much, in fact, that I hadn’t made time for a spiritual life, and now I was feeling dissonance of my own creation. Apologetic and determined, I sat through that entire service, and afterwards signed up for the mandatory new member “preliminary course.” This, the pastor said, was the first step toward membership in their body, and would be followed by a private interview with a board of elders, after which I would be elected to membership by a church vote. When I asked him what had happened to the good old end-of-service invitation, he gave a lengthy explanation. I did not understand it, and I cannot remember why. I only remember nodding my head in the tall shadow of a pastor, ashamed that I did not know what he was talking about, and much like when I hid my confounded expression from my law school professors, I considered it my own failing that I didn’t understand. Church was the place I’d grown up. It should have been my territory, my comfort zone, my dance. A typically driven law student, I found myself completely confused, but still dying to impress the admissions officer who stood behind that pulpit. Completing the membership course did not alleviate my apprehension. I’d told myself that, at the very least, it would be an opportunity to meet some new people in the community who didn’t have their noses stuck in constitutional law texts all the time. But what I encountered was a church body so steeped in rules and discipline that I finally understood why their sanctuary had individual chairs—a pew would allow far too much freedom of movement (forget dancing). There was no traditional Sunday school program; instead, congregants were encouraged to participate in a series of “Christian development seminars.” Our instructor kindly suggested that, given my age, and the fact that I hadn’t yet found a suitable Christian spouse, the best program of study for me would be their course on biblical courtship. It was taught by a young man about my age who had never been married. Still, the inescapable challenge of being “accepted” in the very church I’d been born into dangled before me. And when, after completion of the course, I was invited to sit for my interview with the pastor and his board of elders (again, I was too intimidated to ask what in the world an “elder” was, and whether they had anything to do with deacons), I accepted with an eagerness that shames me to this day. Deep down, I knew better. But law school is full of societies, scholarly orders, and tiers of accomplishment, and so far I hadn’t been accepted into any of those. This, at least, was something I could call and tell my grandparents about—their little Emy, so far from home, still seeking out a church home. They could get a copy of my request for membership transfer and hang it on their refrigerator.

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In fact, the interview had overtones of academic accomplishment. Instead of beginning with a prayer (the way my father’s meetings always had whenever someone came to him to inquire about church membership), I was presented with a pencil, a sheet of questions, and a reassurance that I could “take my time.” A panel of men of varying ages in black suits sat on the other side, each reviewing what looked like copies of the forms regarding my background and Christian experience that I’d been asked to fill out at the beginning of the course. I asked, with a timid chuckle, “Am I being graded?” A chorus of laughter rippled through the suits, but no one replied. When I was finished, a secretary collected and copied my form, while the pastor quizzed me on my understanding of salvation and the cross, before he turned the floor over to an elder, who asked whether I had any questions for them. I started to nod. Beneath the winter coat I hadn’t taken off, I was sweating. I wanted out of that conference room so badly that I might have been on fire. But I felt a bundle of words that had been building for weeks below my ribcage burst toward the surface. And before I could stop myself, I asked: “Do you allow women to speak in your church?” The suits exchanged sideways glances, and the pastor replied quickly, almost in the tone of a parent who grasps the hand of a toddler right before she touches a hot stove: “Nooooo . . . no, no, no.” And then he added quickly that the Bible forbade such activity, but that women were permitted to serve their church in a variety of capacities, and even to lead classes. In fact, one of the elders pointed out, a new series of weekend seminars, for women and by women, had just been started, and I should plan on attending as many as I could. I’d be receiving an e-mail about one soon. When I got home, that e-mail was already in my inbox. The seminar was on strategies for closet organization. The next week, there would be one on easy home organization. And still, when the phone rang that evening, and one of the pastor’s darkclad emissaries informed me that I’d been “Accepted! By unanimous vote of the church membership body!” I said I was thrilled. I said I’d be there every Sunday. I’d never told a church leader no before. But I was beginning to understand why it had taken my father a decade in the SBC to gain that kind of courage. I never went back to that church. And though I didn’t expect to be on the elders’ best-loved members list, I couldn’t help but be shocked when, a month later, I received an official letter from the pastor informing me that I’d been expelled from their church membership for nonattendance, again “by

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She Ironed Our Underwear

unanimous vote” of the church body. Me, Elizabeth Emerson Hancock, pastor’s daughter from birth, had been excommunicated. I didn’t know whether to laugh or pray. In the end, I did what I always did in such a conundrum. I picked up the phone and called the pastor of my life, my father, who chuckled when I read him the church’s scathing letter, but only because, he said, “I ran out of tears for these things a long time ago.” As it happened, Dad took that call at my grandparents’ house, where they happened to by entertaining the Reverend Homer Carter for dinner. Homer had been my father’s pastor as a child and was a longtime family friend. And, he’d spent several years living and preaching in the Washington, D.C. area where I was attending school. Homer was listening in on the conversation, and before Dad had a chance to tell him the situation, or even to repeat aloud the name of the church that had just revoked my Baptist card, he took the receiver. I’ll never forget his words as he spoke to me that night, as urgently as though he were an emergency dispatcher: “Miss Hancock, I know exactly where you are. Now, you get out of there right now, and don’t you ever go back. I know that place, and I’ll find you a good home, a safe one.” When I grew up dancing down those aisles and into those fellowship halls in my patent leather shoes, I never dreamed that church wouldn’t be a safe place for me—for my spirit, for my voice, or even for my soul. I thought all steeples were alike, that all Southern Baptist marquees were alike. And my discovery that they were not, while painful for me and my family, proved to be yet another one of those evils that a parent just has to let a child encounter for herself, so she’ll learn to sense it and avoid it in the world. I say “avoid” because I’m not sure the kind of church I encountered during law school will die any time soon. It may be cleaved in half at some point like other places, and the remainder scar and mutate into something fiercer and less recognizable than before. If only churches, and their angels like Frances Roark, could live forever. My father knew he couldn’t save all of them, and neither can I. But I will try to make good on the sacrifice he made for me—leaving his job, leaving his fellowship, leaving the life he loved so that I might one day have a voice in it. I’m sure there are times he wants to go back; I’m sure there are moments when his underwear seems just a little too wrinkled. But I hope he looks at his little girls, complete with their bungled “courtships,” and their closeted organizational skills that are decidedly unchristian, and decides it was worth the risk. After all, a child will only fit inside a manger—blind, swaddled, and mute— for so long. No matter what certain pastors like to believe.

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THE SPAWN OF LAVONN BROWN Nathan Brown

hen my dad, Dr. Lavonn Brown, first began to smell that something had died behind the walls of the Southern Baptist Convention, I was crawling through the psychological sewer of my early- to midteens, and all I cared about was electric guitars and synthesizers. He was the pastor of First Baptist Church in Norman, Oklahoma, where he served from 1970 until his retirement in 1999. And while I did carry a genuine spiritual concern for the state of my soul during those years, I also found ways to be a royal PK pain-in-the-neck to a long string of youth ministers and Sunday school teachers. Early on in that career, I was the Indiana Jones of sneaking donuts out of adult classrooms during “big church.” Later, I moved on to harder crimes, like making out with that one older girl in the back of the charter bus to Purgatory Ski Resort. All along the way, though, I had a reputation for giving snappy retorts to questionable theology any time I had the chance. One that stands out in my memory was the response I gave to a youth minister who told our group one night, “It’s okay when you look the first time . . . but if you look a second time, then it’s a sin.” He’d directed the statement at the boys and their bubbling hormones, of course, and I—lacking the sense of propriety God had granted my friends and classmates—shot back, “No problem. I’ll just look long and hard the first time.” Yet—like I said—I still somehow wanted terribly to please God, in the middle of all this pubescent confusion. And as I began to get more serious about music and songwriting, I have to be honest and say the church environment did supply a great support system when it came to opportunities to perform and expand those talents. Well, at least at first.

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*** In my late teens, I started to listen in on some of the conversations that took place between mom and dad in the kitchen, as well as with guest speakers

NATHAN BROWN

around the dinner table after revivals or special events the church had held. I knew something was going on in the Convention that caused my father, and many of these friends, a lot of spiritual pain. Somewhere during this time, Dad took a rather public stand against the growing darkness, and it didn’t appear to bode well for him and his career. It took me a while to piece it all together, but I soon reasoned out that someone had to be in charge of suddenly not inviting him to speak at Glorieta and Ridgecrest ever again. Both of these retreats had been the stomping grounds of many of my young summers, and I always looked forward to returning again the next year. But the phones went silent. And the trips to these favorite places came to an end. *** It wasn’t until my twenties—when I became a licensed minister myself— that I had my first experiences with the dark side in a more direct way. I was working my tail off to become the next sensation in contemporary Christian music—travelling from state to state, playing in churches, leading praise and worship for youth camps, and pumping out albums right and left (albums I can no longer bear to listen to). I lived for a short time in Nashville, writing songs professionally, and trying to increase my odds on the rising-young-star end of things, but I began to see and experience problems with the Christian music business. For one, a radio promoter told me that for one song I wanted to release at the time, I’d need to go back in the studio and throw in a few more “Gods ’n’ Jesuses” into the lyrics to make it work for the holy airwaves. Stories like this one abound from that time period. But the straw that broke my back was when a “Christian” publisher stole around thirty of my songs in the fine print of a stack of contracts. To this day, decades later, I have no control over those songs. Though to be honest, I wouldn’t want them back now, even if he offered. So, I packed the truck and headed back home to Oklahoma, where I continued the work. I wrote new music, recorded more CDs, and did my best to book concerts without Nashville’s help. But I slowly began to notice there were certain churches and organizations that, rather conspicuously, would not have me. Some big, pious hand floated in front of my face whenever I tried to make contact with them, and it took awhile for me to realize—since I still believed that Christians would want to be about the cause of Christ, and not politics—that the problem traced back to my Dad. Pastors wouldn’t return calls. Secretaries would lie about their being out of the office. Youth ministers would give vague answers about how they weren’t sure what they wanted to do with “this event” yet. No one would ever give specifics, but it eventually

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The Spawn of Lavonn Brown

became all too clear that my father’s views and stances on Southern Baptist issues now directly affected my ability to get gigs. One undeniable fact in particular bothered me through this time in the valley of the shadow: I knew my father to be a great man—one of those rare individuals who remained on Monday what he came across as on Sunday. When boats rocked, he could steady them. When people’s lives tanked, he knew how to comfort them—something I’d seen other pastor’s fail at quite miserably. And besides, when it came to theology and politics, he wasn’t near left-wing enough for me. So when the Southern Baptists came out, finally, labeling him a “liberal,” they lost me forever. It made me laugh. The watershed moment was when I read in some newspaper or magazine that Bailey Smith had recently referred to my generation as the “Barabbas Generation.” I won’t go into detail here. I’m sure his edifying screed is online somewhere, if someone happens to be that bored. But at one point of excruciating brilliance, he had the righteous gall to throw out the term “trailer park trash” in some vague reference to the waning faith and growing ignorance of America’s younger generation. And that’s when I snapped. I wrote an article in response that was published in a small, state-wide liberal newspaper called the Oklahoma Observer, and I let Smith have it. I’d remembered my dismay at a recent coup de grace of eloquence when he stuck the foot of “God doesn’t hear the prayers of the Jews” in his big mouth, but this time I just wasn’t going to stand for it. Besides, that previous moment of idiocy had already met its demise in the response of an older rabbi in the Dallas Morning News, who responded with nothing more than, “Well, I know one Jew God heard the prayers of.” I received a surprising amount of hate mail for this article, though— e-mails that read as if I’d slandered the President of the United States (which I’ve been known to do as well, later in life). But one exchange in particular, with a small town pastor from eastern Oklahoma, profoundly changed me. He felt sorry for me, was worried for my eternal soul, and yet went on to say that he expected as much from the spawn of Lavonn Brown. (My wording, of course, but that’s what he meant.) Considering my age at the time, this showed a horrible lack of class and common sense on his part. I sent back an e-mail that said as much and asked him how he would feel if my Dad had written one of his kids, secretly telling them what he thought of their dad’s ignorance. He simply responded with more of the same pious gibberish and completely ignored my question. After a series of flaming e-mails between us, I finally wrote back and said that before we could go any further, he had to answer one serious question for

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me. I told him that from the time I was eight-years-old, I had prayed—almost daily—the prayer of Solomon, asking God for wisdom and discernment. And I assumed—since he was a minister—that he had prayed something similar for many years as well. So I wondered if he could explain why it was that God had chosen to ignore my prayers, while answering his. The return e-mail merely repeated all the puff and fluff of his earlier e-mails, and, again, ignored the question. I replied one more time, typing only, “Answer the question, Sir.” And I never heard from him again. What most offended me in this pastor was the apparent inability to consider that I just might have had a heretical thought or two all on my own, without my Dad’s help. (My Dad would certainly have attested to the likelihood.) But now I wanted to know more—what had happened to Dad in his professional exile. And the more I found out, the more I was done with the Southern Baptists. Period. End of discussion. I make very clear to people who want to start up a conversation that I really don’t have anything to say about it anymore. I now view the politicization of this denomination, along with its ridiculous creeds, to be an affront to—if not an outright abomination of—the teachings of Christ. And I’m just not interested in fighting over it anymore. *** For me, now, my faith remains an intensely personal and quiet problem. To explain what I believe to someone, here on the back porch of my forties, would take longer than most of my closest friends could handle. So I keep it to myself. And when I look over the decades as a whole, I see now that I had, and have, only one comfort in the end—the comfort of knowing that history never sets this kind of ignorance free.

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THE ROAD BACK R. Kevin Johnson A man’s road back to himself is a return from his spiritual exile, for that is what a personal history amounts to—exile. —Saul Bellow

A BAPTIST HERITAGE

he fall of 1989 was an exciting time in my life. I had decided to enter full-time Christian service and was bound for college in upstate South Carolina. During high school, Baptists in the state vetted me and invested in me by offering scholarships to their colleges. It seemed natural that they would. From birth, I was active in Southern Baptist life. My parents and older siblings attended the same church with me, and we spent a significant portion of each week in fellowship with other Baptist believers within the walls of that building. I started in the crib, graduated to Mission Friends and preschool choirs, made my way into Royal Ambassadors, and benefitted from a comprehensive, graded church choir program. I didn’t play little league baseball. I played church-league softball. My friends were church friends. My activities were church activities. My time outside of public school belonged to God, in that simple Baptist body of believers. Baptists were invested in me and I was wholly invested in them.

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THE FELLOWSHIP

I knew little about the controversy that was brewing in our denomination. I knew that a minority faction in Southern Baptist life had taken control of the Convention. It was increasingly obvious to a few that the only way to maintain

R. KEVIN JOHNSON

integrity and historical Baptist principles was schism. My church pastor, Dr. Rick McDuffie, was troubled by the shift in the Convention. Eventually, Rick left our church to plant a new church (that would ultimately become supportive of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship), and many members of our congregation who shared his vision followed. My parents started attending another well-established church nearby; I followed Pastor Rick. When West Columbia Baptist Fellowship (WCBF) was born, church leaders bought an old grocery store and renovated it to be the church building. The church was affectionately dubbed “The Piggly Wiggly church” and grew quickly. (Ken Satterfield’s family was in this same church—see his essay.) Many of the musicians from our former church were now working to make the music ministry at WCBF the best it could be, and the youth program was fantastic. I’d found a place where I could be and enjoyed my time there. The summer before my senior year of high school WCBF was the place to be. I was excited to be going to youth camp with my group of friends and was active in the music ministry. The summer schedule at the church was altered so that evening services were held offsite at various locations in the area. Each location offered its own list of activities that church members could enjoy before a time of worship and a meal. One of those Sundays, we all headed into the woods to a recreational spot owned by the local newspaper. There was a beautiful lake that had a nice swimming area and a floating dock for diving into deep water. As children played, youth swam, and adults visited together, there was a true sense of “this is the way it should be,” and general goodwill. Folks were happy and were noticing—perhaps for the first time since the beginning of the fellowship—that God was blessing their efforts to be faithful. Many had left the church building they had known since birth in order to follow their hearts to the Piggly Wiggly church, and they knew they’d done the right thing. As the sun set and the people started to get hungry, the smell of hamburgers and hotdogs on the grill was prevalent, and everyone headed for the covered hut where we would worship and have dinner. Rick pulled out his guitar and strummed a familiar old hymn, and everyone started singing. Young and old, our voices sang, and the sound wafted across the lake we’d been splashing around in just a few minutes earlier. It was an example of the beautiful gift of unity the church had been given and I could feel the Holy Spirit moving among the people of God. In those moments, it became abundantly clear to me that God was calling me to vocational ministry. It was emotional and it was real. God had led me to the Piggly Wiggly church to surround me with His people and to show

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me His plan for my life—I would be a worker in His church. As I shared this realization with my family, my church family, and with my pastor, I noticed a common reaction from all—it was pride. Deep down, they all knew this was the way it would be for me, and they were pleased that I was willing to answer the call. Ten years later at my ordination, my father shared with those gathered that he knew there was a special purpose for me from the beginning. I was a latecomer, a surprise, following siblings who were 18, 15, and 11 when I was born. My dad held me in his arms and prayed, “Lord, take this child and use him.” That night on the lake was the official beginning of the ministry my dad had prophesied at my birth. My pastor at the Fellowship continued to tell me about his own struggle with changes in the Southern Baptist Convention and sat with me over lunch to explain a bit more about what he meant. Still, I did not really understand how the change would affect me. I was 17, naïve, and eager to follow my call to vocational service. The first step in that pursuit was to enter college. I decided on an educational path that was popular to many in South Carolina Baptist circles. I would enter North Greenville College for two years of training; transfer a few miles south to complete undergraduate work at Furman University; then I would move to Fort Worth for seminary at Southwestern. My path was set. Scholarships and financial aid for my Baptist education were in place. I was on my way. NORTH GREENVILLE COLLEGE

Unfortunately, it was not long before I received my first real education about Southern Baptist Convention politics. I became aware that there was a group of individuals who were intent upon making changes at North Greenville College. Those changes began with senior administration. The students were devastated when we learned that Dr. Paul Talmadge would be leaving us. Talmadge had worked hard to promote a pro-student atmosphere. He could be found sitting among students in the dining hall, sharing a meal. The sign on his office door said, “Enter without Knocking.” I dropped in one day for a chat about a student concern and he welcomed me with a handshake and a hug. He cleared the desk (literally) of the university business to which he was tending, looked me in the eye, and said, “What can I do to help you make all things better?” And he was genuine. Dr. Jimmy Epting was chosen to succeed Talmadge. Epting was a former vice president of North Greenville whose service was deemed “inadequate” by faculty members who had conducted a study of the institution in 1988. Since

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then he had moved on to another school; however, he was tapped to return to duty at North Greenville to “reform” the school. Dr. Epting gave the school a new motto: “North Greenville College: Where Christ Makes the Difference”; then, systematically, his regime worked to oust anyone on the faculty who wasn’t “fit for duty” based on their theological perspective or who opposed the change in administrative leadership. Some were let go, some resigned under pressure, some just resigned. I was sitting in class one day when a thirty-year faculty member entered the room and whispered a message to my professor. When he turned to leave, he said, “I will not work for that man.” An important debate over academic freedom emerged among both students and faculty and resulted in complaints to the American Association of University Professors filed by Professors Steven Hearn and Marie Burgess. 1 It was a dark time for me, as an honor student who had great pride in his school and denomination. I spoke out and did not feel my voice was being heard. My fellow students and I were powerless to stop the train of change that was barreling through our campus. No one felt safe. On graduation day, I cried outside the auditorium and told my parents, “This isn’t how it’s supposed to be.” But that’s the way it was, indeed. FURMAN UNIVERSITY

I entered Furman University with great excitement. At Furman, I found an engaging student body, professors who challenged students to think deeply and proactively, and a rigorous academic curriculum. I was proud to be part of the Furman tradition. The year was 1991 and I was ready for a new beginning. Over the course of the junior year, university president Dr. John Johns and Furman trustees were in conversation with the South Carolina Baptist Convention about the university’s affiliation. The trustees made a strong case for the institution’s need to be able to look beyond those who were nominated and elected every five years by the SCBC for help with oversight and consultation. It seemed logical to students that this move was a wise one. Many gifted Furman alumni had moved on to great reknown and were leaders in all areas of service around the globe. It would be good to be able to elect alumni and friends outside of South Carolina Baptist circles to the Board of Trustees and advisory committees. Doing so would also breed a healthier community and preserve academic freedom in the face of growing fundamentalism among Southern Baptists. University administrators and trustees noted “a fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention and its denominational boards and seminaries in

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the late 1970s and 1980s”2 and were aware that nominating committees were placing fundamentalists strategically in view of doing the same at Furman. After a taxing season of compromise proposals and rhetoric, the SCBC decided on May 16, 1992, to sever ties with Furman and to withhold a substantial portion of its funding. Many long-term supporters of the university through the SCBC instead sent their donations directly to Furman, resulting in a 20 percent drop in contributions to the Convention in that quarter. 3 Furman’s motto remained Cristo et Doctrinae (“for Christ and Learning”), and, according to the “University Core Values,” the school “is an institution of liberal learning offering a comprehensive education in an ecumenical and interfaith setting,” which honors “its Christian heritage . . . [and] challenges students, faculty, and staff, as they grow in knowledge, also to grow in faith through critical examination of their religious commitments and to exercise moral judgment in the use of knowledge.” 4 While the events of 1991–1992 saddened me as a South Carolina Baptist and as a student at Furman University, I was well aware of both the necessity of the change and its significance to other Baptist-supported institutions in the world that were seeking new oversight in the wake of increased fundamentalist control. My keen awareness came as a young student who had witnessed two very different outcomes in the same battle for academic freedom and a healthy learning environment. I was exhausted by the debate and disheartened by the experience. The unwillingness of the SCBC to compromise at once astounded me and proved the point that an unfathomable agenda of control existed within a group that had, ironically, long lobbied for freedom. SOUTHWESTERN BAPTIST THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY

I took a semester off between college and seminary, and in January 1994 I entered Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (SWBTS) in Fort Worth, Texas. I settled in quickly and went around learning about faculty and bathing in the campus ethos. There were rumors that things weren’t good between the seminary’s board of trustees and the administration. Those rumors were somewhat confirmed when I asked a faculty member, “How has struggle within the denomination affected SWBTS?” Her reply was short: “What have you heard?” The fact was, I had heard enough to recognize the chatter as the same I’d heard at both North Greenville and Furman, and I grew nervous. However, I figured there was hope. After all, Dr. Russell Dilday had a long history at Southwestern. He had earned both his M.Div. and Ph.D. at

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the institution. He had been president for fifteen years, and during that time the seminary thrived and was recognized as the largest in America, with over 5,000 students. It was also a top-ranking institution in theological education. Dilday and his wife Betty were beloved by both faculty and students, and their leadership had made a big difference in the school’s reputation. “The trustees would be insane to fire Dilday,” I thought to myself. In March 1994, the Board of Trustees met for their spring meeting in Fort Worth. We all waited for the release of Dr. Dilday’s performance review, many of us expecting the worst. Word quickly got around that a favorable evaluation had been presented to the president and that all was well. The relief was felt across campus and a normal week resumed. The next day, Ollin Collins, then-pastor of Harvest Baptist Church, a megachurch in the Watauga community of Fort Worth, was scheduled to preach in Chapel. I attended with friends and was excited to hear what Collins had to say. He was noted to be a dynamic speaker. One of his points stood out to me, and I can only paraphrase: If Southern Baptists were busy just winning the lost, we wouldn’t have time to fuss and fight. While I believed that Southern Baptists had much more to do than just win the lost, I was heartened by what I thought was a call to repentance. Yes, I thought, if Southern Baptists would turn from the nonsense we have engaged in over the past fifteen or so years, we could perhaps move forward. I was wrong. Thirty minutes after Chapel ended on that day in March, approximately twenty-four hours after Dr. Dilday was given a positive review, the president’s office door was locked, he was denied access, and he was told his time of service to the seminary had come to an end. 5 Students and faculty made their way somberly to the front lawn of the president’s home, where we were greeted by Dr. and Mrs. Dilday—graceful, stoic, and appreciative of our support. Students who graduated later that semester sought out the Dildays in their new home to have their diplomas signed by their president, mentor, and friend. THE ROAD AWAY AND BACK AGAIN

When I finished seminary, I served a series of churches that were not Baptist. This time of self- exile helped me to move away from my heritage and explore other brands of Christianity from the inside. I remained active in Baptist life through missions, giving to the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, and participation in significant events. However, the road back has been a rough one, with a few bumps along the way. When I served a Baptist church in North Carolina, I submitted writing samples and then received an invitation from the North Carolina Baptist

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Convention to attend its annual meeting and to interview with their historical committee about a history of their convention. When I appeared before the committee, things went well until I was asked whether I identified as a conservative or a moderate within Baptist life. I answered honestly and became the target of derision for the remaining twenty minutes. I was not surprised to learn via postal mail the next week that I had not been offered the contract. I know that the Southern Baptist Convention as I knew it as a child is long gone, and I hold no hope for a return to what once was. If “a man’s road back to himself is a return from his spiritual exile,” 6 as Bellow wrote, then I guess I have returned to Baptist life from a sort of spiritual exile indeed. It took me many years to realize that I could not bring the Southern Baptist Convention of yesteryear with me. NOTES 1. The report on this matter archived by the AAUP can be found in the journal Academe (May-June, 1998): 54–64, or by visiting http://www.aaup.org/file/NorthGreenvilleCollege.pdf. 2. Mark Alan Taylor, Religious Identity on a Slippery Slope: Furman University and Mercer University During the 1990s, (Tallahassee: Florida State University College of Education, 2000), 62. 3. Ibid, 71. 4. Furman University Board of Trustees, Statement of Core Values, May 15, 2004 http:// www2.furman.edu/sites/planning/Documents/Furman%20at%20a%20Glance/ Core%20Values%20Statement.pdf 5. In a letter, the trustees explained their action by saying that Dilday’s view of Holy Scripture was left-leaning and that he wasn’t supportive of the fundamentalist resurgence in the Convention. 6. Saul Bellow, The Actual (New York: Penguin, 1997), 2.

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GOD, WOMEN, AND MAYBERRY Bailey Edwards Nelson

he great “split” that seminary professors and pastors recall with a sense of pain and loss is not something for which my generation has any understanding. We did not stand divided from colleagues, mentors, and friends, suddenly finding ourselves exiled and without a denominational home. We were not a part of the initial meetings that would birth the fellowship that would eventually become our home. We may not have been there for the fight, but I would dare to say we find ourselves daily caught in its wake. I always knew that my ministerial journey would be a difficult one. Growing up in a Southern Baptist church, it was not acceptable (much less popular) for a young girl to pronounce herself called to ministry. For a time, my calling was met with patronizing smiles and pats on the head. “Oh, that’s sweet. Just keep listening to God, darling.” Perhaps they never expected that it would develop and that I would one day be a woman standing before them still proclaiming that I was called to ministry. Yet that is exactly what happened. Furman University came and went. McAfee School of Theology came and went. Still the calling remained. I was going to be a pastor. I knew it in my bones and I felt the pull of the Holy in my soul. There was nothing else for me but to preach the Gospel and to live and minister beside God’s people. My time at these educational institutions had provided me with opportunities and affirmation that I had never before experienced. I had a network of peers and professors, colleagues, and ministers, who could see where God was leading me just as clearly as I could. They had no interest in convincing me that I was “misinterpreting God’s call.” They only wanted to aid me on my journey in fulfilling that call. As I prepared to graduate from seminary, I desperately wanted to begin pastoring. I had served as an associate minister in various areas for years, but I was ready to live into my calling. I was not naïve. I knew that the odds of any woman being called as pastor of a Baptist church, especially one right

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out of seminary, were very low. I knew that I could be made to wait for years, maybe even a lifetime, before I would get the chance to pastor—if I ever got the chance at all. Though I was not called to pastor a church, I was given an incredible opportunity after my time at McAfee. I was hired to serve as the minister in residence at a congregation in Jacksonville, Florida, through the Pastoral Residency Program of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. I spent two years serving a wonderful congregation that allowed me to grow in my pastoral skills. They gifted me with affirmation and a ministerial experience that was overwhelmingly positive—a rare thing in church work. I was not prepared for the day I would have to leave them. The residency program was time sensitive, and only allowed me to serve there for two years. I had finally found both a church and denominational home that seemed to fit. Neither was perfect, but each seemed to offer one very important thing (at least for me). They saw me for what I was, what I am, a minister. I was also not prepared for the year that followed my leaving Florida. I was not ready to face again the harsh reality of the search process. It can be long and arduous for any minister, but it is hard to explain what it is like for a woman. I sent out dozens upon dozens of resumes, made endless phone calls, shared coffee and lunches with contacts only to come up short continually. I was prepared, educated, and had a resume to match any of my male counterparts. Yet, it seemed that I could never get past the dreaded phone interview. It only took a few minutes for the shock to wear off when the search committee realized I was a woman (my name can be fairly misleading). The tone in their voices would change and I could tell that I was being written off. Every now and then I got lucky and someone would want to meet for a meal or even hear a recording of one of my sermons. But time and time again, the journey would end before it had really even begun. “We’re sorry, but we are just not ready to consider a woman. You know we are a dually aligned church, right?” Ah yes, the reality of the “dually aligned church.” This is the Baptist church with no true identity, and yet too much identity. The truth is that “second generation moderates” find ourselves ministering primarily in churches that continue to embody the split that played out in the lives and careers of our predecessors. We pastor congregations that align themselves with both the Southern Baptist Convention and the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, and often a number of other Baptist entities. It should surprise no one when these churches have difficulty hiring pastors, not to mention with all the other aspects of congregational life. It should also be no surprise that with such a high percentage of CBF churches also being associated with the SBC, the majority of these churches would never consider hiring a woman as their pastor. This

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fact never bothered me or deterred me. After all, fair or not, what female pastor can be that picky? Though pastoring a dually aligned church was not my ideal, I never considered just how difficult it might be until the calling of God led me out of the big city and down the dirt road. Who could have known that God would call me to Mayberry? I can remember nearly dropping the phone the day they called to ask if the search committee could come and hear me preach. Were they serious? Did they know that they were a church smack dab in the middle of apple pie and Andy Griffith? Where I had spent months being written off by churches, suddenly I found myself writing them off! I was sure it would be a waste of my time. They would come and listen to my sermon, maybe even pay for a meal or two, and then be on their way back home ready to find the “man that God had for them”. To quote Gomer Pyle, “Surprise! Surprise! Surprise!” On June 5, 2011, I accepted the call to serve as pastor of Flat Rock Baptist Church in Mount Airy, NC. It was a day of great joy, and it carried with it an overwhelming sense of peace. I called a dear friend and told him, “I’m a pastor!” His response was overwhelming. “Bailey, you were always a pastor. Now you have a church.” He was right. I had always been called and for many years had the privilege of pastoring, and now I had a church to call home again. I will not claim that everyone at Flat Rock Baptist Church was as happy as I was. There were those who did not understand why their church would ever call a woman as its pastor. Some chose to leave before I ever arrived. Even on the day I stood in the pulpit to accept the call, there were those who stood up on the back row and walked out of the sanctuary as I spoke. That is an image that will surely stay with me for years to come. However, there were many, many more who celebrated and dreamed of what our journey together would be like. There was an excitement in the air that was so thick you could cut it with a knife. We were now a match, pastor and congregation, and we couldn’t wait to get started! Sadly, we wouldn’t get very far before running into a wall of hate and disapproval. Only days after beginning my work as pastor, the church received a letter from the Surry Baptist Association, the local arm of the Southern Baptist Convention. Our church had been a member of this association for many years, but the letter relayed that other member churches and their pastors were concerned about Flat Rock’s decision to call a female pastor. The association had called a meeting to discuss “solutions” to this problem and requested the attendance of our church’s leadership (though I was not included). Knowing the only “solution” that would be acceptable to them

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would be my resignation or the church’s letting me go, the leadership of our church decided not to attend the meeting. The association had decided that there was a problem, but Flat Rock Baptist Church saw no problem. We decided to go on about our business, which we felt was the ministry of being the presence of Jesus Christ to one another and our community. However, it quickly became clear that the Surry Baptist Association was not going to accept our assertion that we were an autonomous Baptist congregation, with every right to call whomever the congregation deemed fit to serve as pastor. Only weeks after our brief written exchange, the association gathered for their regularly scheduled meeting. Though it was not on the agenda, the first order of business was the presentation of a motion to expel our church from membership in the association. Five minutes were allowed for discussion. The pastor of First Baptist Church, Mount Airy, spoke in support of our church, and then they quickly called for a vote. We were easily voted out of the Surry Baptist Association. None of the member churches had been notified that a motion would be made, much less that a vote would be taken. We were not in attendance, though I would have liked to have been, had I known that we were the hot topic of the night. It saddened our members that the process of expelling a church was handled with so little respect and intentionality. It should not have been that easy to get rid of us. And so began the firestorm that surrounded my first six months as pastor. Many churches and individuals were disgusted with the lack of proper process and respect for Baptist principles. Just as many cheered the association’s willingness to “clean house.” Suddenly we were big news. Mount Airy was all abuzz with talk about the church with the female pastor, and everyone had an opinion. The local newspaper published an article about our expulsion from the association and it included a picture of me. Needless to say, I soon found it impossible to go anywhere in town without being recognized. I was approached at the gas pump, the aisles of the grocery store and Walmart. “You are her! You’re that woman preacher!” I would then hold my breath and wait, since I never knew what would come next. Some would hug me and offer words of affirmation and support, while others would simply damn me to hell standing right there in the frozen foods section. Sadly, the hate and oppression did not limit itself to the aisles of Walmart. Pastors in Mount Airy felt the need to take to the airwaves and preach sermons of hate and violence against us. Signs were posted reading, “Women should not be pastors, according to God’s Word.” Countless blogs were set up by Southern Baptist pastors and leaders from across the country to continue

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the discussion of “our problem.” A small church in rural North Carolina had successfully gotten a significant portion of the Baptist family talking, for better or worse. It didn’t stop there. Our story was picked up by the Associated Baptist Press and soon several other Baptist papers and blogs. Our story was being read by people around the world and the response was overwhelming. Letters and phone calls poured in; my e-mail inbox was so full it nearly shut down from overload. Much to the dismay, I’m sure, of the association and Southern Baptists everywhere, the communication we were receiving was astoundingly positive. Clergy and lay people alike had connected with what we were going through and felt the need to reach out and tell us that we were not alone. They offered words of blessing and shared vision. There were those who even gifted us with the sharing of their own stories of pain and struggle to follow the call of God in their lives. The church was wrapped up in love by the global Baptist community, and so was I. My colleagues and friends, those who had journeyed with me for so many years (and many I did not know and may never meet in person), stood beside me as a sister in Christ and fellow minister of the Gospel. What had been meant for evil was producing immense good. We had been removed from the “family” that for so long had served as a safe haven and trusted partner for Flat Rock Baptist Church. Some may have wondered what we would do next, how we would again find a network and support system that would journey with us into the future. That is when this pastor decided to remind her congregation that she was the pastor of a dually aligned church. You see, for the all the tension and problems it can bring, to us it gave a place to land. I had long been a part of the CBF family and suddenly I had the opportunity to share that family with my new family. The church had maintained a loose and minimal affiliation with CBF, mostly through financial contributions. Upon being dumped by the Southern Baptists, they were quickly picked up and held in the arms of community and cooperation by the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. Suddenly, they were able to see and experience what I had been gifted with years before, a desire to authentically uphold the best of what it is to be Baptist—freedom. I was quoted in the Associated Baptist Press article as saying that I was proud to be their pastor because “they were willing to call a person, not a gender.” Now we were a part of a Baptist family that celebrated our right to that freedom. I no longer pastor a dually aligned church, but perhaps that should have never been the root of our identity to begin with. We are a free and faithful Baptist congregation, and that is a church I am proud to pastor. I have been exiled from the church of my childhood and the denomination of my

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upbringing, but in being so I have been allowed to embrace my freedom. So perhaps they did me a favor by cutting me loose. I certainly believe they did Flat Rock Baptist Church a favor. Who would have thought that God would call me to Mayberry? Certainly not me. But together, Mayberry and me, we have wrestled with what it means to be free, and for that I am grateful. I am a woman. I am a pastor. I am still a Baptist. So, as we say in this neck of the woods, “How about them apples?”1 NOTE 1. Rev. Nelson resigned from Flat Rock Baptist Church, effective February 28, 2013, citing a lack of consensus among members about the congregation’s vision and direction for the future.

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FAITH OF OUR FATHERS? NO WAY! R. Scott Pollard

here was a time when I proudly proclaimed, “I’m a Southern Baptist.” Now I proudly proclaim, “I am a former Southern Baptist.” Or more accurately, “a recovering Southern Baptist.” I hear those words coming out of my mouth and realize I am trying to distance myself from my heritage because I am so ashamed of what it now means to be a Southern Baptist. What I remember as a wonderful faith tradition based on personal understanding and responsibility I now view as a patriarchal oligarchy focused more on political power than the message of Jesus Christ. I was born into the Southern Baptist family as the child of one of its ministers. I attended my first church service when I was only two weeks old and sang my first solo at age five, a rousing rendition of the first verse of “Holy, Holy, Holy.” My earliest memories were formed in parsonages and with friends from church. I clearly remember Bible School, Training Union, RAs, family night suppers, graded choirs, youth group, and Sunday school. I watched with fascination as the organist played hymns at services, twice on Sunday and again on Wednesday. Family vacations in those early years often included attending the annual Southern Baptist Convention. I grew up hearing that I should be a Minister of Music and thought nothing would be better. I had very little understanding of what my father and the other staff did all week, but I knew they were liked, respected, and appreciated. I also knew that I enjoyed being at church and thought it would be great to facilitate such wonderful activities. I knew that I found comfort and meaning in church activities. What could be better than to share that with others? As the years passed, I came to hear more and more about a “takeover.” I didn’t know what it meant, but I knew we quit going to the annual conventions and my father seemed much less happy when discussing the denominational leadership. Slowly, I came to know the terms moderate and fundamentalist,

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although I couldn’t have explained the differences. I only knew that we were moderates and the fundamentalists were bad. In high school I had the opportunity (divinely guided I now believe) to attend a liberal-minded church; one that had ties to the SBC, but worked hard to hide them. I hadn’t known such places existed, much less how rare they were. But it was there that I discovered that some churches, with their gothic-inspired architecture, dedication to the liturgical calendar and classical music, were not unique to the Anglican and Catholic communities. The service was formal and intellectual, but it was structured so like that with which I had grown up that I was perfectly comfortable. With no disrespect to my father, his abilities as a preacher or pastor, I wanted to delete the “Southern” from my Baptist identity. And I no longer wanted to be the “minister of music,” I wanted to be the “choir master.” Upon graduation from high school, I fled the East Coast for Baylor University to study music, still planning to attend seminary, but completely unaware of what I was to find. I laugh as I think back on my expectation of finding the liberal “high church” in Waco, Texas. Needless to say, I was completely shocked by the conservative tone of the school. My plan had been to move far from my family and the eyes of my father’s congregation, to a new place where I could explore life in all its glorious diversity. My reality turned out to be a small town with a school where most dorm parties included a Bible study. It was my introduction to auditorium-like sanctuaries, praise bands, speaking in tongues, and other forms of what I consider to be emotion-driven, exhibitionistic worship. It was also a place steeped in a complete denial of diversity. I lasted one very long semester and left with no plans for the ministry. My journey soon reminded me that there are many wonderful people who do amazing work under the auspices of the Southern Baptist Convention. The Richmond Baptist Association runs a small summer camp program, deep in the beautiful mountains of Virginia, called Camp Alkulana. I consider its former director, Gracie Kirkpatrick, to be one of the finest people I have ever known. She has given her life to her work with underprivileged children in that little camp run on a shoestring budget. And while some members of the Association demanded to know the number of souls won to Christ each summer, the equivalent to graduating from high school, she kept struggling to show the children that they were lovable and loved, the kindergarten lessons most had never learned. I had the incredible privilege of working with Gracie for four summers. Each year I would arrive unsure that I was worthy of her trust and would leave infused with a sense of purpose and great joy. She allowed me to understand

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that God is greater than the Southern Baptist Convention. Camp Alkulana gave me hope that, maybe, I could still be a Southern Baptist. It was several years after Baylor (and a couple more failed attempts at college) that I again enrolled in a Southern Baptist school, Campbell University, determined to find a way to fulfill a call to ministry that I couldn’t shake. Armored in denial and expecting the worst, I sped off to a campus set among the tobacco fields of North Carolina. I found early respite in two missionary kids I had known from childhood and a small BSU group, and I settled in for the long haul. It was an interesting journey, to say the least, but I found my footing and finally grew up. With, and despite, the best efforts of that school’s administration, I graduated with an education I will treasure for the rest of my life. You see, I left Buies Creek with an acceptance of, and appreciation for, who God created me to be: a gay man with a strong desire to minister to the needs of the sick and outcast. Now holding a master of social work degree, and, more recently, a degree in nursing, I have had the privilege to work with God’s children who have been infected with HIV. I now know that I am charged with reaching those who have been given but one interpretation of the divine mystery. My dream of ministry is fulfilled every day that I get to work with patients who feel that God is punishing them—many of them for the “sin” of being created gay. Many have been shunned from their church families. While in graduate school, I once again felt the desire to unite with a church community and was very fortunate to live near Pullen Memorial Baptist Church in Raleigh, North Carolina. I had heard that its pastor, Rev. Dr. Mahan Siler, was leading the congregation in an exploration of its willingness to allow him to perform a Holy Union for two men in the church sanctuary. Intrigued, I attended a discussion on the topic of homosexuality held one Sunday evening at the church. I remember being completely overwhelmed by my emotions as I heard the church’s members respectfully discussing their often divergent thoughts and feelings about a topic I thought was taboo in almost every Baptist church in the world. Pullen’s commitment to social justice, as described in Micah 6:8, was evident throughout, and I knew I had found a new home. Dr. Siler knew that his stance on Holy Unions was controversial, but trusted in the SBC’s commitment to one of its founding principles, the autonomy of the local church. His trust was discredited, however, when he and the congregation of PMBC were voted out of the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina and the Southern Baptist Convention. I then knew that my association with the SBC was also over. Any hope I had managed to cling to that there might be room for me in the church of my childhood was gone.

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How far gone, however, I was yet to learn. My parents, after retirement, returned to a church my father had once pastored for many years. This church to which they had given so much time and energy accepted them back with open arms until my father committed a grave error: he filled in for the current pastor and preached a sermon that included a public statement of his acceptance of his gay son. Although my parents have tried diligently to shelter me from this truth, I have learned enough to know that they were subsequently made to feel unwelcome by a large contingent of the congregation of their church home. So much so, that I don’t think they have returned since moving back to North Carolina. My dislike of Southern Baptists became disdain. And my ability to separate God from the church is often tested. My anger at those who purport to speak for God is frequently misdirected at God. But, now, as I heal, I mostly feel regret that the faith tradition of my fathers is so unrecognizable. It seems unfathomable that a denomination founded on the priesthood of the believer and the autonomy of the local church has moved so far from those core principles. Yes, Southern Baptists are still taught that they can pray directly to God, but they certainly aren’t allowed to believe that they have any authority to interpret scripture. In fact, to dare to see the scripture as anything other than the “literal word of God” is now decried as sinful. Failure to vow to teach that women should be subservient wives can cost you your job with any of the denomination’s boards. Failure of the pastorate to hold inerrant the guidance of the church leadership is grounds for excommunication. In other words, the SBC has declared its papacy. I thank God that I, and my family, escaped the SBC with faith intact. My sister joined her husband’s Methodist tradition and found a home. My parents, the retired pastor with a doctorate from a Southern Baptist seminary who spent forty years working in SBC churches and agencies, and his wife, now worship joyfully with a United Church of Christ family. And while my membership remains at Pullen Memorial, a church with affiliations that include the Alliance of Baptists and the American Baptist Church, I freely admit that I do not attend church regularly at this point in my life. I find that my time is better spent reveling in nature and recharging my batteries in the homes I share with my partner and our cadre of animals. Evidence of God abounds around me, and I find ample sources of community and learning in life and literature. This is not to say that I will never return to the church; I hope that I will. But for now my healing continues in the way that it must. I sometimes dream that one day I will sit with my partner, a man far more wounded by the church than I, in a congregation where we are accepted as a

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couple put together by God, understanding God as we do, worshipping as we feel called and learning that which is true. I seriously doubt that I will realize that dream in a Southern Baptist church. But I now know that there are many roads that lead to the same destination. Perhaps finding the one that is right for me is one of the great adventures of this life.

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TWO GRIEFS AND A HOPE Denise Dinkins

t is eight o’clock in the evening, my bedtime in 1980. I lie awake waiting for sleep to come. Usually, I wait in silence; but tonight is different. My parents have their dearest friends, colleagues from Southern Seminary, over for dinner and fellowship. Instead of silence, there are waves of laughter rolling up the staircase. With each surge of laughter, I wish I could be back downstairs in the living room soaking up all the warmth and friendship. I picture their faces creased with lines that reveal hearts full of joy and twinkling eyes that make you feel loved. It is the loss of this extraordinary community that I have grieved for my parents. As the fundamentalists’ takeover became sure, my dad, Andy Lester, began to search for a place to teach pastoral care. He gratefully found a home at Brite Divinity School in Ft. Worth, Texas. We moved the summer after my senior year of high school. During the first few weeks of college, the simple question, “so where are you from?” made my shift in home base a reality. “Well, I grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, but my parents just moved to Ft. Worth, Texas . . .” Somewhere along the road, I started giving the short answer, “Texas.” Whenever I was met with silence and a questioning look, since I did not have a Texas accent, I would complete the story. The loss of my “home base” was not a hardship for me since it happened during a phase of transition in my life. God has graciously given me a sense of feeling at home wherever I am. And my parents also gratefully embraced their new community in Ft. Worth. What remains is simply a sadness that the intolerance of some could unravel the beautiful community found at Southern—a place full of love, respect, and acceptance, where there was fulfillment of “neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female . . . all one in Christ Jesus.” The subject of women in ministry is another source of grief, one that was close to the heart of my father. My dad advocated equality for women with every fiber of his being. I did not understand the complexities of this issue as a child; all I knew as an eight year old was that I had the ugliest beach towel at the pool. It was a picture of a tough looking girl in a bright green outfit

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holding a big brown baseball bat. The caption stated, “Never underestimate the power of a woman.” I just wanted something pretty and colorful like a big rainbow, a butterfly, or perhaps a beach scene. Of course, in retrospect, I can see how important it was to my parents to surround me with messages that women can do anything, particular in response to whatever God calls them to do. Jesus explained to Nicodemus that the wind blows wherever it pleases, just as it is with the Spirit of God. How can humans dare to question whom God chooses to use for kingdom work? I met some of the cream of the crop of women in ministry from Southern Seminary—they were hand picked to be my babysitters! My impression of these ladies (and couples who spent weekends with my brother and me when my parents were leading marriage enrichment weekends) was that they were full of love, joy, and care. I also noticed they brought with them some awfully big books to study after I went to bed. Somewhere in my brain, I filed away a note-to-self, “never go to seminary, you have to read huge books.” Silly as it was, it did make a big impression on me. I began to feel a call in my life to kingdom work, particularly to “the least of these,” but it never crossed my mind to go to seminary. My desire to serve led me to Camden, New Jersey, to work with children through a phenomenal organization called UrbanPromise. I fell in love with the people and the ministry and went back every summer, then for a yearlong internship, and finally moved there after I graduated from college. I worked at a Michael’s frame shop to support myself and volunteered with UrbanPromise at their Westminster Presbyterian Church site. After a year, I was at a crossroads. I couldn’t find a sustainable balance between work and ministry and felt at a total loss about my next step in life. In the midst of this confusion, I decided to walk to the post office instead of driving. As I walked, my mind was spinning with thoughts. I felt like I couldn’t make any headway, like I was stuck in circle of thinking that was leading me nowhere. I don’t believe I was praying; my memory is that I was trying to sort everything out in my own wisdom, when out of the blue I heard these words: “Denise, go to seminary.” Immediately, I felt charged with joy and excitement; my mind cleared and I felt at peace. I had no doubt that this was a word from God because, one, I don’t usually address myself in my own thoughts! Second, the thought of ME going to seminary had never crossed my mind since making that mental note to never go to seminary. When I returned to my apartment, I made two calls—one to Sam Apple, the pastor of Westminster, and the other to my dad. Both rejoiced with me. I began to search for a seminary to attend. Had this endeavor taken place a decade and a half earlier, Southern would have been the obvious choice. I

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can still smell the halls and communal places of Southern, a smell I can only describe by the feeling it gave—the feeling that I was surrounded by a great crowd of wise witnesses. The smell of academia filled with smiling faces. Of course, by 1997, Southern was not an option for me. My succinct instruction from above did not include what my vocation would be post-graduation, but I couldn’t go to a seminary where women were limited. I was not theologically astute, but I did know that even a cursory reading of the gospels gives a clear picture of women in important kingdom roles. The Gospel of Matthew begins with Jesus’s lineage, taking care to specify Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba and to identify Joseph as Mary’s husband. Next, Mary shines with her stellar reaction to angelic visitation, compared to Zechariah’s blundering disbelief and subsequent silence. During Jesus’s ministry, there was no hesitation to communicate with the woman at the well, no panic when a bleeding woman touched him, and no delay in healing a crippled woman on the Sabbath. Jesus stands corrected by the Canaanite woman who had faith that he was also sent to the Gentiles. When he is asked by Martha to straighten up her sister Mary’s understanding of her role, Jesus gently replies that sitting at his feet, as any serious disciple would do, is the better path. Jesus commends the woman who anoints him for his burial—that her story will be a part of the Story wherever told. Last, but not least, the women are the first witnesses to the Resurrection, the first to go and tell. How this good news can be misconstrued to limit God’s storytellers to half the population is mysterious. As I searched for a seminary to attend in the spring of 1997, I had already missed the deadline for many programs. In a phone conversation with my father, I asked if I had also missed the admission deadline at Brite Divinity School where he was teaching. There was still an open window, and it didn’t take long for doors to fly open for admission, finances, and housing. I had found a seminary home. It was a joy to meet my father’s colleagues and study under their excellent direction. As I became part of that community and watched how my father interacted with students and faculty, I could see how he had brought with him the best of Southern. I was often confided in by other students whom my father had cared for in significant ways. He taught pastoral care by living it. It is my hope that what my father brought to Brite Divinity School from his field at Southern is true for all the other exiles in their fields—that the best of Southern Seminary lives on in exile. Surely God works for the good of all who love him and have been called according to his purpose. God can take even the fundamentalist takeover of the SBC and the shattering of a seminary community and miraculously bring good out of the pain and struggle.

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ASCENDING INTO EXILE Dave McNeely

very stage of life is a curious and enigmatic mixture of the sacred and the profane, an intersection of grace and grist that join to make the substance of life. In our senior adult years, we contemplate our mortality as eternity’s baptizing shores wash up against our broken bodies. In middle age, we stumble over the divine in the midst of dishes and the din of children and deadlines. In our teenage years, we can scarcely define the division between the Holy Spirit and our hormones. And as children, we are graced with the wonder to wander, meeting the mysterium tremendum et fascinans in nothing more than a winter snow and in the small forgotten corners where the aged have long since stopped looking. If you spent much of your childhood under the shadows of steeples and stained glass, you know that few journeys are as enduring and as hallowed as each week’s quest to find a better hiding place. We Baptists may not have catacombs, but we still have our mysteries, and every church I’ve inhabited seems to have its own set of tucked-away alcoves and dark passageways where even angels fear to tread. But tight red curls aside, a little cherub I was not, and few locations held more allure to me than the cold, dark stairwell at the end of our underground fellowship hall. Aside from the occasional clandestine adventure, there were only two reasons any child would be found occupying that stairwell: a special children’s choir performance and baptism. Beyond our penchant for pedo-baptism, very few Baptist congregations maintain a coming-of-age ritual carefully defined by the tradition. No confirmation. No Chrysalis walk. No bar or bat mitzvah. But the human condition longs for, even demands, such rituals. They may not be inscribed into our bylaws, but they’re ever-present nonetheless, punctuating our emergence into new maturing stages of identity and assimilation. To this day, I can’t recall whether the children’s choir performance or my baptism came first. But the memory of the stairwell remains. A stairwell that began underground and emerged into an opening that was only separated by

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a thin set of glass windows from the highway that coursed like a main artery through our small county seat town. Discovering this awe-inspiring stairwell and daring to breach the border presented by a steel door was simply a precursor to the moment of ritual so many of us found exhilarating. Eventually the day would come, the day when the children’s choir would emerge not from the pews, but from the rear of the pulpit. And there was only one proper way to enter through that space—that glorious, secret stairwell. The ascension up those cold, barren stairs was a pilgrimage, a coming-ofage, an unveiling of the mysteries that was bound to usher upon us all a new state of sanctity. Each step would lead from grace to grace until we reached the street-level floor, pausing for a few moments as if to soak in the tension of the world that lay behind us and the world that lay before us. And then, just as the palms would start to sweat and the knees knock, we would step one-by-one into the dizzying and warm lights of the sanctuary. What I can see now, in the shadow of that piercing light, is that what I experienced that special Sunday morning was not a sense that I was accepting this faith, but rather that this faith was accepting me. Emerging from the cocoon of childhood, however, I experienced a volatile mixture of awakening and disenchantment with this accepted and accepting faith. Would this school be for me? Let’s see—nice gym? Excellent. Food court? Perfect. Three hundred miles from home? Let’s get this matriculation started. I chose to attend a Baptist college. Unbeknownst to me and any intentions I may have half-heartedly held, my experience at college was a match that set fire to the kindling of my upbringing. The fire that began to burn was, no doubt, a fire stoked by pietistic flames, but it was increasingly being forged on an anvil of bedrock Baptist beliefs. As my heart learned to “Shout to the Lord” and “Sing for Joy,” my mind was equally stimulated by the “four fragile freedoms” that had unknowingly shaped not only my own denominational heritage but the entire American religious landscape as well. Just as quickly as I learned the names of Roger Williams, John Smyth, and Luther Rice, however, I also began to experience the realities that made these Baptist distinctions so “fragile.” As a part of my growing engagement in both the life of my college and the life of Baptists, I was selected to represent my school at the annual state Baptist convention my sophomore year. This would also be the year that Baptist politics and fearful conservatism would begin withholding large amounts of money from my future alma mater, due in large part to a perceived lack of theological orthodoxy and a concerted

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effort by state Baptist leaders to obtain greater control over the previously autonomous (but cooperative) institution. Over the next few years, both vicariously and personally, I began to experience the blowback created in the wake of the conservative resurgence in the Southern Baptist Convention. As I began to hear the stories that shattered the idyllic picture of pre-1979 Baptist life, it became clear that these were stories with faces, and these faces were standing in front of me. Philosophically, as I became more enamored with the longstanding vision of “free and faithful” Baptists, I began to sense a deep distance growing between me and the Convention that had, for all of my baptized life, claimed me as a member. As graduation approached and decisions about graduate school began to take decisive shape, my feet remained planted firmly within the Southern Baptist tradition. In retrospect, however, the seeds of disenchantment had been planted, and they would eventually grow into something much wilder, and yet perhaps more rooted, than simply an “exiled Southern Baptist.” Eventually, I would choose a “moderate” Baptist seminary to continue my studies, one of the first such institutions to emerge as a result of the splintering of the Southern Baptist Convention. There, once again, I would sit under the tutelage of many SBC academic exiles, each bearing the wounds that connected them with so many Baptist dissenters of the past. Whether or not I was growing more fully into the image of God, it is clear that I was certainly growing more fully into the image of the profoundly restless Baptist forefather, Roger Williams. But whereas Williams could only find himself trekking farther and farther away from all previous institutional incarnations of Christianity, I find myself today journeying farther into the mysteries of the most deeply institutionalized forms. My prayer life has prospered under the steady hand of “common prayer.” The once-absent depth to our cross-denominational rituals, such as baptism and the Lord’s Supper, has resurfaced through encounters with mainline Protestant communities. And when I found myself most in need of spiritual refreshing, I took solace in a monastery. I was recently discussing the nature of the twenty-first-century Baptist pilgrimage with a fellow Baptist exile. Together we considered the possibility that perhaps the fragmentation and eventual division of the Southern Baptist Convention had been a disguised mercy for young Baptists like us. With the many cultural and theological developments that were bound to leave an indelible imprint on our lives, hindsight recognizes that our Southern Baptist identity would have been jettisoned regardless. But perhaps through the painful mercy of exile we were spared the painful process of exodus.

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Looking back now on that transformative set of stairs, it’s hard not see a stairwell that needed to be cleaned (and seriously, was there no way to heat that place?), a passageway barely worth mentioning in passing, a cluttered and neglected hallway hiding the junk that was no longer worth displaying. Looking back on my denominational roots, it’s hard not to see the same things—theology and liturgy shaped by the passing fancy of each successive pastor; rituals imbued with significance but devoid of the words and practices to buttress them; and, finally, a history that often willfully skipped over centuries of our shared Christian story. In retrospect, it was the second ascension, the second flight of stairs, which I most needed. Rather than walking through that first door that would lead me out to the Baptist sanctuary (where, Stanley Hauerwas opines, we’ve set up a permanent revival tent), I should have focused on the journey that would reach its goal one flight of steps higher. There, barely big enough to anchor down a robe that would soon inflate into a nautical parachute, I would be submerged into the waters that stretched across time and space and denominational lines. There, whether I knew it or not, I would find the faith that had found me all those years ago.

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TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY CHURCHIN’ IN ALABAMA Stephen M. Fox

n May 28, 2006, by a vote of 32–20, I was voted off the grounds of the Collinsville Baptist Church, Collinsville, Alabama. It was there my mother was baptized in 1936, immersed with her mother, who had come over to the Baptist church from the Methodist church in town. I had been a member of that church since 1993. For fifteen years my membership had been dormant because I hadn’t joined a congregation since 1978, the year my family left Gaffney, South Carolina, where my father had been pastor of Bethany Baptist Church for almost seventeen years. Well, I take that back, I was a member of the Providence Baptist Church for about five years after Momma died in 1988. If not for that, I could not have gotten credentials from the several state and national Southern Baptist Conventions I had attended in that time. How I got “churched” could have several tellings, versions, or analogies to William Manchester’s report on the LBJ call to Bobby Kennedy a few minutes after JFK was pronounced dead: “The facts are unclear, and a dispassionate observer cannot choose.” One version, one that a bunch of good women—the neck that turns the head—is that I got a little too flamboyant for the congregation, and I didn’t respect my elders. However, I was well into my fifties at the time. My own version is still a work in progress, but what follows is my story as of the summer of 2012. I concede there was a little something analogous to what short-story writer George Singleton calls “The Half Mammals of Dixie” in my attempts to fastforward the congregation into some remedial education (in 2002) about what the last two decades in SBC life were about. On the one hand, there was a solid

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cohort of capable, educated folks in the congregation—average attendance around eighty for the fourteen odd years I was formally associated with them. It should be noted that the preacher had a doctorate from Southern Seminary. His four sons were achievers: two are graduates of the University of Virginia, a third a graduate of Duke University, and the fourth at the time on the road to grad school at the University of Alabama, now working in public relations for the Republican Party of the State of Alabama. So I thought maybe having David Currie of Mainstream Baptists (Texas), Lottie Moon’s biographer Catherine Allen (Alabama), Samford University English Professor Mark Baggett (former associate editor of the Alabama Baptist), and respected Alabama Baptist pastor Mel Deason in the sanctuary for a discussion of SBC matters, February 24, 2002, might not be a bad idea. The panel presentation of February 24, 2002, went well, or so it seemed to me. Even Martha Barksdale, chosen as an example for young women by the Northeast Alabama Regional Chapter of Girl Scouts as a notable woman of the decade of the 1990s, said it was an impressive program. Later that same evening, I did have a brief discussion with the pastor. I was surprised at his reaction to the event. He was quite upset for a brief moment, but apologized on the spot. In my fourteen years of knowing him, it was uncharacteristic behavior. After awhile, I began to see the matter from a different perspective. In some way, I think the conversation had threatened his worldview, though he never wore inerrancy on his sleeve. For him, I think it was about the culture war and an unintended incidental besmirching of his experience with the Home Mission Board during his pilgrimage. But once things got out of the bag, resentments emerged, and this incident begat fissures in our relationship that, like Humpty Dumpty, were never to put back together again. Or as the poet Mary Oliver says: “You know how it is when something different crosses the threshold . . . the younger brother begins to sharpen his knife.”1 Here are my ruminations on my experience. In one of the latest examinations of the Southern Baptist question, Giberson and Stephens, in their book Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age, put it this way: “Baptists energetically protect the doctrinal purity of their fellowship, an often rancorous enterprise. Their unwavering commitment to the literal truth of the Bible, combined with the belief than anyone and everyone can interpret Scripture, provides a natural incubator for conflict.”2 While I can’t call Collinsville Baptist Church an entirely inerrant fellowship, I am convinced that the tribalism embedded in a small town family and networked community supersedes any fair resolution of conflict and dissent. At the same time, I do give them credit for acting true to their convictions in their deliberations with me.

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And in their 175-year history, the congregation has had moments of great promise. In the time of my mother’s faith development in the 1930s, Collinsville Baptist was recognized statewide for its vibrant youth participation and vital Baptist Training Union. In addition to shaping my mother, it motivated Mary Catherine Reed, the first woman in Dekalb County to earn a doctorate, hers from Penn State. Mary Catherine chaired the Home Economics Department for some time mid-century at the University of Alabama, and was known for her methodical incrementalism in race relations. In the late 1940s, John Jeffers, later to become one of the most progressive voices in the state at the pulpit of First Baptist Church, Auburn, was the pastor of Collinsville Baptist. In the mid-1970s, Fred Grissom had a short ministry at CBC, his first pastorate, on the way to the faculty of Southeastern Seminary in the Randall Lolley era. And Pastor Morgan had several areas of ministry over his thirty-five years and counting outside his legacy in denominational relations. As of this writing (mid-June 2012), I still have hopes of being allowed to attend the 175th anniversary of the church’s founding this August, though my prospects are remote. My mom and dad were there in grand spirit for the 150th celebration in 1987. Both have now gone on to the Other Shore. After all the preparation I had mustered for the February 2002 event, the follow-up was disastrous. Several folks met for breakfast early the next day—two men not at the Currie gathering. They skewed the whole matter sideways. I got word of the meeting at choir practice the following Wednesday evening. Shortly thereafter, I got copies of Currie’s Mainstream Baptists’ periodical that spoke to the social issue that concerned these folks. On Sunday evening, the pastor dismissed all my efforts with some arcane video on the Home Mission board as he had apparently taken great offense at an aside by panelist Catherine Allen. I was a little frustrated to see my efforts so casually dismissed. So, the smoldering began. And I was disappointed in my pastor. That fall, I got a stark note from a spokesperson for a fundamentalist family faction in the congregation. And that added to the stew, though matters were still simmering, somewhat contained within the fellowship. In some ways, another frustration of my pilgrimage in Baptist life was set to erupt. With my educational formation, something was sooner or later bound to bubble up in some manner that was troubling many in that congregation. Maybe my introduction at Furman University to some serious thinking about my culture and religious tradition raised the bar too high for me in their company. Accepting Jesus as my savior in Hayesville, North Carolina, the birthplace of George W. Truett, might have disposed me in a direction at odds with the culture of the church in Collinsville, Alabama. Hearing stories

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about Carlyle Marney and Stewart Newman, then at Furman, becoming aware of Marshall Frady, the Baptist preacher’s son who many say was the greatest social-justice journalist of the last half of the twentieth century—maybe I was coded to be a contrarian. In about 1960, four or so years after my Dad graduated from Southeastern Baptist Seminary in the class with Randall Lolley and Bill Self; Stewart Newman comes through the beautiful mountains in Western North Carolina. This is four years after Newman’s great confrontation with W. A. Criswell and his race-baiting speech to a Joint Session of the South Carlina Legislature a day after delivering almost the exact sermon to the hoots and howls of Southern Baptist ministers gathered in Columbia. I was about seven years old then and as the story was often later told to me, Newman and the SEBTS delegations were there for a relaxing Saturday meal with grand fellowship. Stories are being told in grand fashion as only some of the best preachers of that day could tell. Apparently, the group was on their way to Nashville and the foreshadowing of the Ralph Elliot Controversy. Newman, one of the brightest free church Baptists of his time, even then was growing weary of all that mess. There, in the birthplace of George Truett, he told Binkley and Stealy just to go on without him to Nashville; “I think I’ll just stay here with Billy” (my Dad). At Furman, I became acquainted with Will Campbell and all the challenges L. D. Johnson would bring our way. I was actually walking the halls of folks who actually had been on the bridge with Martin Luther King at Selma, Alabama. By 1978, in Gaffney, South Carolina, I was ready to set the world straight on all matters of race relations and textile labor relations, mill hands, and preachers, etc. But as my internationally acclaimed novelist friend Ron Rash wrote of one of his characters in a short story, “The world wasn’t interested.” In the ’80s, my ruminations on Marshall Frady kicked in as the fundamentalist takeover in the SBC exploded. I was reading and seeing the connections of fundamentalist leadership to Jesse Helms and the Birch Society leftovers of the ’60s. Though not the only one, for a while I was passionate and dogged in my pursuits, writing letters to state Baptist papers. At the 1986 SBC Convention in Atlanta, I had a one-on-one conversation with the Washington Post’s Tom Edsall, and for the next couple of years I was an active correspondence with Ellen MacGilvra Rosenberg of the pivotal book The Southern Baptists: A Subculture in Transition. My activism garnered a short note from Bill Moyers in 1988 that said, “People like you make a difference.” In the ’90s, I had several freelance articles published in Baptists Today, and even an article in the Christian Century in January 1992. Later that year, in July, I was on statewide public television in Alabama for a live call-in twenty-minute

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program on fundamentalist designs on the state convention and Samford University. David T. Morgan, author of the book The Crusades, the New Holy Land: Conflict in the Southern Baptist Convention, 1969–1991 named me the most outspoken moderate in the state of Alabama; and Samford President Tom Corts, on hearing of a provocative piece in the Wall Street Journal on his school, thought, “Steve Fox planted it.” I did not, but would have been proud had I that much influence. I joined the Collinsville Baptist Church around 1993, not long after documentarian Brett Morgen had come to town to show his documentary filmed a year earlier on Collinsville. I was his local consultant. The film made front page coverage in the Alabama Baptist and was the subject of a front page story in the Birmingham Post Herald; a story written by a woman of Jewish descent whose early days with the Post Herald had her covering the 1988 SBC in San Antonio. Morgen was later to gain fame for an Oscar-nominated film, an entry in the ESPN 30 for 30 series, and a provocative work on the Chicago Ten; with several of which Sundance and Robert Redford were enchanted. In 1992, I was on statewide public television to discuss on a three-person panel the SBC fundamentalist designs on Samford University. Coupled with the preceding events, it was just a matter of time before the matter got out of hand. I thought it might be interesting to see how the SBC matter might play in a small town congregation in the after burn of the SBC takeover, as state conventions were still in play in the early part of the twenty first century. Sometime between February 2002 and the fall of 2003, the pastor’s Sunday evening bible study took up the controversial subject of women in ministry as pulpit preachers. In that conversation, I made what I thought was an innocuous reference to a former member of the church who was on staff at Baylor, and had at Southern Seminary become something of a disciple of Molly Marshall. There was an outcry from the pastor and murmurings among the gathered, even though the young woman wasn’t present to defend herself. The next year, I regrouped and brought to the congregation a discussion on the tax reform initiative by the governor that was the outcome of some of the leading ecumenical progressive forces in Alabama, including several Baptists. That didn’t set well with some of my detractors either. Around that time, I was becoming more active and outspoken at the Baptist online discussion board Baptistlife.com. In the aftermath of the sound defeat of the tax reform movement, I vented publicly in Jon Stewart Style at bl.com. That was a mistake. The pastor’s wife wasn’t happy; made allusions to my online essay from the pulpit of the church, and a few days later, a deacon delivered a note to me at the Collinsville Library, then right across the street from the church.

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The deacons were upset. Among the five numbered items of their grievance were these four: We expect you to make a public statement to the church of your sorrow for the pain that you have caused. We expect you to stop any and all references to the church or its members in anything that you say anywhere; including any written form or electronic form. We expect you to stop any comments in all church gatherings, including worship services, Sunday school classes, or other gatherings. We want you to participate in church groups by singing, praying and attending, but you must not ask questions or make comments. If you have announcement or prayer requests, you should take them in written form to a deacon before the meeting. The deacon will decide if what you have written will be presented.

I made a copy of the note and sent an e-mail to my corresponding friend Ellen Rosenberg, author of Southern Baptists: A Subculture in Transition. She e-mailed back, “My God, who would want to be a member of such a congregation?” My consolation was that my mother was baptized in the First Baptist Church and my family was part of that community from the 1840s. And when I sang the hymns in congregational singing on a Sunday morning, in the Spirit, it was timeless. For those misbegotten souls, sprinkled with a strong dose of fundamentalism, who were singing with me. I found some hope in that. After a while, in the present moment, I gained some comfort in making comments in Sunday school. For about two years, the young adult Sunday school class, which the pastor taught, used Smyth and Helwys literature, some consolation for me for awhile after my disappointments with the Currie event. In due time, there were rumblings about the adequacy of Smyth and Helwys literature. That added to my dissatisfaction with the pastor. I was already having my doubts about his allegiances, even though his children were matriculating to the best schools in the southeast. More and more he was showing his colors, showing his ties to the fundamentalist muck of his early days in the ministry. His misgivings about Smyth and Helwys provoked a strong reaction from me one Sunday morning. In retrospect, I could have expressed myself with less arrogance that morning, something I apologized for the next Sunday. But my behavior that morning stuck with the chair of the deacons, present in that class that morning. In the late winter of 2006, a near-perfect storm weathered in. I had a confrontation with the local librarian who for several years was in the choir

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with me. We saw some things differently in the church. With her administrative power over me as a patron in the library, she found a way to play her cards. Concurrently, the pastor was having his annual three week emphasis on the Richard Land/Francis Schaefer view of the abortion issue, and I had always resisted what I thought was a less than satisfactory exploration of the matter, especially the way it had been used as a political wedge issue in national and Baptist politics. The pastor had been a student of Paul Simmons at Southern Seminary in the early ’70s. I asked him in Sunday school class, with two of his sons present, and a daughter-in-law, a later-to-be daughter-in-law, and his wife, if knowing what he knew of Simmons, had the pastor been a trustee of Southern Seminary a few years before, would he have voted to have Simmons dismissed from the faculty? That pinched a nerve. Next Sunday, I was told that after further review of policy in regard to my dissent in the congregation, I would no longer be allowed to express myself in Sunday school, though I could still attend. The pastor’s oldest son and daughter-in-law were and continue to be great friends of mine. I sang in the choir with many of the groom’s friends of the University of Virginia Jubilate Choir and singers of the larger Collinsville community. It was a highlight of my ongoing sojourn in Collinsville. On April 30, 2006, at my invitation and arrangement, SCOTUS Hugo Black’s grandson, Stephen Black, spoke at my Mother’s alma mater, Collinsville High School. These other memories are special, because what happened next erased all recollection. On May 28, 2006, I was voted off the grounds of the church. Collinsville, Alabama, one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the state, could be a poster child for local congregational failure; failure to recognize what happened in the SBC. In February 2006, one Collinsville deacon had even asked in Q and A, “Why bring it here?” In June 2012, controversies surrounding Alabama Public Television’s house clearing by our deacon were occurring; Governor Bentley’s appointments to that board over disagreements surrounding the bogus American religious history of David Barton, and in a time when it looks like once again Judge Roy Moore will be the Chief Justice of the State Supreme Court; when Alabama has gained national notoriety for its draconian immigration bill; when Pulitzer Prize nominee Wayne Flynt talks of a struggle for the soul of the state, the Collinsville deacon may finally have his answer to “why bring it here?” In the fadeout for the 2009 Palm D’Or winner at Cannes, director Michael Haneke’s White Ribbon offers something of an aesthetic resolution to my “churchin’.” The balcony choir fades into eternity in a Calvinist German burg before WWI. Dust to dust, so it is for me and my time in Northeast Alabama,

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where my mother’s family goes back to the 1840s. But there is always some light. Christendom does not rise and fall with this writer. Longtime Duke Chaplain Will Willimon had been Bishop of the United Methodist North Alabama Conference of the United Methodist Church since 2005. His stay ended the last of August 2012. He has been a national anchor in protest of the Governor’s immigration bill, joining the progressive Baptist Ethicsdaily.com in several presentations of their highly praised documentary on the subject. In his 2012 book, The Bishop: The Art of Questioning Authority by an Authority in Question, about his stay in Alabama, Willimon references University of Virginia professor Charles Marsh’s 2010 lecture in Berlin that includes Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.; Bonhoeffer as something of a John the Baptist to King’s moment in America. Studying for nine months at New York City’s Union Seminary from the fall of 1930 through May of 1931, Bonhoeffer had embraced the black evangelical and worship experience of Harlem. He had become great friends with Frank Fisher, son of the then-pastor of 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, a congregation and edifice later to become part of America’s 1960s Civil Rights iconography. In April 1931 Bonhoeffer drove through Alabama on his way back from a month-long excursion thorugh America’s midwest and down to Mexico. He got back to New Orleans and traveled up through Alabama right in front of my Mother’s house. She would have been eight years old that year. Bonhoeffer’s traveling companion on U.S. 11 from New Orleans, through Mississippi and Alabama, on up through the Shenandoah Valley to New York was the French student and pacifist Jean Lasserre. In dreams and sometimes while sitting under the shade tree in the front yard, I can see them coming up the road. Amen. NOTES 1. Mary Oliver, “Maybe,” New and Selected Poems, vol. 1 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992). 2. Randall J. Stephens and Karl W. Giberson, Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/Harvard Univ. Press, 2011), 188.

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WHEN IDENTITY FALLS APART James Hill Jr.

CRISIS WITHOUT CATALYST?

uring my years both in ministry and in preparation for ministry, I have encountered a variety of perspectives on identity and the formation, claiming, or discovery of identity. I have discovered what most of us find in our journey through life: identity is an incredibly important part of the human experience. Identity helps us both claim and express who we are. Identity helps us to connect in community. Identity, particularly in how it changes, allows us to reflect in healthy self-awareness on the many years of our lives. While perhaps not a universal experience, I have been struck by how many of those reflecting on the formation of identity—the overwhelming majority—have experienced some type of “identity crisis,” if not “identity crises,” during their lives. These crises flow from times of loss, growth, tragedy, connection, failure, or success. Sometimes a combination of these (and many more) lead to times of identity crisis. Though I have not attempted to study this phenomenon in any scientific sense, simple observation has led me to conclude these times of crisis are among the most pivotal, and perhaps most necessary, for identity formation. Our experiences, cultural background, family origin, faith journey, personal relationships, and so much more all come together in identity formation—and an identity crisis can arise from any (or many!) of these. However, a part of identity can seem to be in a constant state of crisis, even for a lifetime. Children pulled in unhealthy ways between divorced parents often endure this type of constant identity struggle. We would ordinarily trace this identity crisis, even if ongoing, to the divorce itself as the catalyst of the crisis. However, in reflection, we often discover identity crises that feel constant and pervasive—without a single, obvious catalytic event. A single crisis can seem to cause our identity to fall apart. At other times, our identity crumbles slowly over a lifetime without a particular or single cause.

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This has been my experience with my Baptist identity. Without question, being Baptist has been an incredibly important part of my personal identity. I trace this identity first to my paternal grandfather. My grandfather was a Baptist pastor and denominational leader for over forty years, his final role of service as a director of missions for the Kansas City, Missouri-based Blue River Association, where he served until his death in 1989. Prior to his time as an associational missionary, he served as a pastor in several churches in western Missouri, in both small town and urban settings. Three of his eight children, including my father, became Baptist pastors. My mother’s family has a rich Baptist heritage as well. Her father and grandfather both served as deacons in a Baptist church most of their adult lives. From my earliest days, I remember hearing stories of my mother’s youngest brother and his wife serving as Baptist missionaries for the Foreign Mission Board (as it was known then) in Argentina. Today, I have cousins on both sides of my family serving as ministers in local Baptist churches. My parents met while attending Southwest Baptist College (now University) and my father went on to earn two graduate degrees from Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. My father has served as a local church pastor, church planter, associational missionary, home missionary, national denominational strategist, and state convention executive director—all within the Baptist realm. From my earliest age, my identity has been shaped by Baptist heritage in general and Southern Baptist heritage in particular. Since I was born in 1976, I am a part of the generation in Baptist life that has known almost nothing but conflict. In addition, I am a part of the generation that many observers have defined as “post-denominational.” However, I have never felt particularly “post-denominational.” THE 1980S AT THE HOME MISSION BOARD

In 1983, our family moved from Kansas City, MO, to Atlanta, GA, as my father began service on staff at the Home Mission Board. During the next seven years, I learned only through the eavesdropping ears of a child about great conflict in Southern Baptist life. I remember hearing words like “fundy,” which I would much later come to understand as slang referring to those fundamentalists who intentionally wrestled political control of the SBC away from its more historical Baptist leadership. I remember hearing about missionaries, seminary professors, and others being forced from their long-time positions of service. However, what affected my family most was the change in atmosphere in places like the Home Mission Board in the late 1980s. My father became

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more and more stressed about this change in atmosphere, and I was now old enough to understand this as I continued to overhear my parents and other adults at the time. I remember hearing words like “toxic” used to describe this new atmosphere, and hearing about good people serving in very difficult situations. While I could not possibly understand the totality of what was happening in Southern Baptist life, I knew whatever was happening was not good. Though I could not see it at the time, looking back I am immensely grateful my father was called back to the local pastorate in 1990, moving our family back to Missouri. A PK AGAIN AND CALLED TO MINISTRY

When our family moved to St. Louis and my father became a local pastor again, our family left denominational politics and conflict behind for a period of time. At least this is how it seemed in my teenage world. Once again, I was a PK (preacher’s kid) and these years allowed me to know my father as my pastor in a way I never had before. I began to learn more about Baptists and what it meant to be Baptist during these years, also learning more about the particular Baptist history of our family. In particular, Baptist contributions to religious liberty and local-church autonomy in the American Church became sources of pride for me. During these years, my father demonstrated a renewed excitement and passion for ministry—and I suppose some of that may have rubbed off. Only a few years after our move, I experienced my own call to ministry, surprising almost everyone who knew me. As the time came for me to begin my college selection process, it seemed a foregone conclusion I would attend Southwest Baptist University, where my parents had attended and where my current girlfriend (and future wife) was already enrolled. However, a series of unusual circumstances led me to consider William Jewell College, a historically Baptist school which is one of the oldest private colleges west of the Mississippi River. Only weeks before my first class on campus, I chose to attend William Jewell, in Liberty, MO. I could not understand at the time how pivotal this decision would be for my developing, and at times crumbling, Baptist identity. COLLEGE YEARS AND THE MISSOURI BAPTIST CONVENTION

While in college, I learned of a much broader Baptist world. William Jewell, founded in 1849, actually pre-dated the split between northern and southern Baptists that would eventually lead to the modern American Baptist Churches

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USA and the Southern Baptist Convention. I learned of the existence of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship as this new Baptist group began to grow throughout the 1990s. A course in Christian heritage would allow me to place the Baptist movement in the larger context of Christian history. However, my own heritage and identity remained decidedly Southern Baptist. In Missouri in the 1990s, though many began to claim ultraconservative or moderate battle lines, the state seemed to have stayed beyond the larger Southern Baptist battles of the 1980s and 1990s. I remember attending a Missouri Baptist Convention annual meeting, representing William Jewell and my local church as well. I voted against a resolution affirming “inerrancy” as the default hermeneutical position of Missouri Baptists. I remember how proud I was when the resolution met a resounding defeat. Later, in my college years, I found an opportunity to serve as a semester missionary for the Missouri Baptist Convention—working with a local congregation in Independence, MO. During these years I began to learn about MBC life, even as I continued to pull away from SBC life. When I began my senior year of college, I remember talking with my undergraduate advisor about seminaries and other graduate schools. He encouraged me to explore beyond Midwestern Theological Seminary, where my father, grandfather, and uncles attended, which was my inclination anyway. My searching confirmed what I already suspected: Midwestern was no longer the school it had been. I found a home at Central Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City, KS, the oldest Baptist seminary in the region and an American Baptist School. 20 0 1 . . . THE CONFLICT BECOMES PERSONAL

Halfway through my senior year in college, in December 1997, the Missouri Baptist Convention called my father as executive director. This surprised me. Though he had not been my pastor for several years (I was serving in other churches by this time), I had come to know my father as a pastor, instead of as a denominational leader. From a short distance, both geographically and figuratively, I witnessed my father pour himself into leading the MBC. It was exciting to watch and I began to believe in the worthiness of denominational organizations, for really the first time in my life. However, it would not last long. By 1999, Project 1000, a fundamentalist-led political organization in Missouri Baptist life, began to turn up the heat. They actively pursued control of boards, committees, and institutions, using the worst forms of manipulation, guilt-by-association fallacies, and even outright slander and libel to force out anyone perceived as “liberal.” The tried and true tactics of the 1970s and 1980s SBC fundamentalists had come to Missouri by the late 1990s. In 2000, while

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still attending seminary at Central Baptist in Kansas City, a small church in central Missouri called me to my first pastorate, not far from Jefferson City, where the MBC is headquartered. Suddenly, the conflict came even closer to home as I now served a church with MBC employees as members. The struggle for control of the Missouri Baptist Convention became ugly. While moderates like my father struggled to maintain a fragile peace, hardline fundamentalists made continual grabs for power. Not only had I never had reason to question my father’s integrity, I had never even heard of anyone questioning it; this was how well-known and well-respected my father was in Missouri Baptist life. Now, I was reading horrible things others were saying and I moved on from disappointment very quickly. A defensive anger, only natural when a person’s family is under attack, began to grow in me; I suddenly found myself ready to go to war with Project 1000, members of which I had not so affectionately coined “nut-jobs” in my ordinary language. However, a war was not to be. Those wiser (and calmer) than me recognized the truth: it is impossible to win a war with these types of religious fundamentalists unless one is ready to get really dirty. Such behavior is not Christ-like and is particularly unbecoming of those called to shepherd local faith communities. By October 2001, my father had resigned from the MBC. It became clear Project 1000 had no interest in working with him; they made it obvious removing him as director was a primary goal. I believe it is to my father’s credit he was not willing to “go to war” with these extremists. As one might expect, I became rather bitter toward the Missouri Baptist Convention. Fundamentalists forced him from a position where he could have done so much good. Like the SBC before her, right-wing extremists had seized control of the MBC. Suddenly, my Baptist identity became the part of me I disliked the most. I knew I never wanted to be associated, even accidentally, with “Baptists” such as these. However, I was not ready to give up on being Baptist just yet. By 2002, the Missouri Baptist Convention initiated lawsuits against several Baptist agencies which amended their charters to prevent the toxic political battles within the MBC from controlling or crippling ministries. For many Baptists in Missouri, this grab for power and control became too much to endure; they formed a new Baptist state convention in April 2002 and I am proud to have been among the first board members of this new convention. As the Baptist General Convention of Missouri took shape and sought identity, my Baptist identity continued to refine as well. My Baptist journey continued and I completely jettisoned any Southern Baptist baggage. Since I was a pastor, my relationship with denominational life also changed, and I believe my journey mirrors many others. No longer

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would denominational organizations have automatic support simply for the connection and identity they provided. Instead, local churches like the one I served would now need to see how these organizations benefited the mission of the church, assisted her in her task, and furthered the advancement of God’s kingdom in the world. MY CRUMBLED—AND RECREATED— BAPTIST IDENTITY

In the last ten years, many new labels for what I call traditional, or even authentic, Baptists have immerged. Some claim the label “Goodwill” Baptists. I like this term. I find myself encouraged by the work of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and the Baptist World Alliance, as well as state conventions like the Baptist General Convention of Missouri. However, like many in my generation, I grow tired of introducing myself as “not that kind” of Baptist. My Baptist identity crisis has no single, critical catalyst. A great many things led me to my current Baptist identity. However, I am not ready to give up on faithful Biblical hermeneutics, separation of church and state, religious freedom, and the autonomy of the local church. Baptist have a rich heritage in each of these arenas and they are worth honoring. Then again, I know I will never go back to the days of an automatically shared identity within the Baptist family. I will always be critical. I will always be suspicious. Perhaps I’m more “post-denominational” than I thought.

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THE WINDY ROAD AWAY Brian Kaylor

raveling through the Ozarks of southern Missouri forces one to step back in time. There are not major east-west interstates, so one must slowly wind through the region as the old highways weave through the mountains and hills like a drunken serpent instead of more modern roads where dynamite blasted through a straight, smooth path. As one curves back and forth through the land, the scenery is dotted with roadside combination restaurant–gas stations, abandoned and decaying farm barns, and miles upon miles of farmland. As a college junior studying to become a Southern Baptist pastor, I found myself—with both hands firmly on the wheel—wrestling my car around each curve as I took the five-hour journey back to my college dorm. It was November of 2001 and I had just spent a few days at the annual meeting of the Missouri Baptist Convention. I joined two thousand other Missouri Baptists—mostly pastors—to discuss business issues, hear updates about the previous year’s ministries, and gather together for fellowship. As I wandered through the Ozark Mountains away from there, my mind wandered through the events of the previous few days. Although already wrestling with how to reconcile my feelings, little did I realize at the time how much that meeting would alter not only my future, but also that of Missouri Baptists. My life—and ministry—since then has been a winding, contradictory journey as I seek to find a different, better spiritual home than what I found at the Missouri Baptist Convention. At the 2001 meeting, five Missouri Baptist ministries were defunded and were threatened with lawsuits. Although public debates raged in denominational publications for months prior to the meeting, I still was jolted by the MBC’s actions against ministries—a college, a retirement home, a campground, a newspaper, and a foundation—that were helping and ministering to many people. I cherished memories from many of those being financially cut off and threatened with lawsuits. I first experienced a call to the ministry

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around a campfire one night at Windermere Baptist Conference Center, which now found itself under attack. I spent several weeks of my childhood at camps at that beautiful site nestled on the Lake of the Ozarks amidst the hilly woods. I recalled my first published letter to the editor in Word and Way, the newspaper now threatened, as well as my excitement in being mentioned in various articles. Several former Sunday school teachers and other leaders at my home church where I grew up in Jefferson City worked at some of the ministry organizations being publically reprimanded. The 2001 meeting also started with a bang as messengers expelled a church that had disagreed with the MBC’s current direction. I watched in shock as members from that church filed forward, turned in their ballots, and then solemnly exited the auditorium. Church politics reared its ugly head and shattered my innocence about Christian behavior. Having grown up in the Southern Baptist Convention, I had not even previously pondered my denominational identity in any serious manner. These thoughts whirled in my mind as I trekked back to Southwest Baptist University—and they still haunt my mind today. As an unprepared, poor college student, I soon found myself at a random gas station in the middle of the trip home looking for loose change under my seat in hopes of buying enough gas to complete the journey. During the annual meeting, I had crashed on the floor of the hotel room of my mother, who was the MBC’s chief financial officer. She had headed off in a different direction, back to my childhood home of Jefferson City. Yet, in the middle of the Ozarks, I had little cash and the gas station would not take out-of-town checks—though I could not see from where the in-town checks would come. Managing to find enough change to pump some gas—slowly squeezing a burst at a time so as to not fly past my limit—I arrived at my college dorm unsure of what to think any more about Missouri and Southern Baptists. Over the next year and a half, I would continue to wrestle through the controversy—at times in the public spotlight—and find myself leaving both the MBC and SBC. BECOMING A HERETIC

Sociologist Lester Kurtz (1983) explores the struggle between heresy and orthodoxy and the establishment’s attempt to remove the heretics. By examining the “modernist controversy” within the Roman Catholic Church, he suggests several characteristics of heresy resulting from the struggle to label and suppress the “deviant insider.”1 Kell and Camp argue about the national SBC struggle that those expelled were treated in such a manner because otherwise their “lewd” opinions might infect believers, thereby causing harm

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to the greater community of adherents.2 But as opposed to the usage of excommunication like Roman Catholics and shunning like the Amish, Kell and Camp explain that Baptists tend to use “disfellowship” and “disassociation” to describe the act of expulsion.3 Regardless of the terminology, the result is the same, as the heretic is first labeled somehow other and different from the faithful, and then removed for that error. Kurtz proposes five characteristics of the struggle that develops during the attempt to remove heretics: nearness and remoteness, authority struggles, solidarity, boundary work, and ritual functions. Kurtz’s work fascinatingly disconnects being a heretic from theology; it is less about what one believes and more of how one responds to the social and political forces at play within the religious group. After all, religious groups often change their theological perspectives, so heresy is less about inherent doctrinal disputes than discursive struggles for power and identity. Kurtz’s five categories nicely capture my own journey as I became a “moderate/liberal” heretic during 2002 and 2003. NEARNESS AND REMOTENESS

Few, if any, college seniors ever find themselves attacked in state religious newspapers. Perhaps I had it coming for deciding to speak up. Perhaps I was naïve to believe that a religious newspaper would not stoop to inaccurate attacks. It no longer surprises me. In August of 2002, the MBC followed through on its threat to sue the five ministries that had parted ways. As the new pastor of Union Mound Baptist Church, a wonderful little church on a dirt road out in the Ozarks, I feared that the action was not only overly divisive and unbiblical, but also would be a waste of money, would lead to negative press for Missouri Baptists, and would hurt evangelism opportunities. So in November of 2002, I once again traveled to the MBC annual meeting, this time in nearby Springfield. Before the meeting, I conscientiously studied MBC governing documents and motions from previous years so I could carefully craft my effort to end the lawsuits before Missouri Baptists found themselves at opposing desks in a courtroom. When the time for motions from the floor arose, adrenaline flowed as I rose from my chair and cautiously approached a microphone. Once recognized, I offered my motion to immediately end the legal action against the five ministries. After walking forward to provide a written copy of my motion as instructed, I turned to see an SBU college dean sitting at the piano, giving me a broad smile and an affirming nod. Thus emboldened, I held up my head and walked back down the aisle as the throng of suited Baptist ministers looked at the kid in shorts and a T-shirt who dared question the orthodox view.

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To my excitement, the MBC leadership placed my motion on the schedule for the following morning. This allowed me the opportunity to speak out to the two thousand Baptists present and to perhaps bring some peace and resolution. After receiving affirming, but helpful advice from a former pastor and a former youth minister, I approached the microphone with my remarks written on my stack of ballots. However, I never had to look at my notes. After urging the passage of the motion, I stood leaning on the back wall to watch as messengers stormed the microphones throughout the auditorium to speak for and against the motion. Following a heated, but healthy exchange, the MBC’s president started the voting process, but also started coaching people how to vote, as he clearly feared the passage of the motion. The highlight of the event for me then occurred as I made a point of personal privilege to correct the president’s misstatement about the nature of my motion. He paused, agreed the point was “well taken,” and then moved ahead with the vote without further instructions. While the motion failed (as I expected), I was pleased to see about one-third of the messengers thrust their bright green ballots into the air to vote for its passage. Though disappointed by the failure of the motion, I was especially surprised by how it was framed by the MBC’s official newspaper, the Pathway, which the MBC had started in opposition to Word and Way. Although the author of the article never spoke with me (and never met me), his article called the anti-lawsuit motion an effort made by “moderate/liberal messengers.”4 I was not sure about the “moderate/liberal” part, as I had always considered myself fairly conservative. However, I knew the plural part of the statement was incorrect, as no one else had joined me in planning the motion. The SBC’s Baptist Press ran the misleading report with the same descriptor. My fall from Baptist grace came quickly and publically. Kurtz posits that heretics are both near and remote from the church. They are near because they are within the institution, but remote due to their beliefs that stand in opposition to orthodoxy. Those on the outside pose a smaller threat than those within the institution with oppositional views, even if the outsiders hold more heretical views, because the faithful are much less likely to follow the outsiders. But those within know the institution, its structure, and members and are therefore more likely to lead the orthodox members astray. In the Catholic Church, the heretic can only be a baptized and professing Catholic, not a Protestant.5 In Baptist circles, the most dangerous type of heretic would be someone born and bred in the faith, especially a minister. I did not look the part in my college attire, but I fit the part quite well. In the following years, other pastors would offer anti-lawsuit motions (without any connection to me). I, however, would only attend one more year and even then only as an observer and not a voting messenger.

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Despite years of nearness, I had been cast out as a “moderate/liberal” heretical outsider and no longer felt welcome. Throughout the conflict, the MBC’s consistent mantra—like that of the SBC’s—of labeling the opposition as “moderate/liberal” and attacking them for supposedly not upholding the “inerrancy” of the Bible successfully caused many “near” members to be viewed by many as “remote.” Even a conservative college student simply concerned about evangelism being hurt by wasted money and negative press can be framed as a “moderate/liberal” heretic who cannot be trusted. Sometimes, the greatest education occurs far from the college classroom. AUTHORITY STRUGGLES

After flying back from a weekend speech and debate tournament in South Dakota, I was heading to class at SBU when I saw that an article I wrote was on the bulletin board of the religious studies school. I had written several articles for the student newspaper the previous few months, mostly on religious or political issues. This article covered the April 2002 organizational meeting of the Baptist General Convention of Missouri, which was created by a group of Missouri Baptists as an alternative convention to the MBC. In order to learn more about this new group, I attended the inaugural meeting in St. Louis as merely an observer. I found the spirit and attitude of those present to be refreshing and exciting. The harsh rhetoric, mean-spiritedness, and bickering over issues of control and other business matters I had found at the 2001 MBC meeting six months earlier was absent. Though I had little experience with annual meetings, this was how I felt one should be. Yet, at the same time, I felt uneasy about the idea of leaving the Baptist community in which I grew up. After my editor at the school newspaper discovered I had attended the BGCM meeting, she requested an article. It was not an editorial column— since I did not even know yet what I thought about the split—but simply a report of what happened, some of what was said, and the uneasy relationship our school currently had with the new convention. While the dean of the religious studies college and one of the professors spoke at the meeting, the university’s president had stated that the school would have no relationship with the new organization. On the way to class that Monday in April, one of my professors asked me how I was doing. He also mentioned he saw the article and was excited since he had heard it was going to be printed. I did not know what he was talking about since I had left for South Dakota shortly after turning in the article, but I assumed he simply heard incorrectly. After class, a different professor asked

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me how I was doing and told me he fully supported my right to free speech. I gave him a puzzled look and asked what was going on, but this speech professor suddenly refused to talk. Later in the day I got a note from my advisor to come and meet with him. He asked how I was doing and wanted to make sure no one was harassing me too much. Still oblivious, but aware that something was going on, I insisted he explain. Reluctantly, he told the story my other professors refused to. After the student newspaper with my article came out on Friday, all copies of the paper were removed from campus by the administration by Saturday morning. With a hoard of prospective students and their families descending on the campus for a visitation weekend, someone in administration apparently worried my article would upset people friendly to the new convention, who would read that the administration was against it—even though this was public information easily found in Word and Way. The newspapers returned to their stands sometime late Sunday, which is why I did not notice anything wrong when I returned to campus the next day. I never received an article assignment again, and my short college news-writing career came to a sudden, inglorious end. Kurtz observes that heresy “is essentially a problem of authority.”6 It is the remaining in opposition to the institution that defines one as a heretic, rather than simply holding a belief considered heretical. The struggle surrounding heresy becomes a social conflict as those in power desire to stay in power, and so must work to squelch the oppositional threat to their authority. Heresy is therefore more of a political sin than a theological one; it is the result of a rebellion against powerful people more than a revolt against the divine. In MBC and SBC circles, I soon recognized that anyone who publically stood in opposition found themselves quickly labeled a “moderate/liberal,” accused of not believing in the “inerrant” Word of God, and linked to “heretical” groups and beliefs—especially the old “culture war” targets of homosexuality and abortion. However, the true “sin” of such heretics remains not supporting those in power. As I learned, to question those in authority can lead to newspapers being pulled and the loss of a writing job. SOLIDARITY

After my experiences with the college newspaper in April of 2002 and the anti-lawsuit motion in November of 2002, I slowly grew closer to the new convention, the BGCM. The dean of religious studies at my college—who had posted my newspaper article on the bulletin board—was removed from SBU because of his involvement with the BGCM. He soon joined the new

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convention as its first executive director and courted me to join so the staff would increase to three. In April of 2003—a month before graduating from SBU—I joined the BGCM as the special assistant to the executive director, primarily working on public relations and news writing. That first year I also found myself traveling through the windy countryside of Missouri, visiting churches to deliver information about the BGCM to pastors. One encounter even led to another round criticism in the Pathway, as I was called “trouble at the church’s doorstep” and someone who was “out trying to steal churches.”7 With multiple pieces warning about my visits (and some national references to them), MBC leadership quickly attempted to rally churches to their side in hopes of preventing my efforts on behalf of the BGCM. Kurtz contends that heresy “can be used for the creation of intragroup solidarity and for purposes of social control.”8 By exposing the heretics and their threat to the institution, the orthodox forces can rally the faithful to fight back the onslaught from the heretical enemy. Similarly, Kurtz adds, the conflict also creates solidarity for the new group of heretics. As I experienced during my first months working for the BGCM, committed members on both sides quickly rallied to support their side. Over time, the two groups grew to generally ignore each other with fewer and fewer attacks being leveled by the MBC against the BGCM (now renamed Churchnet). Ten years later, with the passions of the controversy muffled, the stringent efforts to demand solidarity have also simmered. Yet in those early months, even the slightest effort by a new college graduate wandering and weaving across the state seemed worthy of statewide—and even national—criticism to keep the “sheep” together and safe from the work of a heretical “sheep stealer.” BOUNDARY WORK

During my senior year at SBU—the 2002–2003 year in which I repeatedly found myself embroiled in Baptist authority struggles—I also took courses at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, which is affiliated with the SBC. During my time there, I wrote a required timed essay to be used to judge my English proficiency and not my theology (or so we were told). So just to get a rise out of people, I wrote mine on why women should be allowed to serve as ministers based on the Bible, Baptist history and beliefs, and practical ministry considerations. To my surprise, I received a letter announcing my academic probation because I was deemed not proficient in English and would need to take a remedial English course before I could take any additional seminary courses. I have the letter—in which my name is spelled incorrectly and several grammatical mistakes are made—framed and hanging in my office next to

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my doctoral diploma and writing awards (I dealt with this story more in my first book). This ended my time at seminary, especially since seminary officials rejected my attempt to file an appeal (even though they previously said appeals would be allowed) and announced they were not offering the remedial English course. The implications seemed quite clear—and so was the reason for my reprimand. Having naively trusted seminary officials who said theology would not be considered, I found myself kicked out for having crossed the line. Kurtz observes that in the midst of the conflict, doctrines are often articulated or hardened. As authority is questioned and orthodox forces attempt to drive out heretics, the doctrinal lines of what is and is not allowed are more closely highlighted. Such boundary work might even result in less leeway being allowed for those who previously received grace despite bending or even crossing the lines.10 During the summer of 2003—a few months after my stint as a seminary student ended—I served as the preacher for the youth camp of a local Baptist association (the association in which the church I pastored was a member). During lunch outside on a picnic table under the nice shade of large tree, I chatted with a couple of youth pastors—both of whom had also attended SBU. After one of them brought up the topic of state denominational politics, the other one, with whom I had several classes, quickly declared, “I wouldn’t touch the new convention with a ten-foot pole!” I looked over at him with a slight grin as he sat right next to me on the right and retorted, “Then you might want to scoot over about eight feet.” We had a good laugh about it (and must still be okay since we now are Facebook friends). Yet his comment seemed to perfectly capture the attitude of the boundary work I experienced at Midwestern and elsewhere. During times of denominational politics and upheaval, one must be careful not to get too close to the line—such as by writing a seminary paper advocating a now heretical position—or else one will likely be tossed out as a heretic. RITUAL FUNCTIONS

In April of 2003, my mother was fired from her position as the MBC’s chief financial officer. This occurred just as I completing my senior year at SBU and starting my work for the BGCM (we had been joking about working for different conventions, but that overlap did not quite occur). After she accused her boss—the MBC’s executive director—of sexual harassing her, she was fired and then publically criticized in the Pathway (and the SBC’s Baptist Press). She later filed an EEOC complaint and then sued the MBC for sexual harassment, gender discrimination, libel, and slander; the MBC eventually settled out of

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court. A couple of years later when some MBC leaders wanted to get rid of the same executive director for unrelated, non-fireable disagreements, they found their way to remove him by finally admitting he had in fact been guilty as my mom charged. After his firing, he was hired by the SBC’s International Mission Board. As my mother was being removed from office and publically castigated, she was even blamed for other problems occurring in the MBC. Kurtz contends that the denouncing and removal of heresy is a ritualistic process that serves to relieve the concerns and anxiety of the orthodox leadership. The fight against heresy is not necessarily successful, but it helps create a scapegoat on which to place blame for the problems within the institution. The removal of the deviants is put forth as necessary for eliminating the problems. Kurtz also explains that the Roman Catholic Church, after responding to heresy, then worked to put forth an image of unity. In the midst of a struggle against heretics, the orthodox leaders cannot admit to wrongdoing that could undermine their moral authority.11 There must be a scapegoat. If someone does not naturally fit the position, then an innocent member—such as my mother—must be sacrificed through lies and law-breaking in attempts to restore peace for the community. As heretics were cast out throughout the Missouri Baptist controversy, MBC leaders argued that those dismissed had been the root of the problem and now peace and unity would rule. This argument was even made in the article that called my anti-lawsuit motion the work of “moderate/liberal messengers.” Although such arguments might relieve the tensions and help Missouri Baptists find peace, when you or a loved one are the scapegoat, it does the opposite. MOVING ON

College often serves as a transformative period in one’s life. New explorations, friends, experiences, and freedom result in greater maturity and opportunities. When my formative time overlapped with the earthquake that struck Missouri Baptists, it simply multiplied its impact on my identity as a minister, Christian, and person. Before the chaos that emerged during my junior and senior years, I felt little cognitive dissonance regarding my spiritual identity and stubbornly knew what my future plans held. Before that time, I easily identified as a Missouri Southern Baptist. By 2003, I dropped the “Southern” from that description. In 2008, I removed “Missouri” from my self-description. And in 2009, I even left behind “Baptist.” After graduating from SBU, I decided against seminary and instead pursued graduate studies in communication. This occurred in part because of my growing interest in communication research, which flourished as I presented a

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paper at an academic conference just weeks after presenting my anti-lawsuit motion at the 2002 MBC annual meeting. At another conference the following April, I met Carl Kell and purchased Kell and Camp’s fantastic rhetorical analysis of the SBC conflict.12 This was my new calling. Upon completion of my doctoral studies in communication at the University of Missouri in 2008, I started as an assistant professor of communication studies at James Madison University in Virginia. In a way, this reversed the migration of my Baptist ancestor who moved from Virginia to Missouri and started what is now the oldest Protestant church west of the Mississippi (Fee Fee Baptist Church in St. Louis, Missouri—where the organizational meeting of the BGCM was held in 2002). The following year, my wife and I joined a Mennonite congregation and I have even preached there a few times. Apparently, I am following the path of John Smyth, the first Baptist, who left the Baptist congregation he started and finished his life among the Mennonites. I still work some for Churchnet (formerly the BGCM) and write for Ethics Daily (the news arm of the Baptist Center for Ethics), but my Baptist ties now are primarily in providing public relations and news-writing work. When the controversy in the SBC exploded at the state level in Missouri, I was a model insider. My mother worked at the MBC, my father was a longtime Southern Baptist deacon, my maternal grandfather was a decades-long Southern Baptist pastor, and I was a life-long Southern Baptist studying to become a Southern Baptist pastor. Yet as a result of my challenges to authority and the MBC’s need for solidarity and stronger boundary work, I quickly found my nearness being recast as remoteness. After the ritual functions ended and I literally moved on, I now am truly remote. I remain at peace with my remoteness in ways I never was with my nearness—especially during the time my nearness was challenged. The long, windy path from there to here often felt like the process of being exiled. Yet I do not live in exile; I am home. I simply did not recognize my old home as the exile when I lived there—much as some Israelites following the time of Joseph did not see Egypt as exile but as home. Leaving that home—despite the difficulties of the wanderings in the desert or through the mountains—is worth the trip. Or perhaps that is simply the talk of an exile trying to forget what was on the other side of those curves now in my rearview mirror. NOTES 1. Lester R. Kurtz, “The Politics of Heresy,” American Journal of Sociology 88, (1983), 1085–89. 2. Carl L. Kell and Ramond L. Camp, In the Name of the Father: The Rhetoric of the New Southern Baptist Convention (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999).

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3. Ibid. 4. B. Baysinger, “Unity Punctuates MBC Annual Meeting,” Pathway, November 2, 2002. 5. Kurtz, “The Politics of Heresy,” 1085. 6. Kurtz, “The Politics of Heresy,” 1088. 7. M. Jackson, “Confronting Trouble at the Church’s Doorstep,” Pathway, September 9, 2003. 8. Kurtz, “The Politics of Heresy,” 1089. 9. Brian Kaylor, For God’s Sake, Shut Up!: Lessons for Christian on How to Speak Effectively and When to Remain Silent (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999). 10. Kurtz, “The Politics of Heresy,” 1085. 11. Kurtz, “The Politics of Heresy,” 1085. 12. See n. 1.

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SET ON EDGE Geoff Davidson

shifted restlessly in my seat until I soon found myself sitting on the very edge of the pew, leaning forward. Growing up in church, you eventually learn how to sit in a pew in a way that vaguely resembles comfort. But even with years of experience, the cushion below me seemed to have grown thinner and the wood beneath it much more unforgiving. I leaned forward a little more, resting my newly tanned arms on the pew in front of me. I hesitated at first, countless warnings against such an unpolished posture in church shining through. Once I committed to my new position, I couldn’t help but wonder at why that thought would even enter my mind at such a time. I knew my mother wouldn’t notice, and neither would anyone else. They were all too busy listening to the war of words over a something called SBC and another something called CBF. These letters, completely lost on me, meant the world to the rest of the room, demanding far more attention than my reaction. When your church is sitting on a much more perilous edge than that of any handsomely crafted pew, the uncouth posture of one sixteen-year-old youth tends to go unnoticed. My breakdown in public manners occurred about twenty-four hours after our youth group’s return from a weeklong World Changers mission trip in North Carolina. It was there on a dilapidated roof in Raleigh-Durham that I first learned the fine art of driving a button cap nail into new shingles, my pale arms baking in the southern sun. I am still convinced that there is no song, book, movie, roller coaster, or drug which humanity could devise to replicate the thrill of your first time grabbing hold of God’s call to service. As my mind raced with all I learned every day about God, myself, my youth group, and the hundreds of other Christian youth present, the challenge of the next morning’s work was all that could drive me to sleep at night. It was also in North Carolina that the first edge of the mighty and terrible wave to come lapped over my feet, a wave in which I still struggle to keep afloat nearly a decade later. On Thursday night of the trip, after our youth-group

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devotional time, our youth minister announced that he would be leaving us in a matter of weeks, headed to a new job, new church, and new state. Yes, we cried that evening. But our tears rolled down to jaws set firm with determination. If that week had taught us nothing else, it had taught us that God could move in us, rerouting our youthful energy to help power the already-not-yet Kingdom we serve. We headed back to our church, the only church of which I had memories at that point in my life, ready to face the unknown before us and show our congregation that though changes were coming, we in Christ could face them with courage. The following Sunday night would serve as our announcement of determination, a jubilee of God’s good grace. Instead of a regular worship service, we were invited to share of our experience, relating to our congregation the incredible things we’d seen God do and hoped to continue to see now that we were home and facing the loss of our youth minister. It was one of the first times I ever publically spoke in a religious context, and I will never forget it. The memory stays with me, however, not because of the joy of celebration or the hope for the future. It stays with me because of what followed. We were urged to stay for the business meeting to follow, a formality we expected to be a boring interlude before a celebratory post-worship foray to a local restaurant. Instead, I found myself on the edge of my seat and the edge of my faith as I learned the depth of the mire in which our church had sunk. Months prior, our pastor had been forced to resign amidst a row over maintaining Southern Baptist ties or possibly heading to the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. As a fifteen-year-old at the time of his departure, the few acronyms I knew usually involved sports, basic cable channels, or the simplistic faith statements one learns in VBS, shorthand for Vacation Bible School (see, there’s one now!). Thus, a full understanding of the mess generally escaped me until I could no longer look away that Sunday night. While I had hidden away on the youth floor, learning of a poor man from Nazareth who had invited us into a new kingdom and a new way of living, the ensuing conflict had reached the point that a moderator encamped at our church in an attempt to put down the rhetorical violence. The business meeting that Sunday night was the culmination of his activity and both sides were given opportunity to state their case. I wish the sides had only been stated, however, because if they had I wouldn’t know what it’s like to watch a church eat itself alive. From the edge of the pew, I watched people I knew and loved make it clear that there was nothing redeemable about the other side, each viewpoint representing a cancer to be excised from the Body of Christ. The ensuing months saw the trickle of departing members become

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a hemorrhage. But first, the ensuing minutes saw me forget anything good that happened in North Carolina. Long before I heard harsh words ring out in my church home, the Word of the Lord came to Ezekiel. The young Jewish prophet exiled to Babylon was told, “What do you people mean by quoting this proverb about the land of Israel: ‘The parents eat sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge’? As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Lord, you will no longer quote this proverb in Israel. For everyone belongs to me, the parent as well as the child—both alike belong to me. The one who sins is the one who will die.” (Ezek. 18: 2–4 NIV) There was a point in my life when I struggled with the meaning of Ezekiel 18 because I struggled to set my teeth on edge. Due simply to the shape of my mouth, it is surprisingly hard to line up my teeth so that they set on edge. I myself, though, have sat on edge before. The edge of my pew, the edge of collapse on which my church teetered, the edge of coming events that would shape the last decade of my life and beyond, the edge of the knife on which many feel the broader church in the West now balances; I need look no further than these edges to understand the ancient Hebrew proverb and the tension of expecting the hammer to fall for something that occurred before the punished had a say in the matter. I know what the proverb means because I have felt it. The events often referred to as the “Baptist Holy War” began before my parents met. The conflict did not even reach full bloom until I was born. The critical 1988 annual SBC meeting occurred a scant eighteen months after my birth. Yet these events have continued to define my life in both my personal devotion and vocational ministry. There are enough bloodstained hands reaching from both sides to make me feel homeless and estranged in all directions. This has made me doubt my faith more deeply and more often than any atheist’s talking point ever could. My home church is just now numerically recovering from what happened. Ministers who deeply formed me were gone in a heartbeat. Friends I had known my entire life were uprooted and headed for the greener pastures of other churches. My seminary choice has been panned by both sides, each claiming that it is too something or not something enough for any good to come from it, every accusation being the opposite of the other. Many of my friends, too young to know the sides of the war, picked a seminary based on location or campus visits, only to transfer eventually after learning they had accidentally picked a side with which they did not wish to be associated. Every time a new opportunity for service or partnership presents itself, I feel the paranoia

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of wondering whether this will pigeonhole or typecast me in the eyes of colleagues as something I’m not, preventing future opportunities. All of this pain stems solely from Christians blindly stabbing at each other without ceasing in the name of a something called SBC and another something called CBF. But far more important than the eyes of my colleagues are the eyes of an increasingly post-Christian America. As denominationalism ebbs away, those Christ sent us to reach do not differentiate between one denomination at peace while another fights, nor do they perceive our favored side valiantly standing for a finer theological issue; they only see Christians eviscerating Christians and they don’t understand why. The only explanation they can muster, one for which I cannot blame them, is that our Savior is a lie and our faith is a power grab. When they see the same wars amongst us that they see in the world, why would they want to have anything to do with us? It seems you don’t even have to be a Christian to taste the sour grapes of my spiritual parents. God, however, told Ezekiel that the parable would not be quoted anymore. The hammer will only fall on the transgressor. So why then do we deny ourselves the grace promised us by God Almighty? Why do the deeds of my predecessors haunt and even waylay my steps? Why must my mother, faced now with the prospect of both her sons going into vocational ministry, fear for our future in a church that conducts itself with the same malice as the world and yet curses the world for acting like the world? Why do I know so many who love wrestling with ideas of faith and Jesus and yet wouldn’t darken the door of a church under any circumstances? Why do people seem to draw back the very second I tell them my career path? These things occur because while my story is my own, it is far from unique. We cling so stubbornly to the sour grapes of animosity and malice within the church that we prevent the grace we have been promised. I am genuinely terrified by the number of lives destroyed, fellowships lost, ministry opportunities wasted, and nonbelievers scared out of looking to Jesus because we are too busy hating each other. The spirit of divisiveness terrifies me because I’ve seen the pain in action and I know the seed of that evil is in my heart too. It whispers to me through the lines of theology I study, reminding me that I am surely right on even the most subtle and obscure belief. It screams at me when even God-given emotions arise, twisting God’s design of my soul, asking me to strike as I was struck. I know, like any victim of a physical evil, that I am now more likely to replicate the divisive rhetoric forbidden by Paul in his letter to the Corinthians. An enormous weight of my conditioning pulls me towards reenacting that which hurt me. And I am surely not alone in that trap. Some days it feels like the sour grapes of division have set up shop on our altars, squeezed between

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the requisite Bible and weekly flowers, obscuring our view of those most powerful words, “This do in remembrance of me.” Over the last decade, I have often been exhausted to the point of breaking by the countless times we fail to remember Christ. As a function of my career, I appreciate the rigorous study of theology, but I know there has to be more. Even the most critical piece of orthodoxy does not warrant vilification; the study of God, in fact, demands another kind of lifestyle that avoids such behavior. Lesser theological points can be maintained while still allowing for cooperation in our God-given call to serve the world. Christ deserves more than youth set on edge while fellowships burn around them. Christ demands more than the beauty of service being devalued by conflict. Christ stands able to make these changes a reality. It is a testimony to the power of our Savior that any of the youth in the sanctuary that Sunday night still want anything to do with Christianity today. I was one of those youth. What has happened in my life cannot be changed. I have been set on edge. We have all been set on edge. But I cannot abide letting it happen to anyone else. Devoting myself to keeping my memories just that, only memories, sometimes is the only thing that lets me believe in a God bigger than sour grapes.

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THE DAY THE MUSIC DIED Mark A. Bowdidge

y story begins as so many others in this book. I was called into my profession. I was called to be a teacher. I heard the call first in my teens, but didn’t completely understand what this call actually was. I was 14 when I made a public announcement of my call to “full-time Christian service.” This call was an infrequent, but not unfamiliar, public expression during the singing of the invitation hymn in a worship service at my home church, the First Baptist Church of Springfield, Missouri. I can’t articulate the reason I felt called, at least not in measurable terms. I simply felt compelled to make a public commitment to serve God in a public forum. That forum happened to be the morning worship service on Easter Sunday 1978. I suppose that if one must make such a public statement, Easter Sunday would be the time with the greatest public impact. Regardless, I felt that this was the time, and I responded to God’s movement in my life. But just because I felt called did not mean I was at all comfortable with the thought of vocational work in the church. At the time, the only thing to which one could be called was “church work.” I accepted that concept, although it never really sat well with my spirit. I was a happy Southern Baptist in my youth. I identified with the denomination of my birth. I was active in the various ministries of our local Southern Baptist congregation. My profession of faith, baptism, and subsequent membership in the local congregation was a result of a Baptist Student Union revival team. I enjoyed the national ministries with local chapters, including Royal Ambassadors and Training Union (I, and many of our adult leaders, never could get used to calling it “Church Training”), as well as Sunday school. I was proud of being a Southern Baptist. As we were reminded regularly during the focus on Foreign Mission in December and Home Mission in the spring, we had the largest Protestant force of missionaries doing God’s work around the globe. This made me feel good and a part of something good. While my peers found little interest in the workings of the church organization, I

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was fascinated by business meetings on the local level and the workings of the Southern Baptist Convention’s boards, meetings, agencies, and auxiliaries. When our congregation would host the state convention meetings, I worked my hardest to make as many of the sessions as possible and collected any piece of printed information I could get my hands on, pouring over the information as if I were going to be tested on it by the end of the convention meeting. I was clearly a Southern Baptist. During my early youth, I began to feel that I was somehow being drawn to serve God in a unique way. I had seen many people over the years make public commitments to “full-time Christian service.” While I didn’t completely understand what that entailed, it was constantly in the back of my mind. I wondered if God might be “calling” me to this “full-time Christian service.” The question was regularly on my mind (and, frankly, still is): am I being called to “full-time Christian service?” There was always a sense that this moniker did not fit me. All of the people who had made public commitments to this special order of vocation seemed to be intending to seek “church work”—full-time ministerial work in a local congregation. I didn’t seem to feel that was a good fit for me, but since that was the only example I saw (with my young eyes), I assumed that if one felt called to this, then one must be expecting to live out that call as an employee of a local congregation. So, feeling this decision was one I needed to make public, on Easter Sunday 1978, I made public my sense of calling to “full-time Christian service.” I had always been drawn to music. And not just any music (although there was little I disliked), but especially choral music. I remember vividly one fall when a commercial came on the television advertising a four-record set of the Best of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. One of the selections from the set of LPs was the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” arranged by Peter Wilhouski. That recording called to me. I had to have it. I begged my parents to buy it for me, pleaded with them, bargained with them, all to no avail. Until Christmas Eve came and our family opened our presents. The four-record set, “The Best of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir,” was in my hands. I listened to that recording of the Wilhouski over and over again. It spoke to me. I bonded with choral music through that recording. Other unusual choral recordings included the Christian Home Music Plan of the Radio and Television Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. My father was a trustee during part of the 1960s and we received everything the Southern Baptist Radio and Television Commission produced. I grew up listening to the Baptist Hour Choir, loving the highly trained voices and expert arrangements. I remember vividly hearing the Singing Churchmen of Oklahoma sing the Gloria in Excelsis by Lara Hoggard. I

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wanted to make music like the music that had moved me so then, and still does today. I wanted to convey the passion, the faith, which made these people sing with such spirit. In the ensuing years, I attempted to live out that call through the only avenue I knew possible—the local church. I planted myself in various leadership roles hoping to find where it was God intended for me. While I was active in the music ministry of several congregations, I never seemed to be able to fit into that “music minister” mold. My interests and natural musical inclinations seemed to run contrary to the direction of the various music ministers. I remember a conversation with a minister of music for whom I felt a strong sense of respect. I had been an active supporter of his dreams for his music ministry, and while they didn’t line up with my own dreams, his leadership was so charismatic that I willingly committed hours to implementing his plans. While I thoroughly enjoyed the activities, I ached for something more. In one conversation in which we had been discussing his plans for the coming months (which always excited me), I mentioned that I would love to be able to do some “classical” music some time. He responded quite forcibly. “Classical music doesn’t reach people. We’re not doing any of that here.” Much to my shock and surprise, I received an even more cutting remark from another minister I admired, “You’ve got to change, Mark. Nobody likes you the way you are.” Within a matter of days, I had received two devastating blows to my developing sense of calling. Were church people really rejecting me and God’s call on my life? Was it possible that I was wrong in making a commitment to “full-time Christian service?” Had I been swept up by the institution of the church and not fully vetted its philosophy? With that rejection, I begin to think about my work, what I perceived to be my call, and to look for options. Concurrent with this sad experience, I was having a difficult period of life in general. Upon my graduation from high school, I entered college. I clearly was not mature enough yet to begin in an undergraduate program. My first six semesters of college were abysmal. I skipped more classes than I attended. I was unable to focus on the responsibilities that would ensure passing grades. Instead, I invested my time in volunteering at the church in the music and single-adult ministries. My grades reflected this misappropriation of time. After six semesters of failure, I decided that I had wasted enough of my parent’s money. In the middle of the fall semester of my junior year, I simply quit going to class. I didn’t feel the need to officially withdraw. After all, I hardly attended class anyway. What possible difference could it make? While I was essentially running from my talents, I began to feel tremendous anxiety. The

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thought began to roll around my head that perhaps I needed to explore my area of giftedness. Perhaps I should be faithful to God and develop these gifts. I couldn’t believe it, but I was contemplating returning to college as a music major. As this crazy idea began to roll around in my head, I came up with all the reasons it couldn’t possible work. I found a job working as an accounting clerk in a firm in the city. I enjoyed using the skills required of me and I was rewarded with seven promotions within eighteen months. I rose to the level of supervisor in a brief period of time and felt a level of success that I had not found in school. But during this period of accomplishment, and with the unpleasant experiences with the two ministers I trusted, I began to revisit my commitment to “full-time Christian service.” On the one hand, it was becoming clear to me that my recent church experience had soured me toward my sense of calling to vocational ministry in a church. On the other hand, my commitment to live out the call was still strong, and my job, while I had experience some success and sense of accomplishment, was clearly not living out that call. I began to think through the possibilities that lay ahead. The thought I couldn’t shake was the possibility that I should be going back to school. As I began to get my mind around the thought of returning to the awful mess I had made of my first attempt at higher education, my work situation began to deteriorate rapidly. While my skills and abilities had been recognized and rewarded early on and numerous promotions came my way, I began to be treated more and more rudely by my superiors. Numerous uncomfortable conversations took place between me and both my immediate supervisor and hers, often without warning; and the duration, intensity, and inappropriateness of these encounters became more and more pronounced. Both supervisors began to undermine my work. The employees I supervised began to ignore my requests while at the same time I was being blamed for not ensuring productivity in my department. I sought and was granted permission to make a lateral move out of our division. These uncomfortable events (lack of acceptance in the local church, rejection in my place of employment, and failure as an undergraduate student) were pivotal in my recognition of just exactly what God had called me to do. While my understanding of this call wasn’t crystal clear, I began to sense a renewed commitment to live it out regardless, whatever it may be; and I was becoming more sure that it wasn’t a call to vocational work in the church. While wrestling with this decision, one thing became clear to me. I had been a failure as a student and I didn’t trust myself (or God’s grace, for that matter) to be able to improve my academic performance. While I had begun

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to apply for admission to various colleges as a music major, I still doubted my abilities. But each time I would discuss with God in prayer a reason I couldn’t be successful in college, God would eliminated the excuse. Certainly the pleasure I found in my job with the accounting firm was ripped from my hands. Finally, in a moment of desperation and utter frustration, as I sat stopped at an intersection waiting for a light to turn green, I cried aloud to God, “Do you think I can do it?” While I was hoping to hear something along the lines of, “Yes, my beloved son,” what I heard was a little unusual. I heard—audibly heard—a voice say, “I don’t know. Why don’t you try it and find out?” Frustrated by this sarcastic response, I responded, “Well, you just watch me.” I realize the irony (or perhaps the sublime harmony) of the situation. Here I sat at a literal crossroads waiting to make a move in my life. I pleaded for direction, God answered, the light turned green, and I continued on my journey. After this decision, I was transferred out of the toxic work environment to a wonderful new position, my relationship ended, and I began the process of movement toward enrollment. But God wasn’t finished moving things around a bit just yet. God continued to work on me, using various methods to get my attention and remind me that I had committed myself to “full-time Christian service.” Finally, after asking God repeatedly, “Can I do this?” I had received my answer: “I don’t know. Why don’t you try it and find out.” What? That was my answer? No “my beloved son?” No angelic choir singing in the background? A sarcastic response to a self-tortured soul? Well, I was about to show Him I could do it. I began to explore several opportunities for majoring in music. My heart was in one school in particular, William Jewell College, though I received admissions materials from several others. I made inquiry at William Jewell and made an appointment with Dr. Don Brown, then chair of the music department. Dr. Brown spoke with me in depth about my interests and sold me on William Jewell without breaking a sweat. After our conversation, we went to meet with the admissions staff. I had been told that I needed to bring my transcript from my previous university, and I did. We met with Dr. Ed Norris, head of admissions, and exchanged pleasantries. During our conversation, Dr. Norris opened the file folder and began looking at my transcript. I could see the expression in his face change when his eyes landed on my GPA. He slowly closed the file folder and returned it to his desk, continued with the pleasant conversation and then said kindly, “We cannot admit you with your current GPA. I would suggest that you attend a junior college for a few years to raise your GPA and then seek admission to William Jewell.”

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I was incensed. I was clearly not Junior College material, and I had no intention of wasting away two years to raise my GPA. I left that meeting determined to figure out a way to matriculate at William Jewell. As I drove back to my passionless job, I realized that the problem with my GPA was the twelve hours of failed classes on my transcript. I decided I would have to get rid of all twelve of those hours. I went to my previous university and said, “I’m trying to enroll at William Jewell, and my GPA is too low. I need to have all these failing credit hours removed from my transcript.” The administrative assistant looked at me like I had trees growing out of my ears and said, “We can’t just take grades off your transcript.” I tried desperately to explain to her why I needed a higher GPA. She was polite, but she clearly stated that the likelihood of grades being wiped off my transcript was nil. She did say that I could appeal to the academic council, though, and I did. The council, by the grace of God, removed all twelve hours from my transcript. By that November I was accepted and registered at William Jewell College. I committed myself fully to my academic work and I excelled. I completed a double major in performance and music education, earning outstanding senior awards in both. As I was nearing degree-completion, Dr. Brown spoke with me casually about my plans after graduation. I mentioned that I expected to secure a job teaching vocal music in a high school, although I admitted that that wasn’t really what I wanted to do. Dr. Brown encouraged me to look at graduate school and suggested that Southwestern Seminary might be a good fit. I had expressed to him many times my confusion about my call, that I understood “full-time Christian service” to be a call to vocational church work, but that I wasn’t really comfortable with that, and I was really beginning to think my calling was to teach. Dr. Brown assured me that the School of Church Music at Southwestern was an accredited institution of the National Association of Schools of Music, which offered legitimate music degrees recognized by churches and schools. Dr. Brown arranged for our chapel choir tour to travel to Texas so that I could see the campus and meet the music faculty—particularly Dr. David Keith, a William Jewell graduate and head of the conducting program, and Dr. Al Travis, head of the organ program. While in Fort Worth, the chapel choir sang at Broadway Baptist Church. I was stunned by the beauty of this building and the fine quality of the music ministry. I met Reverend Thomas M. Stoker, the minster of music, and became sold on investing my life in Southwestern Seminary and Broadway Baptist. During my time at Southwestern, my “call” became much clearer to me and to the faculty. As I was completing my master’s work, Dr. David Keith stopped me in the hall at the end of a long day and asked would I do next. I said, again, that I would probably get a job teaching high school vocal music

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or being a minister of music at a church, though I said neither was very appealing. Dr. Keith told me that I really needed to consider doctoral work, that my skills would not be appreciated in a church, and that I would be wasting my abilities in a high-school. He invited me to apply for advanced study at Southwestern, but encouraged me to look elsewhere as well. I applied for advanced study at Southwestern and, to my great surprise, was accepted. It was during this study that I began to realize what my calling had actually been. God had called me to teach—to bring the possibilities of music to light in the lives of students who didn’t know, or couldn’t believe, that something else was out there for them if they would only reach out. I became determined to help others see and develop their musical gifts, just as Don Brown and David Keith had done for me. I began my teaching with a stint as a high school choral director. Dr. Brown had told me that if I wanted to teach on the college level, I needed a minimum of high school teaching experience. Their “minimum” was three years, and I completed exactly that and not one day more. I didn’t like high school when I was in high school, and I slowly found that my experience being on the other side of the desk was no better. I was glad for the experience, but was clearly offering my gifts to an unappreciative and in some cases antagonistic audience. As I was nearing the end of my three years and beginning to look at teaching opportunities at various colleges, I called Don Brown to see if he knew of any open positions. He mentioned a school in the South. An acquaintance of his was retiring and was asking for potential applicants to fill her position. Don asked if he could give her my name and I agreed. In the meantime, I begin to investigate this school through my contacts. A quick view of their website left me completely unimpressed. I spoke with friends who knew the program, and they expressed concerns about its quality and what my expectations would be for it. Based on those concerns, I didn’t pursue the possibility actively. But the chair of the music department, having received my information from Don Brown, e-mailed me and encouraged me to apply. I politely sent my materials to the search committee and thought nothing more of it. Not long after, I received a phone call from the chair of the search committee. In that conversation I asked for copies of programs from the choir concerts of the past few years and for other pertinent materials. There was a marked hesitation in the caller’s voice. He explained that the committee wanted to make a clean break with the musical selections of the retiring faculty member, that her choices of literature were not appropriate for a college setting, and that he was reticent to send me copies of the programs for fear that it would give me the wrong impression of the music faculty and the direction they

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were taking the program. I assured him I was well aware of the past direction of the choral program, that I had no interest in continuing that tradition, and that I would bring to the school a scholarly exploration of choral literature appropriate to a college setting. The search committee chair sent the copies of the programs, which were even less appropriate than I suspected. While each year’s repertoire included an example of historic music, the other selections were all pieces that any good church youth choir would perform. I was saddened that the program was weighted so much for the entertainment of the lowest common denominator, and I feared that securing appropriate choral literature would be an uphill battle. Even so, I was intrigued by the opportunity to confront a challenge and thrilled to be able to build a program where nothing like it had been attempted before. Soon after, I was contacted again to set up a time for an on-campus interview. In each of the interview sessions, I stated clearly what I would be doing if I were hired for the position. I met with enthusiastic agreement from every member of the faculty except the individual I was replacing. I discussed the situation in depth with the president and made it clear that the direction of the choral program would take a dramatic turn toward collegiate legitimacy if I were hired. He heartily agreed with my assessment of the situation and was excited about my determination and drive. I asked the president what he intended to do with my predecessor, stating that I knew if this was not well handled, she would become a deterrent to my success. He stated clearly and emphatically that he would not allow her to influence me or my work, that she would be given a title with little function that reported only to him, and that he himself would see that she did not interfere in my work. I felt that I had made my position clear to all parties involved in making the decision and that I had received assurances of support from the faculty and administration. The call came offering me the job. After a time of discernment, I accepted. As I began my work at the college, I realized the gravity of the situation into which I had walked. Questions that I had not thought to ask about the program became obvious areas of concern. Though I had been told that the membership of the choir was around sixty, I realized that fewer than fifteen of those students were music majors, which meant that the heightened academic rigor I would bring would most likely drive away quite a few of the non-majors; and with a new repertoire and a new director, I foresaw a great exodus of students from the choir. As we began our music-major orientation week, I began to work with the choir. I found that many of the students should not have been admitted to the choir due to the obvious inability to sing. After the week of orientation

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but before the start of classes, we eliminated about fifteen singers. My fear was that this reduction in membership would be a concern to my new faculty colleagues. They were unanimous in their support, much to my delight, and assured me that those who left shouldn’t have been there in the first place and that there were more that needed to leave. I felt much more at ease knowing that my colleagues supported my work. I began to work with the choir, which numbered about forty, and felt I could push the gifted students to mature in their abilities and the difficulty of their literature while pulling the interested but less gifted students along. After our first concert, though I was distressed by the poor quality of the performance, my colleagues assured me that the choir had never sounded better, that the difference between the spring of the previous year and the fall of this year was dramatic and remarkable, especially considering that this was essentially the same group of students. I trusted their judgment and continued in my work. But it was clear that my ministry in this place was anathema to some. One of my most important, but also most precarious efforts was to establish collegiate musical legitimacy in an environment that had deliberately avoided in the past. With the full support of my colleagues in the music department, I worked to design a curriculum that would not only fulfill the academic responsibilities of the college to its students, but also express the spiritual identity and heritage of the institution. Music, to me, seemed the discipline that most easily merged these things. While my colleagues in other departments struggled to come up with statements on “integrating faith and learning,” my discipline was hardwired for the task, and in fact it would have been all but impossible to separate the two. I immediately looked to my own experience to identify expressions that were collegiate, Biblical, historical, musical, and novel. Given the task at hand, I selected three performance projects that would address all five areas. The first effort was to offer to the community an annual production of the Festival of Lessons and Carols based on the model perfected by the choir of King’s College in Cambridge, England. In this effort, I worked with my colleagues to present a department-wide offering displaying all its division’s ensembles, and lectors from the college and community, in a corporate service which focused on God’s love for his creation and his work to provide a savior for mankind. It brought together all the important elements: it was a tradition that was established and sustained by a world-recognized college choir, it was completely drawn from scripture, it was historical, clearly musical, and it was an experience to which few, if any, of our students had ever been exposed. It became the most popular and most well attended music event on the campus.

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The second effort was to prepare the choir for an annual performance of the choral worship service known as Evensong. This liturgical form is one of the most glorious expressions of worship to the Creator that man has ever devised. Its origins can be traced back to the worship in the synagogue, and the Anglican form we used has been traced back to the Protestant Reformation. This experience combined all five of the important elements. It was collegiate, as the form had been established in the monastic tradition from which came our system of higher education. It was clearly biblical, as the service is nothing more than the reading of God’s word, the singing of God’s word, and the praying of God’s word. It was historical, because the form we used came from 1562. It was musical, allowing our students to understand how important gems of the choral repertoire fit into the contexts for which they were intended. And it was novel. It was clear that none of our students had had any significant exposure to the liturgical worship experience, and if they had, it had been negative. While our choir struggled with the music—for it was quite a new experience, learning the freedom and structure of harmonized psalm chanting, and the singing of the prayers and responses, and the give and take required to allow the music to flow freely—it forced the students to learn to sing more musically and expressively. The students were challenged, and they adapted to the requirements and learned to trust their musical instincts, all the while learning a new way to offer their praise to God through the gifts with which God had entrusted them. The final major effort we undertook was an annual community hymn festival. The school was fortunate to have a highly skilled organist on the faculty and with this asset, we worked together to create a musical experience that would embrace our heritage, involve our community, and teach our students. My faculty organist colleague and I would developed a theme for each annual service, selected hymns, scripture, songs, and anthems that fit the theme, and then engage area church choirs and directors to form a mass chorus with the choral ensembles from the school. In addition, we would invite area pastors to be the narrators tying together the hymns, songs, and anthems into a unified whole, drawing the narration from scripture, poetry, and free-form writing. This effort was not as successful as we had anticipated. It became increasingly difficult to find days and times that didn’t conflict with the scheduled events of the various churches. One prominent pastor, an alumnus of the college whom we invited to serve as a narrator, though agreeing to participate, behaved ungraciously in one of the festivals by commenting in very loud asides to members of the audience after the conclusion of the festival that his church would never participate in the event again. Interestingly enough, this same

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pastor was a lector for one of our Lessons & Carols services and seemed to be happy to participate—a far more traditional and formal worship experience than our hymn festival. While I worked to tie the two musical forms in major events, I also worked to increase the musical ability of our students and introduce them to collegiate choral literature appropriate for a church-affiliated school. I worked to select representative sacred music from all historical periods and as many contemporary genres (spiritual, liturgical, world music, etc.) as was appropriate for a college choir. I also programmed selections from traditional church choral anthems or hymn-tune settings. However, that I didn’t program these exclusively and that our students were increasingly capable of more difficult literature became irritants to my well-connected and vocal predecessor. In one of my later years, an internationally recognized choral director was engaged to lead the intercollegiate choir. I knew of this conductor’s reputation and made a deliberate, concerted, and thorough effort to engage as many of our students in this ensemble as possible, knowing they would have a fantastic experience. Once the repertoire for the intercollegiate choir had been announced, I was pleased to discover that a rather difficult work by Johann Sebastian Bach had been programmed. This was a piece that, fortunately, our choir had performed the previous year and our students knew well. In the rehearsals of the intercollegiate choir, it became quite clear to our students that this particular piece was not an easy or accessible one. While our students knew it, they discovered that other students, from better-known and better-funded universities in the state, had been ill prepared and were unable to perform the piece in rehearsals. In fact, the guest conductor, in an attempt to demonstrate to the students who were struggling with the piece how it should be performed, selected several voices—our students—from the larger ensemble to come to the front of the rehearsal hall and sing it in a small group (10–12 voices) to demonstrate proper technique to the rest of the choir. Our students realized that they had accomplished something that the students from larger, more prestigious, and more stable institutions weren’t able to do. This was a huge shot in the arm for our student participants. They realized that, although they had many strikes against them, they were capable of competing musically with the big-name schools. The students were so excited about their performance and the prestige they brought to the intercollegiate experience. They were able to nail a piece that was eating the lunch of the bigger schools. It was clear in that moment that through all the work I had taken on, through all the pleading with the students to give more of themselves to the experience of singing together, through the endless corrections

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in rehearsal, God had given us the opportunity to affirm and bless our work. Our students were the direct benefactors of this blessing. Finally, I wanted to establish a tradition of triennial international performance tours for the choir. Our first attempt at establishing this tradition was not successful. While we had a choir of about thirty-five, only seven students expressed an interest in our plans for a trip to England. In spite of the low numbers, we went ahead and scheduled the trip, making it more of an educational trip than a performance tour. Upon our return from England, these seven students’ excitement at the experience induced us to schedule a second tour in two years. This second trip was much more successful. Out of a choir of thirty-four, twenty-eight students participated, raising the required funds. The performances on this trip were stunning. We were warmly welcomed by our British hosts, and the performance venues were thrilling. Our hosts were so excited after two of our performances in particular—at Coventry and at York—that we were immediately invited back to perform again in the future. The verger assigned to us at Coventry told me, “You don’t understand. We have visiting choirs presenting noon concerts in our cathedral regularly. We don’t often hear choirs of your quality, and when we do, we want to make sure they return.” Again, our students realized that the quality of their work was recognized by individuals who know what they were talking about and listening for. Upon our return, I was asked to present a summary of our experience to the faculty and staff at the opening banquet of the school year. I prepared a PowerPoint slide show of pictures of our students performing in the different venues and pictures of them enjoying themselves, all the while playing a recording of one of the selections we performed on the tour. The results were gratifying. But not all of my colleagues approved of my work. At the end of a school year, I was working alone in our building. I, as usual, taught a couple of classes and held regular office hours during the summer term. One afternoon I was sitting in my office grading papers—the rest of the music faculty was away for the summer—when a temporary staff member entered my office to chat. I had enjoyed lunch with this individual and his wife several times throughout the year and felt comfortable with him. The conversation was pleasant for about thirty minutes, but then began to take a very unusual turn. He began to ask about my philosophy of music education and my vision for the choral program. He questioned me about my process of selecting repertoire for the choir, asking why I had chosen certain pieces for the choir to perform the year before, and began to make a few observations on the choir’s performance in general and two particular concerts specifically.

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I am not afraid to hear a legitimate critique of my work or reasoned opinions on my choice of music, but his comments and questions were no longer “legitimate” or “reasoned.” It became apparent after a few minutes of these more intense questions and comments that he was deliberately intending to escalate the conversation into a confrontation of some kind. I began to be alarmed by the intensity of the comments and was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with him in my office. I was looking for a route of escape, but unfortunately he was blocking my only means of egress. He began telling me that “people” didn’t like what I was doing and were saying I was “ruining” the choir. He said he hated the choir’s performance at the state convention meeting and that the college president said to him, “He won’t be around much longer if that kind of music continues.” I responded, “The president told me that we hit a home run with our performance at that year’s convention.” This enraged the staffer. I said to him, “I think our conversation has ended. Thanks for dropping by.” But he refused to leave. I asked him again politely to leave, and he refused. I reminded him that the music building was closed during the summer and only authorized personnel were permitted inside. He angrily replied, “I have the right to be in any building on this campus, and this proves it,” and he forcefully waved his staff ID in my face. Then he said, “And I have a master key to this campus, so I can get in anywhere I want, any time I want.” By this time I feared for my safety. I said, “If you do not leave immediately, I’m going to call the police.” He became physically agitated and again refused to leave my office. I reached for the phone and dialed 911, but before the call was completed, he grabbed for the phone and pulled it off my desk, disconnecting the wire. I was shocked—stunned—I couldn’t move. There was a phone with an extension to my office line on the desk of my work-study student. When my phone was disconnected by the enraged staff member, the extension phone began to ring, because the call apparently had, in fact, gone through. I picked up the extension and reported an intruder in the building. The operator said a police officer would be on the way. When I turned to hang up the phone, the enraged staff member was standing away from the door to my office, so I made a dash for it with the intention of getting in my car and driving away. But I had left the keys to my car on my desk, and he was between the desk and the open door. I was acting by instinct at this point, and quickly guessed that he would follow me out of my office, and that when he did, I could turn around, run back inside, and slam the door, locking him out. The plan almost worked—he followed me out into the hall, and I was able to turn and dash back into my office—but I wasn’t quite fast enough. As I was

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thrusting the door closed, the staff member blocked it with his hand and boot and it popped back open. Then he slapped me across the face, shook his finger in my nose, and said, “I’m talking to you!” I calmly said to him, “This has now changed to an assault. It would be to your benefit to leave now.” He backed up a little, but was still hurling insults at me. I ran to my desk and grabbed my car keys and left the building with my office door wide open. He was following on my heels the entire way to my car, but did not attempt to touch me or say anything. I got in my car and locked the door. He stood with his nose touching the window of the driver side door, staring at me as I backed away and left. I didn’t know what to do at that point. I was afraid to go home for fear that he would follow me there and find out where I lived. I thought about going to the police station, but felt an urgent need to get back and lock my office. I drove around the block a few times checking to see if he was still around, and on my second trip around I spotted him on the opposite side of the campus heading to his school-provided housing. I dashed into my parking spot and ran inside the building, locking the outside door and my office door, and closing my window blinds. I then called the police and reported that the intruder had left the building and that they were no longer needed. I called the chief academic officer of the college and told him what had just happened. I called my department chair and let him know too. After completing this last call, my door abruptly opened. I feared it was the enraged staff member using his master key, but it was the chief academic officer. I relaxed, thinking he was here to comfort me. Instead, the first thing that came out of his mouth was, “Are you going to press charges?” I stared at him in silence. I had just been assaulted by a member of the campus staff, and the first thing this man wanted to know was whether I would press charges. A simple “are you okay?” would have been appropriate at this point, I thought. I answered him, saying, “I’m okay. I don’t know what I’m going to do yet.” He said, “Okay. Well, let me know what you’re going to do. I’ll lock the door again,” and he left. Several days later, one of my colleagues called me on the phone. She had heard about the incident through another colleague and said, “Everything that happened to you, short of the assault, happened to me with this same staff member—the berating, the questioning, the threatening, the physical entrapment, everything.” As for me, I didn’t say anything about it because I didn’t want to cause waves. Several days later, the college president came to my office and asked if I had time to talk. I agreed, and he expressed his regret that the incident had happened. He told me a similar episode had happened with a student, but

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that since it was the end of the semester and the staff member would only be around for a few more weeks, he had decided not to terminate him immediately. The president said that no one had the right to speak for him—that he alone could speak as the president. I then asked him if he had in fact said that I wouldn’t “be around much longer if that kind of music continued.” The president said that while he did say something similar, its intent was to indicate that someone of “my caliber” would not likely wish to remain at our kind of institution for very long, and that I would soon move up and on to a better place. I asked the president specifically, “Do you still want me here?” He responded with a statement that, to me, seemed to be a bit presumptuous: “I’ll be here until I retire and I want you to be here as long as that, and longer.” While I felt that there was some sincerity in his statement, everything inside of me was screaming, “He’s playing on your emotions—he’s lying—don’t believe a word of it.” But I wanted to believe that God had placed me in that institution to help build faithful students into flowering musicians. So I ignored the voice inside and gave him the benefit of the doubt. All of this took a toll on me physical and emotionally, but I assumed that since this was clearly where God had planted me, such was the cost of being faithful to His call. And despite the consistent attacks on my work, I was making inroads with the students. I was sitting in my office after a routine day of work when a student in the choir stopped by on the way out of an instrumental ensemble rehearsal and said, “I won’t be going on the choir tour. I’m going to Russia with the jazz band.” My mind began to work quickly and I realized that the two ensembles shared quite a number of the same students. In addition, my colleagues and I had always tried to work together to avoid scheduling conflicts, so I was shocked that not only had there been serious planning of an international trip without the faculty being aware of it, but that the trip had even been announced to the students. I quickly responded to the student, “No, you’ll be going on the choir tour.” The student was not at all happy with my statement (though, frankly, I couldn’t blame him). A few minutes later, another student came into my office with the same announcement and provided more information. Yes, the jazz band had, in fact, been told that a trip to Russia had been planned, that they would be leaving during the middle of the already-planned choir tour, and that the school would be paying for the trip. I was shocked. The two international tours I had taken the choir on were both after the end of the school year, after commencement exercises had concluded. In both trips, not only did the students pay their own way, but I had been told in the most explicit terms that the college would pay no expenses

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at all. Yet here the school was going to pay the entire cost of the trip for the jazz band, with the exception of fees for expedited passports. The injuries continued to mount. I immediately called the department head and asked if the information I had received from the students was accurate. I was assured that in fact it was accurate. I reminded the chair that the trip was scheduled during the middle of choir tour. The chair responded that yes, he know that, but that the president wanted the jazz band to travel to Russia. I asked again whether he fully realized that the dates of the Russia trip conflicted with the preexisting choir tour. He said that yes, he did know that it conflicted with the choir tour. I then asked why, if he knew that the trip conflicted with the preexisting choir trip, he hadn’t consulted with the faculty, but instead announced it to the students before the faculty knew anything about it. He said that the president was behind this trip, that it was by invitation, and that the members of the choir would be told they couldn’t go because they had an obligation to go on the choir tour. I reminded him that I had already had two members of the choir tell me that they would not be going on the choir tour (which was a requirement of the course) and would instead would be going to Russia. He responded that he would clarify the invitation to the Russia trip at the next rehearsal. I expressed to him my grave concern that this would read badly on my part, that the administration would see me as the self-martyr, and that the choir students in the jazz band would resent my holding them to the course requirement for the choir tour that had been scheduled by mutual agreement a year earlier. He assured me that their intention was not to create a conflict with the choir tour and that he was sure the choir students in the jazz band would understand. I expressed my doubts about the feelings of those students, who would be missing a free trip to Russia during the school term. After my conversation with the department head, a third student entered my office and asked if he could speak with me. This student was a member of both the choir and the jazz band. He expressed his frustration at the situation and stated that he was choosing not to participate in the Russia trip because of the extremely late notice (it was March and the trip was planned for midApril), the fact that passports would have to be expedited (meaning that the students would have to come up with around $300 each and drive to a passport center, the closest of which was 500 miles away in New Orleans, in order to obtain their passports before the trip), and because it directly conflicted with the annual five-day choir tour. I began to suspect that this sudden addition to the performance calendar was inadequately planned and spur-of-the-moment. Knowing from experience how much planning went into an international trip and knowing the individual

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heading up this particular trip, I began to realize that the likelihood of the trip’s happening, even if all expenses were paid, was slim at best. While this realization encouraged me to think the choir tour would take place as planned, my gut was rotting, knowing that this abuse of trust was going to be blamed on me and my “uncooperativeness.” At the next rehearsal of the jazz band, it was announced that members of the choir were not allowed to participate in the Russia trip. As expected (and understandably), several of the choir members were upset. Several days later, the entire trip was cancelled. But for many, the damage was already done. One of the responsibilities of my position was to serve as the coordinator of the music education program. As is often the case in small colleges, the music education program is a hybrid program of study administered somewhat jointly by the music department and the education department. In some situations, this relationship is less than amiable. In ours, I had worked to maintain and foster a cooperative relationship with my colleagues in the education department, and I believe they felt and did the same. We worked together on many projects and were satisfied with our working relationship. One concern of the education department was the need for many education students to take a class geared to a certain “hot button” topic for which their national accrediting agency was adamantly pursuing. My concern was that adding another class to the degree requirements for music education majors would make our program too much more demanding than others; already our music education degree required twenty hours more than other degree programs in the school and ten to fifteen hours more than music education programs at the state schools. This made our program a hard sell for many students. I feared that adding an additional three hours to the degree program would only make the situation worse. I had been working with the chair of the education department to negotiate a way around this new education requirement by covering the content of the course in one of the existing music education courses in our department. While we had reached no firm agreement, the chair and I were both optimistic about the idea, and I felt confident that we had found a way to avert a potentially damaging problem. I was surprised, then, to receive an e-mail from the chair addressed not to me but to a colleague of mine in the music department—I was a “carbon copy” recipient of the e-mail—stating that the chair agreed with my colleague that the new course must be included in the music education curriculum. I, of course, was shocked. I, as coordinator of the music education program, had spent months in dialogue with the chair working to avoid this very situation, only to find that my colleague, without my knowledge, had also been corresponding with the

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chair and that the two of them had come to an agreement about the new course. I immediately called my colleague in the music department and asked to speak with him. He said he was available and I went to his office and asked why he was negotiating with the education department. He said that the course needed to be included and that he thought it was a reasonable request. I stated that, as coordinator of the music education program, it was my responsibility to work with the education department on the degree plan and that I had been working for months to avoid this very outcome and had come to an agreement in principle to allow the music education program to absorb the requirements of this new class in its existing music education courses. I asked why he had involved himself in this situation since it was my responsibility to coordinate the music education program. He said, “Who says you are the coordinator of the music education program?” Shocked, I responded, “My contract says so.” He responded, “No, it doesn’t.” I said, “I am the coordinator of the music education program. Until I am told otherwise, all program decisions regarding the program will be my responsibility alone. With your intervention in this situation, you have hurt our students by now requiring them to add an additional three hours to their already absurdly large degree plan.” I asked that he no longer involve himself in any negotiations with the education department. I next visited the department chair and asked, “Are you wanting someone else to coordinate the music education program?” He stated that no, he didn’t, and asked why. I explained the situation, my work to avoid having to add the new course, my understanding with the education department chair that a way to avoid it was possible, my colleague’s intervention, and the resulting decision to force the music education students to add three more hours to their degree plan. I stated that if he (the chair of the music department) wanted someone else to coordinate the music education program, I was completely happy to give up that responsibility, but I needed to hear the official word from him. The chair stated that I was hired to have responsibility over music education and that I was the only faculty member in the department who had any public school education experience, so I was the only one capable of holding the responsibility. I asked him, then, to send out an e-mail statement to our department stating that I was the coordinator of the music education program and that music education issues should go through me. I then restated that I was happy to give up the responsibility if that was what he wanted. He assured me that no one else would want it. He then sent out the e-mail stating that music education issues should go through me. I received a rather sarcastic e-mail from the interfering colleague addressed to the chair of the education

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department—I was again a “carbon copy” recipient—stating that I had “so eloquently stated” that I was responsible for music education program and that he had acted inappropriately by involving himself in music education program matters. Again I was labeled a troublemaker, and I had learned that fundamentalists take care of their own. In a church school, as well as in a church, fundamentalists will protect each other or their favored ones to the point of absurdity, or until the truth of their collusion becomes so transparent that they cannot continue while saving face. Several incidents illustrate this point. Though I had been charged with bringing the difficulty of the choir music to the college level, I was mindful that the tradition had been skewed so heavily toward standard church-anthem literature that some of my selections would have to be from that genre. As I look back over the repertoire I selected during my seven years, I am embarrassed by some of the choices. I worked diligently to program a diverse and equally representative repertoire each semester, which included all historical periods, as many twentieth century genres as possible, and pieces from the legacy I had inherited. Sadly, the fact that I did present a balanced repertoire was enough to upset some vocal alumni who cheered on my predecessor. In one concert that my predecessor attended, I had programmed a piece that has become a standard of the collegiate repertoire—Daniel Gothroup’s “Sing Me to Heaven.” The text addresses the truth that music is so powerful that its very use can touch the spirit in a way that no other human expression can. The focus of the text is that through song we can be lifted to the heights of human experience into the realm of the spirit. Every college choir of worth has at one point or another performed this piece. As I usually did with most of our selections, I introduced it to our audiences by relating it to the refrain of a familiar hymn: Wonderful, wonderful Jesus, In the heart He implanteth a song; A song of deliverance, of courage, of strength; In the heart He implanteth a song.

After performing “Sing Me to Heaven” at the final concert of the year, my predecessor confronted several of the music faculty with her opinion on my choice of including that particular piece. To my great delight, the entire music faculty supported me and my choice. One colleague, who was the favorite of the administration, went so far as to tell her that his Baptist college choir had sung the piece and that it was thrilling that our choir was performing it too. She then confronted me about the piece and said, “Only you would try to give that lustful song a spiritual meaning,” and walked off in disgust.

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I, of course, realized that most of the negative response from the alumni toward my work with the choir was coming directly from my predecessor. While I expressed my concern to my colleagues, they assured me that I was doing what they wanted and that her influence was not nearly as great as I feared. I wish they had been correct. FUNDAMENTALISTS DEMAND ADHERENCE TO A SET OF UNDEFINED CRITERIA

My goal was not to destroy a choral program, but to build one. I was proud of my Southern Baptist heritage as it was passed down to me through church, college, and seminary. While I could no longer identify with what was becoming the “new heritage,” I felt called to work, to labor to maintain the gift that I had been given. My work to expand the musical experience of our students was an attempt to legitimate our full musical heritage—the music of our own churches and culture (a heritage that had clearly been dishonored by the current generation of leaders), but also the greater musical patrimony of the Christian church as a whole. In a way, I was presenting a “musical gospel”— the good news of how God worked in the lives of those he called to music, in the past and the present—to further and deepen their understand of the God-given art; not to keep great music hidden from them, but to give them the gift of God’s creative genius in the unfamiliar musical expressions they were being denied by culture, society, and church. What I was learning was that: 1. Fundamentalists fear true education, for they seem to believe that serious academic study, even music, equates to liberal (or false) understanding. They prefer not to allow exploration of other thoughts, fearing it will become a slippery slope to losing one’s faith. 2. Fundamentalists have a desperate need for an enemy and will create one if one cannot be found. I became a victim of this. Because I was successful in my work and was developing thinking, spiritual musicians, I became a threat. 3. Fundamentalists focus on the inconsequential at the expense of students, who come to school entrusting it to provide them with an education, not to use them for institutional gain. The music program did not exist to provide students with an education. The music department existed to serve the institution, to provide free entertainment to its constituents so that they would support the institution. The education of the students was inconsequential. 4. Fundamentalism defines higher education differently from the traditions of the Academy. Fundamentalism believes that to teach an idea is to

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endorse it. Fundamentalism would stop the theory of evolution from being taught because if it is allowed to be taught, then it must then be true. 5. The special art of the fundamentalist is the reduction of thought, discipline, and, specifically, music to the level of an emotional trigger word, to be used to elicit a predetermined or pre-programmed response, preventing any serious study that could give knowledge. Fundamentalists provide students with one limited tool—a small, specialized screw driver, so to speak, that is useful in only one very specific situation, instead of making an entire set of screw drivers available to the students so that when confronted with real problems they have a range of tools with which to find solutions. The limitation created here is of the most insidious kind, for while fundamentalists insists they are keeping the students “pure” or away from “temptation” (for we all know how morally repugnant the music of Bach can be), they are in fact hindering the work of God by taking away opportunities for the students to think creatively in solving problems and finding situations. If God choose a path for a student that did not fit into their small musical box, fundamentalists will argue that students will be ill prepared to act on their abilities since they have not been trained to use them. If God chose to move a student in a new direction in their life ministry, they would not be prepared to respond because of limited training and experience. God works through our imaginations to deliver new ideas in His effort to bring others to saving faith in Christ. If our students are only trained in the narrowest of musical expressions, how can we prepare them for the changes in musical taste they will face in their careers? 6. Fundamentalism entails the constant collision of two worlds: education and indoctrination. Education pulls students outside of the narrow evangelical view of worship and draws them into an understanding that worship is for God.

In mid-January 2008, I received an e-mail from the president’s secretary seeking to confirm a meeting with the president on January 31. I became concerned, and with good cause. All of the faculty members that had been terminated during my tenure had been summoned to a meeting with the president on January 31. I immediately went to my department head. I told him about the e-mail, reminded him about the pattern of terminated faculty being called to meet with the president on January 31, and noted that contracts for the next school year would be released on February 1. I then asked, “Are there any plans to terminate me?” The chair stumbled, mentioned that he and the president had been talking, noted that the administration was concerned about enrollment and, in fact, was under pressure from the trustees to address the enrollment issue. I asked, “So, are you telling me that the president is blaming

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me for our declining enrollment?” The chair gave an inconclusive response. I asked again, “Is my contract going to be renewed?” The chair skirted answering the question directly, staying that he didn’t know anything about it and that if I were going to be terminated, he, as chair of the department, would know about it. I found his answers to my direct questions unsatisfying. I left the meeting with his assurance that he would call the president to find out. I returned to my office and wrote back to the president’s secretary, asking the purpose of the meeting. She responded telling me that she didn’t know and that the president had asked her to make an appointment with me. I then e-mailed the president asking for an agenda for the meeting. He responded by stating, “There is nothing you need to prepare for the meeting.” Several days later, the chair of our department asked to speak with me. He said that he did, in fact, know that the president sought my termination, and that that he and the president had been discussing it over the fall semester. I reminded the chair that I had asked him a direct question—was I going to be terminated?—and he said he didn’t know anything about it. The chair hung his head and said, “I’m so sorry, Mark.” I reminded him that he had also once sabotaged my effort to achieve tenure, and that if he hadn’t played with my career in that way, I wouldn’t be in this situation. The chair didn’t respond. I spoke with a faculty colleague who had supported me in my application for tenure. He encouraged me to speak with the chair of the appeals committee and, once the inevitable occurred, to begin the process of appealing the termination. I met with this trusted man and was assured that there was an appeals process, that the president would tell me that there wasn’t, but that numerous faculty and staff had appealed using the process outlined in the school’s policies and procedures manual. While I didn’t think I would be successful, I found it heartening to know that there was at least a process for it. I meet with the president and the provost on January 31, 2008. The meeting was short. The president informed me that the administration had decided to do some “retooling” in the department of music, and because of that my contract would not be renewed. I asked why and was told, “I don’t have to tell you why. Georgia is a right-to-work state.” I asked, “What kind of retooling are you going to be doing?” He responded, “I don’t have to tell you about that.” I then stated that I had been a dedicated member of the faculty, had created a choral program that simply didn’t exist before I came, and that I deserved to know why I was being terminated. The president raised his voice and said, “I told you I don’t have to tell you why. Georgia is a right-to-work state; we don’t have to tell you anything.” After a pause, he stated that the provost might have something to add. I turned to the provost and said, “Why am I being terminated?” The provost shifted in his

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seat and simply said, “I have nothing more to add to what the president said.” I stated to the president that I had already met with the chair of the appeals committee and that I would be mounting an appeal. The president assured me that there was no right of appeal in the policies and procedures manual. He then stated that I had done “good work” with the choir, but reminded me that I was still under contract for the remainder of this academic year and that I would be expected to fulfill my duties as assigned. I was shocked at the insinuation that I would become a slacker and not fulfill my commitment to our students. I assured him in the most definitive terms that I would not be sacrificing our students or their learning. I then stood up, shook both their hands, and departed. At the next rehearsal of our concert choir, I announced to the students the administration’s decision to terminate me and their desire to do “retooling” in the music department. Although when they asked what “retooling” meant, I told them I had no idea, that I was told essentially it was none of my business. Really, we all knew what it meant. The attempt to bring musical legitimacy and literacy to the college was being dealt a swift and eventually fatal blow. Our students, of course, were the ultimate victims. In the ensuing days, a number of faculty, administrators, staff, alumni, and students sought to meet with the president to advocate for my reinstatement. I received several calls from colleagues encouraging me to appeal the president’s decision. I spoke again with the chair of the appeals committee and told him that the president had stated that I did not have the right to appeal. He told me he would meet with the president to discuss the matter. Several days later, the chair of the appeals committee told me, “I took a copy of the appeals policy to the president and had him read it to me. He said ‘I guess it can be interpreted to mean employees have the right to appeal.’” The chair of the appeals committee stated that he would be looking forward to receiving my appeal. As I began to write my appeal, I was slowed by the difficult task of making my case for reinstatement, since I didn’t know why I was being terminated and that I had been denied the opportunity to hear and address the reasons. In a conversation with a trustee who had recently rotated off the board, I realized that I would have to address the issues brought up with the president’s meetings with the alumni and faculty. The trustee asked that I send this list of reasons and any comments I had as to their accuracy or validity. I did as requested and used the list of reasons for my dismissal as the basis for my subsequent appeal. Once completed, my appeal contained over 300 pages of text and supplementary materials. I was easily able to debunk all the reasons given by the

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president for my termination and I addressed head-on the issue of appropriate choral literature. I delivered the 3-inch binder to the chair of the appeals committee and waited to hear their decision. The group of alumni, faculty, staff, students, and administrators who supported my appeal grew in number and diversity and began working diligently to present another appeal directly to the board of trustees. At some point, the group decided to send their appeal to the board in a letter expressing their displeasure at my termination and requesting its overturn. Once this decision had been reached, there was debate among the group about whether the letter should be signed or sent anonymously. The decision was made to send the letter anonymously. In addition, they decided to document a pattern of abusive and inconsistent personnel decisions by the president in an effort to place my situation as simply another in a long line of unchecked abuses of executive power. The letter quickly changed from a letter of appeal to a letter of denunciation. After these developments, one of the participants in the group came to me and informed me of further developments. Whereas I had assumed that the appeal would be a personal presentation to the board in a meeting, I was told by this individual that the appeal would now be in the form of a letter and would be sent to all trustees, faculty, staff, and students. From past experience, I didn’t have complete trust in this person’s judgment or their ability to understand complex situations. Having heard this report, I found it to be too absurd to believe. I had complete confidence in the individuals working on my behalf and I trusted their judgment. I simply said to this informant, “A letter? I thought you were going to meet with the trustees.” The informant repeated that a letter would be sent. I thanked this person for the information, not willing to trust what I had just heard. I found myself perplexed at this bit of news. An appeal to the board of trustees from my colleagues and our alumni could be beneficial to my cause. As the situation stood, the only official communication with the trustees was through the office of the president. Without providing additional information to the trustees, the president would be able to state his case for my termination without challenge, and the trustees, most of whom were selected by the president, would, naturally, back him. Without outside input and an understanding of the respect I held in the eyes of young alumni and my colleagues, there would be no fair representation of my case. On the other hand, if what I had just heard were true, the trustees would likely completely dismiss the letter, regardless of the accuracy of the information it contained. I decided not to involve myself in the letter issue. I did not want the president to be able to present an inaccurate picture of my service to the college without

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challenge. I spoke with one of my colleagues, who I knew was working on my behalf about this information. He confirmed that they had decided to send a letter. He asked if I wanted them to go ahead with their appeal. I explained my reasons why it was important that accurate information about my tenure with and service to the college be presented to the trustees by alumni and colleagues. He assured me that the letter would do just that. The letters were received by the trustees and all other recipients with noncampus addresses on the Monday before the annual spring trustee meeting. The letters sent to campus mailboxes were somewhat delayed after they left the local federal post office to be delivered to the campus, but before they were distributed by the campus post office. Because of this, I did not receive a copy of the letter. While the senders were investigating the disappearance of the posts to campus mailboxes, I began receiving calls in my office offering corroboration of the information contained in the letter, giving words of encouragement, and expressing disgust for the current administration. Many said, “I had no idea you were terminated.” The letters were received on Monday of the week of the trustees’ spring meeting. The appeals committee met on Wednesday of that week and denied my appeal, not on the grounds of its merit, but rather because I had no right of appeal under the policy I had cited. On the next day, one of the first acts of the meeting of the board of trustees was to rescind the policy I used to appeal and replace it with a new policy clearly indicating that faculty did not have the right to appeal termination.1 .

NOTE 1. When all was said and done, Mr. Bowdidge was terminated, an exile cast out by the fundamentalist leadership of his college community.

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A WANDERING ARAMEAN Martin Davis

hile driving home one evening from football practice, my younger son asked me a pointed question that I was unprepared for. “Dad, why don’t we go to church?” It is a defining question. I didn’t have a defining answer. I could have told him my story of being raised in the Southern Baptist church, attending seminary to become a minister, and leaving after a year in a crisis of faith so severe—brought on in no small part by the fundamentalist takeover of the denomination—that it would be more than a decade before I could darken the door of any church again. Alternately, I could have touched a discussion about the ways we do embrace religious life in our household and explained that this is how we now do church. Either would have placed our talk on a high road. Instead, I chose a low road. “We don’t go,” I calmly replied, “because you and your brother don’t enjoy going, and your mother and I get tired of begging you to go with us.” Putting the person who asks the hard question on the defensive is a classic debating tactic—a sure way to steer the conversation away from a topic one doesn’t want to address. My eleven-year-old son, accustomed to doing battle in the trenches along the offensive and defensive lines, wasn’t going to back down meekly in the face of a rhetorical device. “But dad,” he replied, “it’s important to you and I know it makes you sad that you don’t go.” “We’ll talk about it another time,” I said, conceding defeat and licking my wounds. The balance of the ride home was quiet.

W

*** When Carl Kell asked me to write my story of exile, my thoughts returned to the conversation I had with my son. If I had no answer for him that night— what could I say to readers I might meet?

MARTIN DAVIS

In many ways, my story resembles the ones many of you share. It involves anger over being told I was no longer welcomed among those I’d spent my life with and given my heart to. Pain over being ostracized, realizing in my aloneness how intimately my life was wrapped up with the Baptist church and her people. Embarrassment that my family members were targeted by those I long believed to be friends, “friends” who attempted to leverage my family relationships to get me back on the “right” path. Fear that leaving had an eternal consequence that I would never be able to undo. Fortunately, my story has also involved rebirth into wholeness. I’ve been able to piece together another way of living into faith that isn’t built upon the broken shards of pottery that were my life from the mid-1980s, when I left the church, to the mid-1990s when I reclaimed a relationship with God that, though unorthodox to many, has restored the floor in my life. If my story is to have any meaning, I decided, it would be in how I’ve managed to put those years behind me and live into my present reality. This does not mean that the pain and hurt don’t resurface—they often do. In fact, I admit to delaying Kell twice on this project. The pain of revisiting this piece of my past is real; it involves wounds that do not heal. Rather, they are wounds I’ve learned to live with. Much as when people lose a close friend or relative to death, one never “gets over it.” One does learn to live with it. But in so living, your life is forever changed. THE ROAD

The road back to faith began, as it does for many young adults, with the birth of my first child. As I stood in the delivery room, encouraging my wife and watching with awe as he emerged into the world, I felt for the first time, since leaving active church life, a sense of genuine awe. For all the difficulties and hurts that life inside the Southern Baptist Convention ultimately left me with, it’s equally true that there were more than a few moments in which the presence of God was palpable; a presence that always produced in me this sense of awe. It is a fleeting experience, defined more by what it is not than what it is. It is not, at least in my case, hearing the voice of God or seeing God. Nor is it a charismatic experience in which God acted through me. Rather, it was more a sense of feeling truly connected to the larger world around me. The Buddhists refer to this experience as nirvana, the moment when you cannot discern where your physical being ends and the earth’s essence begins. Medieval mystics described awe as union with Christ.

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However one chooses to express the experience of awe, most agree that it is fleeting. As if the moment one becomes conscious it is occurring, the sense evaporates. For that moment, as our first-born came into this world, I felt for the first time in over a decade the presence of God with me and around me. For that brief moment, I felt myself keenly aware of the energy we call life, which both preceded me and was now being transferred to the next generation. In the days and months that followed, my wife and I talked about engaging again a faith community; a place where we could interact with the Spirit of God; a place to give our son the same grounding in faith that was again bringing us comfort. But passing on to him the same faith that had so destroyed me in early adulthood was never a consideration. We opted for the Episcopal Church. There was much therein that appealed to all of us. The ritual, in particular, captured my imagination. The use of liturgy was a warm reminder of just how much of the Bible we’d never been exposed to in a church that trusted the minister to be moved by the Spirit to the right texts for each week—texts which seemed to always, always, always come from Paul’s letters and the Gospel of John. The distinctive place and position of the priest was also a welcome change of pace for me. It was a pleasure to be led in worship by people who not only understood scripture, but were trained in church history, hermeneutics, and theology. People who were as comfortable introducing the poetry of Robert Frost or the essays of Mark Twain into the sermons as the Torah, Psalms, and Gospels. The comfort did not last. By the end of our second year in this congregation in South Carolina, where I was pursuing doctoral work, many of the demons that spelled destruction in the Baptist world were rearing their heads. Bitter divides between parishioners on the interpretation of scripture (literal or otherwise); a rising tide of anti-intellectualism among some leaders in the congregation; and at the denominational level, the ugly politics of leaders using money to force individual communities to yield to their directives. Eventually, these tensions led to a split in the Episcopal Church between those moderates who retained the Episcopal label, and the conservatives who adopted the Anglican position. We did not hang around long enough to witness the divide firsthand. The memories of what we endured in the Baptist church told us the best option for us would be to get away and search for another house of worship. What we could not appreciate at the time was how the scars of those battles in the Baptist tradition prevented us from seeing the aspects of the Episcopal tradition that had nurtured us for two years. A respect for the truth that women have as much access to God as men, and have every right to lead.

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A biblical tradition grounded in the text, respectful of both God and God’s voice contained therein, as well as the role of the writers in shaping the text in very human, flawed ways. And a commitment to delivering the Kingdom of God on earth not through doctrines of salvation, but through hospitality and social justice and care for those less fortunate than ourselves. So to the road we returned. THE SHELTER

For the next two years, we went from house to house in search of a congregation we could call home. As at our Episcopal congregation, however, the memories and scars from our formative years in the Baptist tradition continued to make it difficult for us to settle down. Our ears had grown tinny—all references to the Bible sounded like literalism, even though they weren’t. Any talk of God was laced, in our minds, with the sounds of hell and vengeance, even though no such references were intended. We began believing we would never find a place to shelter. But we did— a United Methodist congregation near our home whose minister seemed to understand where we were at. We met by chance over Labor Day. We talked honestly for an hour. I shared my struggles, my hurts, my distrust of religious leadership, and we were welcomed. Our family embraced the United Methodist tradition. More to the point, we embraced the community. We attended church regularly; we became involved in community outreach through feeding programs and caring for shutins; youth group activities became important for our then-young boys. Our guards dropped. When our daughter was born in 2003, our return to the church became complete. We had her baptized and had a special blessing bestowed on our two sons. The ritual of baptism is a purely communal experience. And my time at the Methodist congregation taught me to appreciate this. Far from the teachings of my youth in which baptism was an act that sealed the salvific covenant, baptizing our daughter was a covenantal promise that we would raise her in the ways of the Christian church, and in turn the congregation would support us in her walk through adulthood. Shortly thereafter, I assumed leadership positions in the congregation—we had indeed come home to the Christian church. Over the next three years, however, the relationship began to crumble. The details matter little. It fit a familiar pattern—congregational tensions over how to interpret the scriptures were the spark. Our guards were back up; it

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took time, but we again realized that we could not stay within the community. As before, our inability to cope with the tension led us to leave the church suddenly. A move that surprised our minister as well as the members of the Sunday school class I was then teaching. This time, however, when we left, we left for good. We were no longer going to look for a church in which to settle. We were leaving the brick-andmortar congregations—not the world of faith. We had become what a Pew Survey calls the “nones”; people unwilling to attend church or synagogue, but mostly committed to faith and a pursuit of God. (Less than 5 percent of nones self-describe as atheists.) Social media certainly helped this transition. As a professional writer by day, I did what most every writer does in my spare time—I turned to blogging. My squibs about faith and God and the practice of belief in a world that to all appearances is becoming “post-congregational” struck a nerve at the site I named simply FaithAndFumbles. I soon learned that I was hardly alone. As readership grew, I began to realize just how many people there were who’d fought the same fight. They were conservatives and liberals; Jews and Christians; men and women; young and old. Each had given up on the congregation as a brick-and-mortar answer to their spiritual quest. Over the following years, I received calls from readers asking me to pray with and for them; e-mails from people who wanted someone who understood even a little of what it was like to be ostracized from a community of faith to share their experiences. I came to see something quite distinctive about the people I was dealing with. They were not looking for a support group. They weren’t interested in rehashing the past over, and over, and over again. They wanted to find people with whom to share their experience of God and faith without the heavy hand of doctrine hanging over their heads. A WANDERER

For one brief moment since leaving our Methodist congregation, I wanted to give congregational life a final chance. We found the opportunity, quite serendipitously, at a Baptist congregation near my house, whose Vacation Bible School my daughter had been asked to attend. We attended occasionally for about a year. I became friends with the minister—a good man, well educated, and passionate about the work of the ministry. We finally left. Not because we were forced, not because of some uproar in the congregation, but because we came to peace with faith and the path the faith journey had taken us on.

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Now twenty-five years since leaving seminary, I have come to realize that it is in walking that I experience God. The path I walk goes by many houses of worship, but those houses are shelters along the way. They are no longer the objects I strive to settle in. My friends have a difficult time understanding this, and I understand why. It’s unorthodox, it doesn’t come with certainty, and it isn’t easy. I do feel closest to God walking along the path; I don’t have any greater insight into the divine mysteries than those who feel closest to God in congregations enjoy. I don’t harbor contempt or hatred toward the Southern Baptist church. I was raised in it. It was there that I learned under a minister who taught me the Gospel of John and the Letters of Paul, as well as the poetry of Robert Frost and Walt Whitman. And he taught me the story of the Wandering Aramean. “Then you shall declare before the LORD your God: ‘My father was a wandering Aramean, and he went down into Egypt with a few people and lived there and became a great nation, powerful and numerous.’” (Deut. 25:6, NIV) The expression is unique in scripture, and it is ancient, which explains why it is no throwaway line. Its rendering and meaning are, of course, greatly debated. But the words themselves resonate at a primal level within not just me, but scholars and ministers alike through the millennia who have wrestled with how to understand it. It resonates, I believe, because every age has known its wanderers. The wanderer is a central figure in many folktales and stories. They are good and evil, righteous, and troubled. They are, like all of us, human. They’ve simply been called to a wandering existence. Our souls are not troubled; they are inquisitive pieces of us locked in the flow of eternity. We have the privilege of falling into the current for a brief time; we explore and gather and learn and share; and like everyone else, we eventually leave. That is the story that I will share with my children. It is a fortunate trip I have been blessed with. It was born of pain, but then, most things worth discovering are birthed from pain. For years, I disliked the source of my pain; I fought against it, and I allowed it to cloud my view of many great spiritual experiences in this society. Today, I enjoy the journey. I relish the diversity of religious life, the conversations I have with people across the spectrum of the American landscape as they share their stories with me. My younger son and I will turn back to this conversation of why we don’t go to church. This time, I will take the high road. Yes, I had some very bad experiences early in my faith walk; yes, I was deeply hurt by people I trusted. But there are few people in this world who have not experienced something

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like this. It can be your undoing, or it can be your door to a better shelter for you. In my case, it opened another door; a door that few are privileged to walk through. Why don’t we attend church? I’ll tell my son that he may answer honestly and with joy: a Wandering Aramean was my father.

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EDITOR’S NOTEBOOK From Exiled: Voices to The Exiled Generations

The biblical source for the title of Martin Davis’s essay A Wandering Aramean can be found in Deuteronomy 26:5. There are as many versions of the legend of the Wandering Jew as there are cultures and countries where the story took root. The version selected for inclusion in The Exiled Generations, as an extension of Martin’s essay, seems to best capture all of the available stories. Writing for Encyclopedia Mythica, Jared Surin, 05 September 1998; last modified on 08 April 2001—MCMXCV—MMIX Encyclopedia Mythica, summarizes the central elements of the story: The Wandering Jew, also known as Ahasverus or Buttadaeus, was given the curse of immortality by Jesus Christ. As Christ was carrying his heavy cross from Pilate’s hall and towards his place of crucifixion, Ahasverus, then a porter in Pilate’s service, struck Christ, and mocked him for walking so slowly. Christ, in turn, told the insolent porter to wait for his return, that is, until the Second Coming. In some versions of the tale, Ahasverus is an officer of the Sanhedrin (an order of Jewish priests); in others, he is merely a shoemaker with a quick temper. Whatever his origins, all version of his tale agree that the Wandering Jew soon repented of his sins and was baptized Catholic. He grows old in the normal fashion until reaching one hundred whereupon he sheds his skin and rejuvenates to the age of thirty. The Middle Ages abound with sightings of the Wandering Jew, generally telling his story in turn for meager food and lodging, sometimes even undergoing tests of authenticity by local professors and academic figures. Encounters with the Wandering Jew occurred all throughout Europe—during the Middle Ages, there were sightings in Armenia, Poland, Moscow, and virtually every Western European city including London. By the nineteenth century, sightings of the Wandering Jew were largely attributed to imposters and madmen. In the 1840’s, he reappeared in New England, although this time only in literary form, in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s A Vertuoso’s Collection and A Select Party (both stories originally published in magazines but later collected in Mosses from an Old Manse, 1846). In both stories, Hawthorne departs from the traditional depiction of the Wandering Jew as a world-weary penitent and instead outlines more of a cynical, earthy figure. At

EDITOR’S NOTEBOOK

the same time, Gustave Dore created a series of elegant woodcuts, The Legend of the Wandering Jew (1856), probably the finest portrayal of the traditional myth.1

Martin’s essay is reflective of all of the contributors for Exiled: Voices and The Exiled Generations who are scattered and adrift from their former denominational home. To be sure, all have moved on, some never to return. Such is the life of a Southern Baptist exile. In Exiled: Voices as well as The Exiled Generations, the fate of the Southern Baptist exile, as that of the Wandering Jew, will be that they will somehow outlive the present and future generations of the Southern Baptist Convention, if not in real years, then in religious time. There will come a day when the rhetorical power of Baptist exiles will produce a collective voice with a timeless message—there is a gender equity of spiritual discernment, celebrated by worship, both inside and outside a building dedicated to God. NOTE 1. “Wandering Jew” created on 05 September 1998; last modified on 08 April 2001 (Revision 2). 312 words. http:://www.pantheon.org/articles/w/wandering_jew.html. © MCMXCV—MMIXX Encyclopedia Mythica™. All rights reserved.

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POSTSCRIPT CRAFTING A NEW BAPTIST NARRATIVE Molly T. Marshall

I think I have been looking for real Baptists all my life! Little did First Baptist Church Muskogee, Oklahoma, know that allowing girls to carry the Bible in the VBS procession might give them ideas about opening it—or thinking that when we sang “Wherever He Leads I’ll Go” that I might think it meant girls, too! From the time that the “boys only” sign was hung on the door of the Ministerial Association at Oklahoma Baptist University to the “keep out sign” hung on the door of the School of Theology at Southern Seminary, I have been looking for a hospitable space for sisters as well as brothers. It is time for a new Baptist narrative. We all know that the SBC did not treat its daughters very kindly. The first year that I taught theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1984, the dean received an inquiry: “Have you run out of intelligent men to teach our ‘preacher boys’?” Were I not such a sweet Christian I would have offered a two-word response: “Years ago.” I am convinced that the strides women had made scared fundamentalists, and one’s perspective on the role of women in ministry became the litmus test for one’s fidelity to the inerrant word. Women were threatening, to be sure. Why, the Foreign Mission Board even tried to commandeer the identity of a dead woman—Lottie Moon—and wrest her “brand” away from WMU. I had been fed up before, but that was too much! It prompted me to send to Delanna O’Brien, then the executive director, a suggestion for a new WMU anthem: “When Men Go to Hell, Who Cares.” Written by E. M. Bartlett (who also wrote “Victory in Jesus”) before the days of inclusive language, it was an old mission hymn. I sent in good humor to suggest that the fight over Lottie was really about male control of all things related to Southern Baptist life. Actually, Lottie Moon’s story has been revised to reflect a more appropriately docile Southern woman.1 This epoch in Baptists south of the ecclesial Mason-Dixon Line reflected larger sociocultural movements in American religion. During the 1970s, “More

MOLLY T. MARSHALL

and more Evangelicals rallied to socially conservative causes,” Ross Douthat observes.2 Southern Baptists, as a part of this larger movement of resistance to progressive political, social, and theological issues, began to betray principled Baptist values as they sought to suppress views that threatened patriarchal hegemony. In this brief essay, I want to explore how the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship has offered a context to craft a new Baptist narrative. While it is not the only new expression of Baptist identity that ensued after the cessation of fundamentalist-moderate internecine conflict, it is the one I know best. I also will probe areas where this expression of Baptist identity needs to become more courageous in its theology and its practice. CBF AS SANCTUARY FOR HEALING

Some of us came to CBF rather beat up. We were tired of being called heretics, skunks, infidels, theologically bankrupt, etc. We needed a new spiritual home place. I do remember the first gathering in 1991; how grateful I was to connect with people of like mind. The ministry of dissent—a great Baptist spiritual practice—was illumined as we found one another. We recognized one another as persons of reflective faith. We recognized the creeping creedalism for what it was—a dangerous threat to Baptist identity. We recognized that God would tend our battered hearts and set us to new horizons. We recognized a future, with hope. We could be a new kind of Baptists. The challenge for the CBF movement has been that the founding membership arrived with such a profound sense of institutional and personal loss that we revisited that narrative at the expense of some really fresh ideas. A sanctuary for healing is important; however, it can become reactive or insular—or both. Trusting new leadership who generationally were not a part of “the controversy” has taken longer than perhaps it should. CBF AS NEW BAPTIST NARRATIVE

For many, the term Baptist equates with being a Southern Baptist. This ignores years of American Baptist identity, historic Black Baptist traditions, as well as global Baptists. Perhaps you have been in the position to offer the following disclaimer: “But I am not that kind of Baptist Baptist”—meaning other than a Southern Baptist. The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship has preserved the goodness of the name “Baptist” for those no longer willing to be identified with the SBC.

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Postscript

During the spring of 1995 (after I had been thrown from the Southern train which had decided to travel on a narrow gauge into the past), I spent a great deal of my time speaking at state CBF meetings. I guess everybody knew I needed a job and might be available to come and speak. I believe my engagement with those fledgling groups kept my sense of vocation alive. There were the stirrings of the Spirit and vibrant hope as the varied expressions of CBF took flight. Those were heady days, indeed. Twenty years of freedom and innovation have allowed us to tell a new story of grace and promise. No longer a part of a denominational behemoth, Cooperative Baptists have learned that small and excellent can be used in the same sentence. We have learned that vulnerability and even financial fragility are media preferred by God—who became small and dependent, too. Entering the world, sustained only by a slender umbilical cord, Jesus cried: “Take care of me.” Baptists have a unique identity that our world needs. The kinds of freedom and Gospel accountability that define our story are good news, truly. CBF AS MOVEMENT OF THE SPIRIT

The greatest need of CBF persons today, in my judgment, is to trust that God’s Spirit continues to guide and empower for ministry. It is a challenge shared with the ancient church; Luke and Paul were writing about the Spirit in different epochs, addressing different ecclesial needs. Paul wrote to temper the enthusiasm of young mission churches whose excessive claims for the Spirit threatened a coherent witness. Luke, writing in a later period, was urging churches that had lost their missionary zeal to seek the Spirit.3 The Spirit works in freedom, calling the church and society to new forms of service in the world. In a day when participation in congregational life is in rapid decline,4 freedom-loving Baptists must make a compelling case for the role that the gathered community plays as a transformative agent of the Spirit. Discerning the movement of the Spirit remains a demanding spiritual practice, in early Christianity and now. I have found these questions helpful in guiding the process. 1. Is the pathway we sense the Spirit to be prompting a way to live the Gospel more fully? CBF has been at its best when it has lived into the reality of being the presence of Christ—in Helena, Arkansas; in Thailand; in Prague; in Owsley County, Kentucky; in Slovakia; in Shawnee, Kansas. CBF has matured in learning to go as well as send. Going as learners and friends—

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rather than as experts—has allowed sustainable relationships that are reciprocal and post-colonial. Living the Gospel more fully is quite concrete at times; while Nancy Ammerman noted in Baptist Battles5 that moderates were a bit more cerebral than some of our Baptist kinfolk, we know how to pick up a hammer and shovel, too. (Well . . . maybe some of us do. My late husband, Douglas, used to say: “Don’t hurt your head, Molly. You can’t do anything else!”) 2. Will this new pathway require more faith, more hope, more love? It was a bold vision that prompted CBF to become a new movement. Not only did the Fellowship want to find ways to do mission with greater humility (when you don’t own a lot of stuff, it requires more faith), CBF also knew that our future required new forms of theological education. And so new seminaries were birthed, what Craddock likes to call “the education wing of the church.” CBF has yet to birth an ovarium, but it will come, I am sure! It is a profoundly hopeful task to start new things and trust that God will prosper our work. It also calls us to love deeply. (How thankful I am for those who love Central Baptist Theological Seminary—an old school become new.) St. John of the Cross wrote: “In the evening of life, we will be judged on love alone.” Yet, hope and faith undergird love, all gifts of the Spirit. 3. Are we persuaded that we cannot do this new work in our own strength? The Spirit usually nudges us toward what will require radical dependence upon divine assistance. At our best, Baptists discern that as unaccompanied ministry founders, the Spirit opens the presence of God to us and makes us present to God and one another. Holy work requires divine provision. William Carey’s famous “Expect great things from God; attempt great things for God” was inspired. He had the right order. The Spirit nudges us toward horizons that move us beyond “confiding in our strength.” We should stretch toward those goals that call us to do our best—yet require the power of the Spirit to accomplish. For Baptists to continue as a vital expression of Christian faith, we must grow bolder in our mission. It is not that churches have asked too much of members; I believe they have asked too little! Nothing less than seeking the embodiment of the Reign of God in our day can summon radical faith and action. 4. Will this pathway of the Spirit challenge old perceptions of how God is at work in the world? God’s Trinitarian history in the world with humanity is ever unfolding newness. God gets bored with the same old methods, even the same old forms . . . new wineskins, indeed! One of the things we know about the Spirit is that human barriers and boundaries do not constrain; rather, the Spirit regularly transgresses such arbitrary constructions. Some of the places where the Spirit is nudging us seem rather clear:

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Postscript Issues of Human Sexuality. We must talk about how humans are wonderfully and fearfully made; recently in April 2012 CBF and Mercer University hosted a conference on sexuality and covenant. The respectful and forthright conversation is a step forward, in my judgment. Baptist churches dare not be silent amidst lively cultural discourse about shifting understandings of what constitutes a Christian sexual ethic. Issues of Gender. My heart rises as I hear daughters prophesying and renewing the church. CBF has been intentional in inscribing methods to ensure female and male balance in the national leadership structures of CBF. The next step is for the various regional leaders to be more proactive in their placement of assistance, advocating for women as able pastors. Issues of Liturgy and the Arts. Baptists are becoming more liturgical and more attentive to the arts. We are learning that the Christian year offers an interpretive framework that invites spiritual formation. We are learning that ritual and aesthetic richness can touch humans deeply. “Religious affections” (Jonathan Edwards’s term) find new expressions as worship reclaims some of the common pre-Reformation heritage of the church. Issues of Interfaith Learning and Partnership. Where else is the Spirit at work? Surely the Spirit is more than the “stealth weapon of the church,” and we must acknowledge that every longing for God is prompted by the Spirit. Not only are we called to work diligently toward ecumenical initiatives for the common good, but we must find ways to strengthen respectful approaches to the dynamism of other ways of faith. A part of Baptist DNA, at least from the Anabaptist wing, is appreciation for the essential unity of all persons with the “two Adams.” This inclusive vision of the extent of Christ’s work could prompt new approaches to other ways of faith.6 Other horizons we cannot yet fathom are in the Spirit’s purview; in due season we will be nudged toward them.

5. Will my community of faith grow in maturity by following this guidance of the Spirit? St. John of the Cross observed that sometimes God steps back so that we have to trust new ways of discerning God’s presence and guidance. The old familiar modes no longer work, and we are called to a greater depth of trust. Faith communities flourish by missional engagement, as we all know. This action-reflection model is transformative, and it calls us to have “the mind of Christ”—thinking not just about our own things, but the things of others. Good things can happen when we are on our knees—planting, painting, and praying. It is also easier to hug children from that position. 6. Will redeeming expressions of grace and mercy flow from following this pathway? How easy it is to forget that Jesus’s ministry was all about inclusion; unlike other religious leaders in his day, he practiced a “politics of compassion” rather than a “politics of holiness,” to use Marcus Borg’s insight.7 Demonstrating grace and mercy mark us as true followers. Poverty and Transformation Ministries of CBF propel us toward the “least of

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these.” With them, we learn of God’s preferential option for the poor— those who know their need of grace and mercy. 7. Will this action be an authentic expression of Baptist identity as well as participation in the Reign of God? God is making all things new! An ecclesial tradition draws from the wells of its heritage, but it is a living, dynamic way of faith. The Spirit continues to call Baptists to new forms of engagement, transgressing limits of human invention. The new Baptist narrative will be more global, more missional, and more pneumatological. May we discern God’s holy nudge and act accordingly. NOTES 1. See the perceptive new work by Regina D. Sullivan, Lottie Moon: A Southern Baptist Missionary to China in History and Legend (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011). 2. Ross Douthat, Bad Religion: How We Became A Nation of Heretics (New York: Free Press, 2012), 113. 3. See my Joining the Dance: A Theology of the Spirit (Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 2003), 120. Perhaps contemporary Baptists are akin to the church in Luke’s time, needing reassurance that the Spirit empowers for vibrant ministry in our day. 4. See the recent assessment by Mark Chaves, American Religion: Contemporary Trends (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). By his calculation, about 25 percent of Americans regularly attend services of worship. 5. Nancy Tatom Ammerman, Baptist Battles: Social Change and Religious Conflict in the Southern Baptist Convention (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 129ff. 6. Melchior Hofmann most clearly expressed this appreciative view. See my No Salvation Outside the Church? A Critical Inquiry (Lewiston, ME: Edwin Mellen Press, 1993), 66. 7. See his book Jesus, A New Vision: Spirit, Culture, and the Life of Discipleship (San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, 1987).

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Appendix 1 MOLLY MARSHALL A WOMAN OF FAITH AND COURAGE Pamela R. Durso

“Molly has been a gift and joy in my life. . . . It is not easy to be a church leader and a woman. It never has been. Even so, Molly has made a path where there was none. Thanks be to God for her courage,” wrote Diana Garland, chair of the Social Work Department at Baylor University, of her longtime friend and former colleague Molly Marshall.1 Another former colleague, Robert Shippey, now associate professor of religion at Shorter College, described Marshall as “a caring individual whose pastoral sensitivities perfectly blended with her scholarly mind. She has been a pioneer paving the way for others to follow—not just female students aspiring to her stature—but for all of us who have valued Baptist liberty, Christian compassion, and integrity.”2 Throughout her ministry as a Baptist educator and minister, Molly Marshall, professor of theology and spiritual formation and acting academic dean at Central Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City, Kansas, has modeled servant leadership for her students, her church members, her friends, and her admirers. She has written widely, especially in the areas of theology, women’s issues, and spiritual formation. She has preached in churches throughout the country and lectured on seminary and college campuses and at academic meetings. For the past twenty years, she has invested herself in the lives of young ministers and has challenged them to examine their theological beliefs and to live out their faith. Despite her academic giftedness, her commitment to the gospel, and her compassionate spirit, Marshall encountered discrimination and intolerance within the Baptist world. As she faced these difficult situations, Marshall demonstrated extraordinary strength of character and self-control, and she remained a Baptist. In 1999, she wrote, “Being Baptist has basically been the same as being alive for me.”3 Today, she continues to be a Baptist— “out of conscience and hope.”4 Growing up in a Baptist family in northeastern Oklahoma shaped the kind of Baptist that Molly Marshall has become. Her maternal greatgrandfather, W.S. Wiley, a Baptist preacher and field missionary for the American Baptist Publication Society, traveled in a covered wagon from Illinois to

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the Oklahoma Territory. He rode horseback throughout the territory, starting Sunday schools, planting churches, and preaching to the Native Americans. Of her great-grandfather, Marshall wrote that his “sermons and speeches (of which I have many) evince a great joy in helping create new communities of faith among the Cherokees, Choctaws, Creeks, Chickasaws, and Delawares. From reading these simple notes he left behind I have learned that being Baptist is not a narrow, judgmental endeavor; but an inclusive gathering of varied family members into a large house.”5 From her great-grandfather, Marshall also discovered that Baptists believed in proclaiming the gospel to all people, supporting missions, and committing themselves to the mandate of the Great Commission. Attending a Baptist church in her hometown of Muskogee, Oklahoma, also shaped the kind of Baptist Marshall has become. That church, First Baptist, was organized by the faculty of Bacone College, a school founded for and committed to the education of Native Americans. In its early years, the church was aligned with both the Northern and Southern Baptist Conventions; and although the dual alignment came to an end in 1913, the church’s heritage reflected an openness to embrace and work with the extended Baptist family. First Baptist was in many ways a typical Southern Baptist church, expecting its members to attend regularly—twice on Sunday, once on Wednesday, and every night during revival weeks—and Marshall was a faithful member. Baptized at age eight, she participated in Sunday school and Training Union, gave her money to the Lottie Moon and Annie Armstrong Mission Offerings, and attended GA’s (Girl’s Auxiliary) where she learned the history of Southern Baptist missions and memorized all pertinent facts about the SBC’s mission enterprises. Along with the other girls in her church, Marshall learned that “the highest calling a Southern Baptist girl could hope to receive was that God wanted her to forsake all and go to a foreign country to serve.”6 At the age of fourteen, Marshall recognized that God had extended a calling to her. Because few Baptist females served in ministry positions in Oklahoma during the 1960s and because opportunities for women in ministry were limited, it is no surprise that as a young teenager, she felt that her only options for being faithful to her calling were to be a missionary, marry a preacher, or serve the church through ministry with youth.7 Of the three options available to her, Marshall believed that God had called her to work with young people. To prepare for a ministry with youth, Marshall enrolled in Oklahoma Baptist University at Shawnee, Oklahoma. There she studied with Rowena

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Strickland, a woman serving as professor of Bible. Marshall saw for the first time the possibility that women could serve in non-traditional ways. She also discovered other young women who were following God’s call into ministry, including Diana Garland, who lived down the hall in her freshman dorm. During Marshall’s years in college, the women’s movement in the United States expanded the educational and career possibilities for women. Women throughout America were enrolling in graduate programs in record numbers and were competing for professional level positions in the business world. Women even had more employment options within Southern Baptist churches. Although they were not being hired to pastor churches, women were now serving on church staffs, mainly as youth and children’s ministers. This new openness to women in Southern Baptist life provided Marshall with opportunities for ministry. In the summers of her college years, she served as youth minister at three churches: Valley Baptist Church in Lutherville, Maryland; First Baptist Church of Cushing, Oklahoma; and First Baptist Church of Comanche, Texas. After completing her undergraduate degree, Marshall headed in 1973 to Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. While working on a master of divinity degree at Southern, Marshall served as the associate campus minister for Jefferson Community College in Louisville, Kentucky; in the summer of 1974, she went to Jerusalem as a summer missionary. In 1976, with a master of divinity degree in hand, Marshall left Louisville and moved to Little Rock, Arkansas, where she spent two years serving as minister of youth and single adults at Pulaski Heights Baptist Church. This ministry experience helped Marshall to formulate an understanding of vocation and to recognize that her vocational call was to the ministry of teaching. While serving at Pulaski Heights, Marshall “figured out that it had to get better at the seminary—meaning a new understanding and advocacy for women in ministry—before it would get better in the churches.”8 Given her new understanding of vocation and the earlier encouragement she had received from some of her male professors, Marshall took the next logical step. In 1979, she enrolled in the doctoral program at Southern. The program proved to be an excellent experience for her and allowed her to broaden her theological boundaries. She did her external work with John A.T. Robinson at Cambridge, and he encouraged her “to venture theologically.”9 Such encouragement led her to focus her dissertation on issues of religious pluralism. The topic and title of her dissertation, “No Salvation Outside the Church? A Critical Inquiry,” resulted in Marshall being labeled a universalist by Southern’s trustees. Christopher Chapman, pastor of Knollwood

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Baptist Church in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, recalled a discussion of Marshall’s dissertation by Southern’s Board of Trustees. The business at hand was a consideration of tenure for Molly MarshallGreen, Professor of Christian Theology, and the conversation focused upon Molly’s doctoral dissertation, which addressed the question of how Christian theology should regard people who lived before the time of Jesus or have lived since the time of Jesus but have never heard of him. Since Molly did not conclude that all of these people were necessarily eternally damned, some of the trustees were troubled. They confused Molly’s ideas with universalism, the notion that all people will be saved, which was not what she was saying. And they viewed this to be a threat to the distinctiveness of the Christian witness, which they argued hinged on one’s belief in the depravity of humanity and the efficacy of the cross. In any event, there was a misunderstanding, and in the heat of the dialogue, one trustee asked, “Dr. Marshall-Green, do you believe in the total depravity of man?” After a brief pause, Molly replied, “Yes . . . and a few women, too!”10 Like Chapman, Marshall believed that the labeling of her theological position as that of universalism was unwarranted and was the result of “guilt by association” since universalism was one of the most compelling arguments of her mentor, John Robinson.11 Midway through the doctoral program, Marshall married Douglas Green, a family physician. At the time of their marriage in 1981, Green had been widowed and had three grown children. Today, Marshall describes him as “my most faithful friend and support through the years of denominational controversy. He believes in my vocation and daily works to sustain what he deems an important ministry in theological education.”12 As Marshall neared the completion of the doctoral program, St. Matthews Baptist Church in Louisville ordained her to the gospel ministry on May 11, 1983. A few weeks later, she became the pastor of Jordan Baptist Church, a small, rural church in Sanders, Kentucky. In December of that year, Marshall graduated from Southern, becoming one of the first Baptist women to earn a doctoral degree and to be ordained. Marshall’s academic success and pastoral experience, however, made her a target for criticism. Just as the seminary trustees had questioned her dissertation, Baptist leaders now questioned her right to lead a church. At the 1984 Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) meeting, Southern Baptist leaders responded to her hiring and to the increasing numbers of women in Southern Baptist life who were articulating their call to ministry, by adopting a resolution: Therefore, be it Resolved, That we not decide concerns of Christian doctrine and practice by modern cultural, sociological, and ecclesiastical trends or by

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Appendix 1. Molly Marshall emotional factors; that we remind ourselves of the dearly bought Baptist principle of the final authority of Scripture in matters of faith and conduct; and that we encourage the service of women in all aspects of church life and work other than pastoral functions and leadership roles entailing ordination.13

Despite the SBC’s resolution and despite criticism of Marshall’s pastoral ministry, Roy Honeycutt, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, offered her a teaching position; in January 1984, she began her new ministry of teaching. Her hiring stirred up controversy within the seminary community. Some of Marshall’s students rebelled against her presence by reporting what she said in class to denominational leaders. Despite the early criticisms of Marshall, she proved to be a successful classroom teacher and an effective seminary administrator. Mark Medley, her student at Southern and now associate professor of theology at Campbellsville University in Campbellsville, Kentucky, summed up the feelings of many of Marshall’s students at Southern: In the classroom and in the life of the gathered people of God, Molly has incarnated a contagious passion for theology. With integrity and boldness, she has challenged many students and “pew people” with the cost of cruciform living. Moreover, she has incarnated the prophetic and dissenting character of our Baptist heritage in so many countless ways. She has been and continues to be “a voice crying in the wilderness” for the integrity of our tradition. On a personal note, whether in her classroom, sitting in a rocking chair in her office, or through email correspondence, Molly has been a guide in more ways than she realizes. Her theological acumen, grace, wit and passion for truth has my deepest admiration. If I can be half the teacher and mentor she has been to me (and other students), then I will consider my vocational calling as a professor a success. Molly has been, and continues to be, my mentor, teacher, colleague, and sister in Christ.14

In 1988, Southern rewarded her good work by naming her associate dean of the School of Theology. By this time, fundamentalists controlled the SBC, and convention leaders were slowly replacing members of Southern’s trustee board with fundamentalists. Trustees forced Honeycutt to retire in 1993 and then elected a young fundamentalist, Albert Mohler Jr., as the new president of the seminary. Shortly after his election, Mohler stated publically, “Without apology, we are hoping that in the classroom we are expecting that all those who are added to this faculty will uphold that the pastorate is a male office and though we support women in ministry, we do not believe women should serve as pastor.”15 Marshall and a few other women responded by organizing a protest. They invited women to fill the seminary chapel’s balcony, where they stood, silently, during an hour-long service, demonstrating their objections to

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the hiring of Mohler and to the trustee commitment that no one supporting female pastors would be hired as faculty.16 During the next year, Mohler carefully built a case that Marshall’s teachings and beliefs conflicted with the school’s doctrinal statement, the Abstract of Principles. Trustees accused Marshall of teaching outside of the Abstract’s doctrines on God, election, and biblical authority.17 Yet, the central problem with Marshall’s teaching seemed to be her stance on women pastors, a stance that defied the SBC’s prohibition of women serving in this position, and Marshall was surely “guilty” of supporting women in all forms of ministry. Over the years, Marshall has written much about the role of women in the church. As a doctoral student, she wrote in 1983, “The longer I study the Scriptures, the more convinced I become of the bedrock theological support for women being afforded equal access to all positions of vocational ministry. . . . The church has, for too long, ignored or denigrated the movement of the Spirit gifting women for all forms of ministry.”18 As a professor at Southern, she wrote in 1986, “I firmly believe that advocating the unhindered role of women in ministry is a thoroughly Baptistic viewpoint. Indeed, our theology demands it! It is time that we lay appropriate claim to our Baptist heritage.”19 Marshall’s writings challenged the SBC’s stance against women pastors, and she believed that it was this outspoken advocacy of women in ministry that made her a threat to the new administration at Southern. Throughout 1994, the pressure on her to resign increased. She recalled the events of that summer: I was informed this past summer in June after the SBC had convened that I needed to be prepared to resign or the president would press charges for my dismissal at the fall trustee meeting. I asked what the charges were, and our system is such that you don’t have to say what they are until you actually file them, and so the allegation it appeared was that I was teaching outside our confessional document that is the Abstract of Principles. I had only had one conversation with the president about my teaching. On March 16, I spent an hour and a half with him in the presence of the academic vice president David Dockery, and he questioned me about my writings, whether or not I perceived that they were within the Abstract. I said I did. No student has ever accused me of teaching outside the Abstract. He was rather noncommittal. He didn’t say, “You are outside the Abstract” Evidently it was a just an investigation. A couple of months later I hadn’t heard anything and the vice president told me that the president had evidently assumed that I was outside the Abstracts and that I need to be disposed of.20

A campaign was mounted within the seminary to force Marshall out. Letters, flyers, and booklets critical of her teaching appeared in Southern students’ mailboxes. Excerpts of her lectures were taken out of context

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and publicized on campus.21 The administration eventually gave Marshall an ultimatum: She must resign by August 19, 1994, or the president would file charges against her. David Dockery informed her that the administration had “the vote and the will to fire” her.22 Yet, Marshall chose to delay her resignation for several months because she did not want to abandon doctoral students whose dissertations she was directing. She noted, “I want to be remembered as a person who put the interests of her students above ‘proving a point’ theologically.”23 By late 1994, Marshall recognized that she could not win this battle: “I decided given the ultimatum that there really was no future for me here [at Southern],” and on December 31, she submitted her resignation. Four months later, on April 19, 1995, hundreds of students and faculty gathered on the grounds of Southern to protest the curbing of free speech in Southern’s classrooms and the coerced resignation of Marshall and other faculty members.24 At the SBC meeting in Atlanta that summer, Mohler defended what had occurred at Southern, stating: “It is change, but not change for the sake of change, but change for the cause of truth of the gospel, integrity, and confession. Such change is costly but the failure to make sure change is more costly still. It is to forfeit our calling and our convictions.”25 Following the traumatic events of 1994, Marshall moved on. In 1995, she began her tenure at Central Baptist Theological Seminary, first serving as visiting professor of theology, worship, and spiritual formation. Central named her professor of theology and spiritual formation in 1997, making her the first female tenured professor at the seminary. That same year, the American Baptist Churches, Inc. extended Marshall the privilege of call, which meant that they recognized her ordination. Of that experience, she wrote, “To seek privilege of call among American Baptists was an expression of liberty of conscience for me. Identifying with a constellation of congregations who prize diversity, the leadership of women, and social justice seemed the right thing to do; given my family history, it was a logical homecoming for me.”26 One of Marshall’s former students, Jerrod H. Hugenot, appreciated her willingness to embrace her “Baptistness.” As a Baptist, Molly works for the preservation of historic Baptist principles. She moves within many circles of the Baptist tradition, advocating change and reacquainting Baptist folk with their rich and diverse history. Molly is a needed presence in the fragmented landscape of Baptist life in America. She is a person who will be important in fostering an ongoing and needed dialogue between American Baptist Churches USA, the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, and the Alliance of Baptists. In a time in which Baptist identity is being challenged or in danger of being diluted, Molly

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Marshall reminds us not to lose sight of the freedoms that have sustained the Baptist tradition.27 Marshall continues to nurture young ministers, and she continues to model servant leadership for her students, her fellow church members, her friends, and her colleagues. David Tonghou Ngong, one of her former students at Central who is now working on a Ph.D. at Baylor University, found Marshall to be “a graceful melange of the theological scholar and the pastor, the teacher who teaches by example and the compassionate friend. I do not know how it would be received here in the United States but in the Cameroon context I would call her mother, for that is the kind of mentor she has been to me.”28 Central’s chief operating officer and vice president for development, Constance McNeill, in describing Marshall, wrote: Molly is a person of courageous convictions. She is both compelled and bounded by her convictions whether in the classroom with students, in the midst of a congregation, or around the meal table with colleagues, friends and family. I knew this about Molly before I knew Molly. She was a courageous role model for Southern Baptist women called to vocational ministry but who did not find many opportunities to live it out within Southern Baptist life. She continues to serve as a role model of courageous conviction for women and men called to vocational ministry within the larger ecumenical Christian community.29 For over twenty years, Marshall has been a well-known and much-loved role model for Baptist women, including me. During my college years, I read with great interest her writings in Folio, the publication of a new organization known as Southern Baptist Women in Ministry. During my years in seminary and then in the doctoral program at Baylor University, I continued to follow her career through news reports and her writings. Although I have never heard her lecture or preach and have never met her, Marshall mirrored what I saw her living out, and I gained strength from knowing that she was faithfully following God’s leadership. Marshall has served as a model of courage and faith for hundreds of other women and men, who, like me, have not had the opportunity to sit in her classroom or listen to her sermons.

Today, Molly Marshall continues to be a source of hope for many Baptists. She challenges us to embrace new pathways for ministry, and she reminds us that a new day has come for Baptist women called by God to ministry. She prompts us to remember that: The fresh wind of the Spirit in Baptist life today is evident in the influx of women serving on church staffs and the unprecedented number of women graduating from seminary and seeking pastorates. More daunting, yet increasingly more common, is the emergence of women as church planters. Birthing new churches as an expression of their pastoral midwifery, these Baptists are constructing creative new patterns of Christian community. Many of us greet this move as a significant sign of ecclesial renewal; that is, the last barrier to full inclusion is being traversed. In calling women as pastors, churches are finally

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Appendix 1. Molly Marshall living out the encompassing implication of our baptismal vows. “All are one in Christ Jesus”; therefore, the church must receive her daughters “for such a time as this.”30

Pamela R. Durso is Executive Director of Baptist Women in Ministry, Atlanta, Georgia. NOTES 1. Diana Garland, e-mail message to author, March 3, 2004. 2. Robert C. Shippey Jr., e-mail message to author, March 10, 2004. 3. Molly T. Marshall, “A Baptist by Conscience: A Baptist in Hope,” Why I Am a Baptist: Reflections on Being Baptist in the 21st Century, ed. Cecil P. Staton (Macon: Smyth & Helwys, 1999), 89. 4. Ibid., 90. 5. Molly T. Marshall, “A House with Many Rooms,” Baptists Today 19, no. 5 (May 2001), 33. 6. Molly T. Marshall, “The Changing Face of Baptist Discipleship,” Review and Expositor 95, no. 1 (Winter, 1998), 60. 7. Molly T. Marshall, e-mail message to author, April 3, 2004. 8. Ibid., March 4, 2004. 9. Ibid. 10. Christopher C. F. Chapman, “Is God a Universalist?” Knollwood Baptist Church, Winston-Salem, NC (August 18, 2002), www.knollwood.org/Sermons/sermon%20 for%208-18-02.doc (accessed March 26, 2004). 11. Molly T. Marshall, e-mail message to author, March 4, 2004. 12. Ibid. 13. Annual, Southern Baptist Convention, 1984, 65. 14. Mark Medley, e-mail message to author, April 5, 2004. 15. “Battle for the Minds,” video, produced and directed by Steven Lipscomb (Hohokus, NJ: New Day Films, 1997). 16. Mark Wiebe, “Pioneer Preacher Molly Marshall Keeps Advocating an Equal Role for Women in the Church,” Kansas City Star, March 23, 1997: Metropolitan Section, page 6; Molly T. Marshall, e-mail message to author, April 3, 2004. 17. “Battle for the Minds.” 18. Molly Marshall-Green, “Women in Ministry: A Biblical Theology,” Folio 1, no. 2 (Fall 1983), 1. 19. Molly Marshall, “Toward Encompassing Theological Vision for Women in Light of Baptist Tradition,” Folio 4, no. 2 (Autumn 1986), 1. 20. “Battle for the Minds.” 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23. Linda McKinnish Bridges, “Molly Truman Marshall,” Encyclopedia of Religious Controversies in the United States, eds. George H. Shriver and Bill J. Leonard (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997). 279. 143

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24. “Battle for the Minds.” 25. Ibid. 26. Marshall, “A House with Many Rooms,” 33. 27. Jerrod H. Hugenot, e-mail message to author, April 2, 2004. 28. David Tonghou Ngong, e-mail message to author, March 30, 2004. 29. Constance McNeill, e-mail message to author, March 26, 2004. 30. Marshall, “A Baptist by Conscience: A Baptist in Hope,” 91.

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Appendix 2 DEEP IN THE HEART OF TEXAS Don Wilkey Jr.

Editor’s Note: Finally, as you read Don Wilkey Jr’s essay, you will understand why it does not appear in the flow of essays in the book. Don’s work is featured as a commissioned essay, i.e., a story to link the historical and on-going struggle on the state level, in the biggest Southern Baptist state of them all—Texas, as it continues today. A full-scale study of Missouri and Texas Baptists, roiled in legal battles and back-room Sunday-night pastor search committees, begs to be researched and told. These two states’ stories of Baptist politics from a bygone era, presently at work on a local and state level, are the stuff of a researcher’s dream. Don Wilkey Jr. is a sentinel—a light on a hill—a storyteller unparalleled who writes from “Deep in the Heart of Texas.” His essay is the first entry in an untold story—the takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1980 now calibrated to work on the state level in the twenty-first century. The continuing saga of Southern Baptists at war with themselves and the culture in which they live will not die.

YESTERDAY . . .

It’s about Texas; the same folks who took over the Southern Baptist Convention sought to do the same in Texas. In 1995, efforts to take over the Texas Convention were set into motion. Later on, Rick Scarborough was their candidate and ran against Dr. Charles Wade. Wade won easily, with a series of defeats prompting the fundamentalist camp in the state convention to make plans to pull out. Scarborough went on to take over Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority. Today he seeks to connect churches with right wing political activity. He wants pastors to organize their church body around a GOP candidate. In 1998, the fundamentalist convention got organized. Their next decade was spent in seeking to convince churches to leave the Baptist General Convention of Texas to join their group. (Hereinafter, the Baptist General Convention of Texas will be referred to as BGCT.) Several thousand churches did leave the Baptist General Convention of Texas. Their arguments focused on convincing people to leave the original state convention. They said that the

DON WILKEY JR.

BGCT would not oppose the homosexual lifestyle and believed the Bible had errors. Most of the men who bought into this system did not know the BGCT had taken positions time and time again against the homosexual lifestyle. The men who led their churches to leave by and large did not know the inerrancy argument was about the original autographs of the Bible. They did not know the leading fundamentalists in the SBC had always believed some of the passages in the modern Bible were not inspired. Common sense says it takes a great deal of concern for a church to leave a convention with which it’s had a long history. Fantastic stories filled with what I call “spiritual McCarthyism” are still used to draw these churches away from their historic past with the BGCT. Ken Chafin once said Baptists often can’t tell the difference between the fireman and the arsonist. I would like to see myself as a fireman. After the splinter group left the Baptist General Convention of Texas, the organization began to sail in new directions in the vast sea of options. It became quickly evident that they would navigate to uncharted waters that the group they had departed from had never traveled. What I have gleaned from their movement is what I read from the paper they send out to Texas churches. Their editorial opinions and news emphasis tends to represent the group’s leanings. The first note of difference I see is evidenced by their ethical stances. Their luggage is not unlike most religious right ventures in the nation. For one, they back Intelligent Design and its introduction into public education. Though most groups in the nation see this agenda as a backdoor way of pushing creationism into public schools, the new fundamentalist denomination, Southern Baptists of Texas, finds the idea inviting.1 Their predictable stance on the Terri Schiavo case is another footnote to the theorem. Articles announced, “Terri was sitting up in her lounge chair, dressed and looking alert and well. . . . Terri’s eyes widened and she was obviously very pleased.” The article claimed the writer joked with Terri and Terri tried to speak to the author. All the while, the article alleges, Terri’s husband was going to kill her.2 Most other Baptist groups stayed away from such controversy, which tended to end up with the autopsy refuting the claims contained in the story. The SBTC’s newspaper editor stated that capital punishment is a biblical mandate.3 Not only does the editor like capital punishment, he thinks the war with Iraq is a good idea. He even went so far as to claim that pacifism is a pagan idea. The peace people were equated with the far left in the editorial who was defined as a “thoughtless, wholly emotional effort based on bad theology.”4 The SBC endorsed the war with Iraq and one of the paper’s issues devoted print to justifying the now unpopular war. The paper assured readers

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the war is not wrongly motivated, “no matter what spin the liberal media may put on it. It is a war to secure peace.” The paper carried quotes from SBC officials backing President Bush’s decision to go to war claiming the war met and exceeded requirements for a “Just War.”5 (Quotation marks mine.) When Secretary of Education Head Rod Paige suggested that he would send his children to private Christian schools, the paper gave a “thumbs up” to the national official. They then took a stab at the Baptist Joint Committee for being “radical separationists.”6 Another issue that shared the spotlight was an SBC seminary president who claimed, in effect, that white women needed to be having more children. The strange social agenda was promoted that birth rates have decreased among “cultures that birthed the modern world.”7 Such statements drew charges of racism in the nation, but there were no apologies forthcoming from a convention that openly courts Black and Hispanic churches. Texas fundamentalist Baptists are joined at the hip to the SBC’s controversial Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. This organization, known as the ERLC, has a reputation among groups who monitor the religious right. The ERLC openly criticizes the Baptist General Convention of Texas and enjoys the warm embrace of the SBTC. SBTC writers believe the national convention was pro-choice until they rescued it and staffed the ERLC with their people.8 In the past, ethics leaders in Baptist life claimed to only speak “to” and not “for” Baptists in their organizations. In a radical departure in protocol, the new viewpoint is speaking “for” the majority.9 This brings up intriguing issues if your ethical leadership only reflects majority opinion. Richard Land, then the head of the ERLC, accused Texan Foy Valentine of being a leader with offensive ethical positions. The BGCT once honored Foy for his leadership in Christian ethics. Foy was Land’s predecessor. SBTC writers allege that Foy headed a liberal agency which was out of step with majority viewpoints held at the time.10 (Foy’s organization was the agency in power during the Civil Rights legislation.) Richard Land is linked to the religious right by the nation’s media. There are also other relationships with individuals and movements that never in the past occupied Baptist life as they do with SBTC people. Historically, Baptists have supported public education. To SBTC viewpoints, sending children to public schools is like sending them to be “educated by the Chaldeans.” Rather than being a bright light in the public school arena, the new convention sees the schools as bringing down students, like “the enemy who winds up infecting our kids.” The answer for this phenomenon is to start homeschooling children or ordering the new literature available at their publishing house for church schools.11

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At annual SBTC meetings, people who were archenemies of the old BGCT are now honored. Two such cases are noted at the 2005 meeting at which judge Paul Pressler handed religious right activist Skeet Workman a reward for her activism.12 Skeet, a rancher who ran on the GOP ticket for Congress, was once an editor of the fundamentalist paper. She is a homeschooler who was given a high rating by Gun Owners of America when she ran for office supporting the GOP redistricting plan in Texas. Skeet made the news a few years back when she attacked the BGCT-linked Buckners Benevolences. Buckners shared a platform on teen pregnancy with Planned Parenthood. Planned Parenthood is the total accumulation of all evil, according to these mindsets. The paper highlighted the fact that the Baylor president was linked to Planned Parenthood. The October 25, 2004, paper carried an honoring article and picture of religious right activist Ed McAteer.13 Ed had wanted President Bush to appoint him ambassador to Israel so that Israel could occupy ancient Biblical boundaries. Linked to the John Birch Society, McAteer put together the 1980 religious right gathering that drew ministers into supporting Ronald Reagan. The SBTC papers often portray Democratic national candidates in a negative light and honor Republican politicians, which generates no surprise that President Bush sent them an official greeting at their 2003 annual meeting.14 Perhaps the most radical course change is in the realm of church and state. Paper editor Gary Ledbetter wants the government to allow churches to engage in political electioneering with no impact on their tax-exempt status.15 The editor supports HR 235, which not only allows churches to endorse candidates, but the congregation can use a good portion of its budgets for political campaigns. The tax-exempt law dates back to a conflict between a Dallas First Baptist member and Senator LBJ. It was no irony that the paper carried an article from a deacon at First Baptist Dallas claiming Johnson’s agenda was to limit free speech.16 Though most Baptists in Texas appear to be horrified at a sight such as a minister publically endorsing a candidate from the pulpit or church newsletters backing politicians, Land and Ledbetter find the idea inviting and accuse the government of suppressing religious freedom. With their viewpoints on church and state, it will be no surprise that the cover of the newspaper featured a picture of Jay Sekulow, who makes over $700,000 a year defending their viewpoints on the First Amendment.17 Jay is the archenemy of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, an organization founded in a Baptist office, enjoying a long history of Baptist support. The annual meeting of their convention often features Pastor Dwight McKissic, who worked with the Texas Restoration Project. This project encouraged churches to register voters through ushers during the morning worship services. Executive Secretary of the SBTC Jim Richards spoke at a Restoration

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gathering. Richards sees separation of church and state as only applying to the state’s interference in the church and not vice versa. He then suggested the readers “vote Biblical principles,” which as his friend Jerry Falwell says, means people will vote for George Bush.18 Ledbetter weighed in on the argument, suggesting it was okay for tax money to flow to religious organizations, a viewpoint that causes our Baptist forefathers to shutter in disbelief. He writes off his critics on this issue as just “liberal groups.” Gary explains his position on the nation’s leaders who don’t want government support coming to religious organizations: “It is not religion being rejected by one side of our current debates; it is God himself.”19 To sum up SBTC’s viewpoint on church and state, one need only go to Ronnie Yarber’s assessment in his editorial. He concludes that the Wedgewood Baptist Church in Fort Worth suffered its catastrophic tragedy (a gunman slew several worshippers), because the government prevents the teaching of Biblical values.20 Not only has the new convention taken a diminishing view of religious liberty, the group continues to fall under the umbrella of the most extreme right in its views on American culture. The Southern Baptists of Texas Convention appears to be waging an allout war against public education. In 2006, they sponsored home-school conferences in both Dallas and Houston. Many articles in their publications address their fear of public education and its harmful impact on Texas students.21 Baptist Press, their official version of the news, carried a story calling a recent letter from pastors supporting public education a political ploy sponsored by a “liberal group.”22 Gary Ledbetter, the editor of their newspaper has been open regarding his disgust with public education. He writes that a generation of college students have been taught that the “great men” view of history is a flawed description of dead white men. Teaching, he added, is not objective and should not be. He insists that efforts to exalt biblical truth in every discipline are worthwhile. Truth is truth after all, he writes. A biblical worldview is thus necessary. Ledbetter writes that there is an agenda against America’s Founding Fathers and we should oppose such anti-intellectual views.23 This editor supports the efforts of fellow patron David Barton who wants Texas school books to leave out mentioning Cesar Chavez, Colin Powell, and Justice Thurgood Marshall for being too radical. Under their Culture Watch program, leaders like Russell Moore, a professor at Southern Seminary, are quoted. Moore told his audience they needed to “outbreed the Mormons . . .”24 Part of the home-school movement is tied to the “Quiverfull” theology, i.e., this group wants female Christians to have as many offspring as possible.

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Tammi, SBTC’s editor’s wife, published an article in their newspaper about Attorney Shelby Sharpe speaking at the Texas Seminary in Fort Worth. The attorney fired up the audience by claiming there were many in the country who are now criminally prosecuted for being Christians in America. He made that comment before declaring that the Supreme Court had declared the country officially a Christian nation. The lawyer told the future preachers to remember their marching orders and not be afraid of the loss of their 501c3 tax status. He told his listeners, as the official attorney of the SBTC, that we are to have this culture to live in obedience to every command of God. No human law should contradict biblical law, he advised. He added that now scriptures are considered hate crimes by legislators. He finished by telling the crowd, “There are occasions when you have to kick some folks out of some places where they don’t need to be. You do it forcefully.”25 Ledbetter warned his warriors that there are attempts by some to lead a Marxist overthrow of the government in the name of the Christian faith. He notes these “redistribution” folks want to create a new America. Gary suggests the leftist folks in the nation want to make Christianity a mandate for bigger government. As true fundamentalists believe, the less government the better.26 Right wing talk radio hosts are open with their fear that the Obama administration will enforce a so-called “fairness doctrine.” Such a law would make sure that both sides of a view are expressed over the air to have an open forum. Radio hosts from the right see this as an attempt to censor their programs, which, for the most part, present a narrow view. SBTC writers agree with the radio hosts that this is an attempt to muzzle free speech. Ledbetter and friends come from a rich history of silencing critics and ending the careers of journalists who do not see things their way. Kelly Boggs, writing a viewpoint about this in their journal, suggests this fairness doctrine was a mere attempt to promote the “illusion of total public support of their whacked-out legislation.”27 A frequent expert on national affairs to the crowd is Richard Land. Land noted that Justice Sotomayer used the courts to slap the face of male firefighters by allowing a black to be picked over them in the famous court decision. Land suggested her gender and national origins would hamper her opinions in the court.28 Some moderate Baptists appear to make belief in global warming a sign of maturity. On the other hand, Kelly Boggs had his chance to weigh in on the topic. Kelly wrote, “The evidence is starting to reveal the theory of manmade global warming is naked—it has no clothes.”59 When Kelly and fellow fundamentalist journalists have a rally, they invite folks like Marvin Olasky

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to lead. Olasky, a home-school promoter, is also tied to Dominion theology and anti-separation of church and state views.30 Biographers tell us that the earlier political campaigns of George Wallace had a simple plan. He promised the crowd the moon and hollered N#@%*$. It worked, and the people responded in Alabama until a more mature electorate caught on. A late Fort Worth journalist claimed the same agenda was taking place in Texas using gays as a political tool. He argued that one could make the case that SBTC followers are homophobic. It appears locally that Joseph McCarthy-like tactics regarding homosexuals are used to recruit new churches. Headlines of many articles declare the Democratic Party’s affirmation of gays, whicb GOP leaders show none of. President Obama is often linked to homosexual agendas.31 SBTC papers had at least two articles claiming that a hate crimes bill would mean pastors could be arrested for taking a stand against homosexual unions.32 This position is often repeated in the circles of the religious right, but mainstream journalists have written more than once that it is not true. David Barton told an audience I was in that pastors can now be arrested for reading portions of the Book of Romans from the pulpit. Editor Ledbetter shared his opinion on Broadway Church in Fort Worth. He believed the Broadway Church should have been banished from the national convention because it was found to have had some members who were probably gay.33 The church voted that they did not accept the gay lifestyle as morally or Biblically right. Their interim pastor and current pastor both said they did not support or endorse the gay lifestyle. Ledbetter said the church was to be held accountable because they happened to have had some in their church. He also mentioned the idea of adulterer’s being in a church as not being acceptable. Thus, by logic, any church that had an adulterer on the membership role was subject to be ousted. The prospect of church leaders hiding in the hallway to catch a homosexual act or face denominational discipline appears rather odd. PRESENT DAY . . .

Texas fundamentalist Baptists have continued their onslaught of right wing dogma as the nation nears the 2012 elections. Jordan Lorence, a counsel for the Alliance Defense Fund, was quoted in a summer 2011 issue of the paper, saying that the ADF is the organization seeking to enlist churches in defying tax laws and endorsing political candidates from the pulpit. In 2010, Richard Land teamed up with David Barton for a conference that ran a half-page ad in the paper in support of this position.34 In August of 2011, Texas governor Perry called a national prayer conference. Such a convening by a current seated governor raised eyebrows from

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First Amendment groups around the nation. Moderate Baptist papers voiced a word of caution concerning such a hosting. It was no surprise that the fundamentalist paper posted a favorable article.35 With historical echoes to the call, the staff of the paper also carried an item about the new head of a seminary in Arlington, Texas, founded by the religious right activist of the early twenties, J. Frank Norris.36 Sinclair Lewis wrote an award-winning novel that was turned into a movie called Elmer Gantry. The novel was based on the life of Norris. Texas made headlines around the nation during this time regarding their state school board. The board was stacked with ultra-extremists. Board members wanted to bash separation of church and state, delete stories about Thomas Jefferson, and leave out minority figures in the history books. The nation’s historians sounded warnings around the country. Gary Ledbetter praised the efforts of the board. He wrote, “We need to hear more than one view of FDR’s New Deal.” He also noted the McCarthy movement “was not all paranoia.” Ledbetter and friends advocate an extreme form of laissez-faire economics, which believes FDR promoted socialism.37 SBTC leaders appear to be pleased that Baylor University hired Kenneth Starr as their head. Starr, who made his fame as lead counsel in the impeachment trial of Bill Clinton, was also a big tobacco lawyer. According to the leadership in SBTC, Starr needs to deal with an apostate faculty which is too secular. Starr, who is not a Baptist, was given an endorsement by state fundamentalist leadership.38 Ledbetter wrote that he had even less respect for Jimmy Carter than Clinton. He noted Carter was “arguably the worst U.S. President of the past 100 years . . .”39 As evidenced in this essay, the fundamentalist state convention uses smear tactics against the rival Baptist General Convention of Texas. One classic illustration is their use of homophobic stories. The BGCT has for decades taken the stance that it does not endorse or affirm the gay lifestyle. Churches welcomed guilt-by-association to accuse their competition of what is considered the unforgivable sin in these ranks. When a Fort Worth church left the BGCT because it was leaning toward affirming homosexuals, the chief officer of the BGCT lamented the historic tie to the famous church. Fundamentalists used the quote from the director Randal Everett to make it appear, in highlighted print, that he was sympathetic to the church and its views on gays. This was false. Local churches have had pastors who told the congregations the BGCT would not take a stand on homosexuals. Printed materials are often used to spread unfounded rumors.40 One thing the right wing convention is not shy about is publishing its view on women. A glowing article about Dorothy Patterson, highlighting her homemaker calling, was published. She called herself a helper to her husband

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and her job was not as an author or seminary professor. It was her influence that led to the firing of a seminary professor because she was a woman and was teaching church history to men. To those who disagreed, Patterson boasted, “they argue with scripture and God and not us.” In February 2011, an issue of the paper stated the correct interpretation of the 2000 Baptist Faith and Message. According to their official version, women were not to teach a class with men in it. There are cases where women could be allowed to teach under the authority of her husband or her pastor.41 Such a stance makes most Baptist churches in violation. Banning women from leading committees or serving as messengers seems apparent. That is, unless they are under the authority of their pastor or husband. One Southern politician, who was also a Southern Baptist, took the position that there should be only one vote per household. The male would vote for the entire family. It appears if their wishes are met, the new fundamentalist convention in Texas would like a world like this. Which all goes to prove how it is becoming harder to reach young families with church dogma like this. CONCLUSION

In 1979, I attended the annual meeting in Houston that led to the fundamentalist change that overwhelmed the Southern Baptist Convention. Adrian Rogers was elected president, to the surprise of observers. He was never involved much in Southern Baptist life and created his own seminary, which he promoted instead of those in the Convention. He was basically known as an independent Baptist. I heard the report on the election and was shocked at the results. Behind me in the convention meeting sat a professor from Southwestern Seminary, the seminary I had just graduated from a few years before. As a young pastor, I wanted his take on the startling news. He just sloughed off the vote as a mere pendulum swing that moved back and forth from left and right in the organization; it was nothing to be concerned about. His analysis proved to be the greatest underestimation of a Baptist movement in the history of Baptists. Agency heads sought to assure people in the pew that things were just fine and the Convention work would continue on as usual. I recall being assured by staff at the then-Christian Life Commission that I was not to worry because a negotiated peace would fuel the day. I recall more than once being told that the new head of the CLC was far out there, but he was not nearly as bad as some proposed candidates. Thus, the idea was that new Convention heads were not the best of the best, but not as bad as the worst of the list. Heads who still held on to power sought to keep the peace. I could understand that. Who was

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to know what would happen? They tended to believe their own personality would sway the new right that was swept into power to work with them. It never happened. T. B. Maston’s warning about allowing influential churches to dominate the Convention was not heeded. The best evaluation of the entire scenario came from a statement from Dr. Bill Hendricks. I had gotten to know Dr. Hendricks working with him on a church staff. He told me his take on the takeover. (You would need to know Hendricks to get the full force of his comment.) He stated, “Well, the barbarians have taken over the castle, but they can’t use the china.” I liked what former head of the SBC Home Mission Board Dr. Keith Parks’s wife was quoted as saying. She likened the uprising to an outside hostile takeover. During this time, there were groups of Southern Baptist “investors” who gathered up funds to buy stocks or other items to take over a company they knew nothing about and did not care for. My own view is to liken the shift in the Convention to pirates taking over a ship. They boarded the cruise liner and hijacked the vessel. Most of the passengers on the huge vessel did not know the ship was hijacked. They were content to bask by the pool and play putt-putt golf. They did not realize the pirates were taking the ship on a different course that slowly was changing the destiny of every passenger. The last Convention meeting I attended in New Orleans had a Committee on Committees chairman who brought the report for appointments to trustees for the institutions of the Convention. He was ruled out of order to prevent him from presenting his report. In the past year, the church he belonged to had not even given a nickel to the SBC. There were accounts of people who had never even been to a Southern Baptist Convention meeting who were heads of committees. I learned some things serving as chairman for the local political precinct meeting. I was amazed at who showed up: not anyone! Thus, those with an agenda, or even a small group, could control the agenda of the local precinct. As baby boomers grew up to provide leadership in churches, they tended to avoid business gatherings. At Baptist gatherings I attend, folks are almost apologizing for conducting business. In short, the new generation of Baptists did not want to be involved in conflict or controversy. This allowed a small group of motivated people to take the reins. For example, when two kids are fighting in preschool, we tend to blame both of them. We didn’t take the time to see if one was at fault, or the other was just defending using self defense. For those who stood up to the fundamentalists, they found themselves labeled as “just as bad as the others.” This atmosphere set the stage for allowing a small movement to take the steering wheel of the vessel. The fundamentalists next moved to the state conventions.

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Texas Baptist leaders who were not fundamentalists dug in their heels. With the aid of Texas Baptist Committed for the first time, the fundamentalist movement was stopped. Texas Baptists next sought to distance themselves from the movement. Paul Powell, the famous Texas Baptist preacher, once claimed there was no such thing as a fundamentalist church, but only fundamentalist pastors. The people in the pews did not want to take the time, nor for the most part were they willing to find out what was going on. There were now in place two working parents with limited time for volunteer church programs. Families relied on the information from their pastor on what was what. Moderates tended to have the innocence of the dove, but lacked the wisdom of the serpent. Fundamentalists in Texas used the innocence of the serpent and the wisdom of the dove to get churches to forsake the BGCT. In an attempt to distance themselves from the SBC, Texas Baptists sought to change the way giving was channeled through the state convention. An attempt was made to get churches to fill out a form on where they desired their money to go. In effect, the state was no longer encouraging the funneling of money to SBC agencies. This didn’t last even a few days after the Convention agreed to this. There were tear-jerking stories of supposed missionaries living in a village who would be left on the field abandoned. What should have happened was to vote to drastically reduce the funding of the Christian Life Commission. This would have focused the debate on what the CLC was actually saying and engaged in. This story got lost in the emotional reports that our seminaries and missions work was being harmed by the lack of funding. The basic problem was that the local church had to decide if it was SBCT or BGCT. The typical person in the pew when presented with such a question would respond, “what is a BGCT?” The name recognition had us in Texas. The churches did not know that they, and what they knew about Southern Baptist life, came primarily from the local association, which was connected and trained by the BGCT. Few, if any of them, had direct connection with national agencies like seminaries or mission boards. The devil was in the details. Folks begin to realize how tragic it was when they sat back and did nothing to prevent this national takeover of agencies. The argument was leveled that Texas Baptist Committed was now becoming a power broker agent and members were given control of the state convention. Some feared TBC would end up doing the same thing the fundamentalists had done. On the other hand, the French Resistance comes to mind. (I am not comparing fundamentalists to Hitler; all metaphors have shortcomings.) After the War, the resistance leaders were honored and served as heads of state for a generation in France. Collaborators were marched down the streets of Paris in disgrace. I am not suggesting we march those who forsook Texas Baptists

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down the streets in Dallas. However, you might understand how TBC folks feel when many of them risked their reputation, friendships, and even powerful appointments to identify with the down and out. To see someone serving the convention who refused to stand up against the onslaught that would have engulfed us all is disheartening. Some need to realize the feelings of many who took a stand. Many of these men, like Sam Houston, were not popular toward the end of their lives. But, history proved them faithful to Texas. The primary focus of the new fundamentalist convention in Texas was to recruit churches from the SGCT. It had no colleges, hospitals, mission starters, or training organizations. It hurriedly sought to put things together. Naïve moderates believed that there would only be a few churches lost to the new fundamentalist group. Some were glad to see them leave. They tended to believe that by and large fundamentalists did not go to meetings and attend conferences. A few moderate churches were given too much input in the convention in Texas. It was costly to find out that the majority of the state Baptist churches still wanted to have a relationship with the SBC. Adjustments were made to keep the peace, but to no avail. Optimists believed the two conventions could just get along, as the late Rodney King used to say. These hopeful, yet naïve people did not realize the nature of fundamentalism and still had not recognized their agenda. Southern Baptists of Texas, the fundamentalist group, often forbids the state convention from working with the BGCT. They won’t even allow disaster relief groups to serve with BGCT workers. If a pastor has convinced his church that the effort to pull their congregation out of the BGCT was worth it, he has another issue. The church will still be in a local association of Baptist churchs that has BGCT churches in it. The logic is, “How come we went to the trouble to pull out of the BGCT and still work with their churches in local associations?” The result of this is that directors of missions of local associations became the greatest defenders of the BGCT. They had to in order to convince their churches not to pull out of the association. The seminary professor who in 1979 predicted a peaceful settlement to differences has been replaced by many other hopefuls. However, the struggle still wages. When churches are seeking a new pastor, this tension is reawakened with fundamentalists seeking to place their man in with their agenda. What began as a movement toward orthodoxy has transformed fundamentalists. I know of fundamentalist churches who practice open communion. Many of them have done away with business meetings and congregational rule. Almost all of them believe separation of church and state is a myth. Author Ross Douthat, in the book Bad Religion, says we are now in a “Chose

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your own Jesus” trend. He wrote, “We are now a nation of heretics, the river of orthodoxy has been drying up.” Ross went on to say, “Politics now replaces doctrine.” I believe Douthat is right in that the next generation is not interested in doctrinal debates. The storefront church with no membership, doctrinal statement, and no organization fits them just fine. The battle still wages. The choice is not between pain or no pain, as onetime Baptist pastor John Claypool used to say. It is the choice between the pain of caring or not caring. Refusing to stand up for your rights or convictions has a way of coming back to haunt you. If one’s church succumbs to the new methodology of fundamentalism, they will have to live with it or leave friends and fellow believers. In Texas, the largest demographic is quickly becoming Hispanic. Most of them are not Republicans. If you allow your faith to be aligned with a political party, don’t be surprised if you have a hard time reaching people who are not connected to a political party. Like the Old Testament prophet learned, you cannot always have their affection, but at least they will respect you for your convictions. The battle still wages and will impact the future. NOTES 1. Jerry Pierce, “Intelligent Design Theorist Says ID Movement Advancing! But, Funding Isn’t. Comparable to Opponents,” Southern Baptist Texas, June 13, 2005, 8–9. 2. Barbara Weller, “Culture Watch,” Southern Baptist Texan, April 4, 2005, 16. 3. Gary Ledbetter, “The Demand for Justice,” Southern Baptist Texan, February 3, 2003, 4. 4. Gary Ledbetter, “Pacifism and Moral High Ground,” Southern Baptist Texan, February 17, 2003, 13. 5. Nathan Finn, “Culture Watch,” Southern Baptist Texan, February 17, 2003. 6. “Thumbs Up,” Southern Baptist Texan, March 1, 2003, 4. 7. “Short Takes,” Southern Baptist Texan, November 28, 2005, 4. 8. Tom Strode, “2003 SBC Report,” Southern Baptist Texan, July, 17, 2003, 1. 9. Tammi Ledbetter, “Land Tells SBTC,” Southern Baptist Texan, 11. 10. “Land Reflects on 15 Years at ERLC,” Southern Baptist Texan, October 13, 2003, 1. 11. Special Report, Southern Baptist Texan, March 3, 2005, 7. 12. Tammi Ledbetter, “Annual Meeting,” Southern Baptist Texan, September 14, 2004, 5. 13. Baptist News, Southern Baptist Texan, October 25,2004, 13. 14. Southern Baptist Texan, cover, November 17, 2003. 15. Gary Ledbetter, “Time to Climb that Wall,” Southern Baptist Texan, March 22, 2004, 6. 16. Bonnie Pritchett, “Christian Citizen,” Southern Baptist Texan, March 22, 2004. 3. 17. Southern Baptist Texan, cover, July/August 2000. 18. Jim Richards, “Cross Roads,” Southern Baptist Texan, July 2004, 3.

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19. Gary Ledbetter, “Common Sense or Reckless Entanglement,” Southern Baptist Texan, March 2001, 11. 20. Ronnie Yarber, “The Mission Message,” Southern Baptist Texan, 2001, 11. 21. Http://www.ethicsdaily.com July 15, 2006. 22. “Resolutions Submitted on Education: Dissent,” Southern Baptist Texan, May 22, 2006, 1. 23. George Ledbetter, “Just the Facts,” Southern Baptist Texan, September 21, 2009, 4. 24. Russell Moore, “First Person; Baptist Birth Rate among Lowest of American Religious Groups,” Southern Baptist Texan, October 30, 2006, 16. 25. Tammi Ledbetter, “Chapel Speaker: Attorney Tells Students Persectuion Awaits in U.S. Legal Realm,” Southern Baptist Texan, September 19, 2006, 7. 26. Southern Baptist Texan, August 24, 2006, 4. 27. Gary Ledbetter, “Why We Give,” Southern Baptist Texan, November 28, 2008, 4. 28. Richard Land, “First Person Justice Sotomayor, For Some, Less for Others?” Southern Baptist Texan, June 8, 2009, 16. 29. Gary Ledbetter, “Can’t Do Your Job, Change the Rules!” Southern Baptist Texan, October 6, 2008, 4. 30. “Students to Capture the Vision at 6th BP Journalism Conference,” Southern Baptist Texan, September 19, 2006, 3. 31. “Obama Administration Throws U.S. Support Behind Global Decriminalization of Homosexuality,” Southern Baptist Texan, April 6, 2009, 16. 32. Tom Strode, “House Approves Gay Hate Crimes Bill,” Southern Baptist Texan, May 18, 2009, 16. 33. Gary Ledbetter, “The 2009 SBC Meeting: Good Work!” Southern Baptist Texan, July 13, 2009, 4. 34. SBC Life, February/March 2010, 22. 35. Southern Baptist Texan, August 29, 2011, 3. 36. “Arlington Baptist College Calls Ergun Caner as Provost,” Southern Baptist Texan, May 30, 2011, 11. 37. Southern Baptist Texan, April 5, 2011, 4. 38. William Dembski, “With ID Proponent Lauded, Starr May Be Tested Early,” Southern Baptist Texan, May 17, 2010, 5. 39. Gary Ledbetter, “The Agenda of Disgust,” Southern Baptist Texan, February 13, 2012, 4. 40. “Forth Worth Church Severs Ties with BGCT,” Southern Baptist Texan, October 4, 2010, 3. 41. Melissa Demming and Tammi Ledbetter, “Challenges to Apply Biblical Parameters for the Genders to Play Out in the Local Church,” Southern Baptist Texan, February 18, 2011, 9.

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Appendix 3 IN MEMORY OF DUKE KIMBROUGH MCCALL The Last Denominationalist, September 1, 1914–April 2, 2013

Bill Leonard

Editor’s Note: In the thirty-year research period for all three books, I was blessed beyond measure by the work of moderate Sothern Baptist leadership from the mid-twentieth century to the present day. There was one figure in the pantheon of Baptist luminaries that was the last on the list—Duke Kimbrough McCall. I visited Dr. McCall twice in the time prior to the publication of Against the Wind: The Moderate Voice in Baptist Life (2009). We had a pleasant day at his West Palm Beach, Florida home (winter retreat), and his summer retreat in Highlands, North Carolina. For Against the Wind, I secured his agreement to write for the book, not only because of his exciting history in Southern Baptist life, but because of how he foresaw the future—Southern Baptists in the twenty-first century. In point of fact, the first reviews and commentaries about Against the Wind referenced Dr. McCall’s essay, not the contents of the book. Unfortunately, Against the Wind was Dr. McCall’s last published essay of his career, a perceptive critique well worth the price of the book. On a personal note, I have no greater pride in this work than to be a conduit for the special insights of Duke Kimbrough McCall. For the lifetime of research in the rhetorical history of the takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention, there was no better way or no better person to share the last words of The Exiled Generations. Earlier in this book, Bill Leonard spoke affectionately of Ken Chafin and his life and times. Here, Bill writes a decade later that Duke McCall and Ken Chafin recognized that “the denominational consciousness that powerfully informed [their] Christian and Baptist identity no longer endures for liberal or conservative alike.” What follows is Bill Leonard’s tribute to Dr. McCall whom he accurately labeled as the Last Denominationalist. Duke McCall passed away April 2, 2013.

Duke Kimbrough McCall was an institution, bearing in himself elements of American religious corporate and institutional life across much of the 20th century. His death this week at age 98 in many ways marked the end of an era reflecting the height of denominational identity in the United States, and its subsequent dramatic collapse. In some ways he was the ultimate denominational administrator, presiding over three significant organizations—New Orleans Baptist Theological

BILL LEONARD

Seminary, the Executive Committee and the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary—each owned and operated by the Southern Baptist Convention. In other ways, he seems the last denominationalist—a symbol of denominational identity that no longer prevails, even among Southern Baptists themselves. Born in Memphis, Tenn., to a family of southern Brahmins, McCall was nurtured in the Southern Baptist ethos of a believer’s church, missionary vision and denomination-related schools. Graduating from Furman University, he entered the Southern Seminary in Louisville, KY., an institution with which he would be connected for the rest of his life. Seminary lore from those years suggested that he was the first student in the school’s history to own a car. Although he served as pastor of Broadway Baptist Church, a bellwether Louisville congregation, his career was given primarily to administrative service in multiple denominational institutions. McCall’s more than 30-year tenure as president of Southern Seminary, the denomination’s oldest theological school, is the longest in the school’s history. His administrative approach helped extend the seminary’s national reputation for academic excellence even as it created upheaval within the faculty, leading to the departure of 13 senior professors in 1958. His ability to weather “the ’58 crisis” and stabilize the school with a new generation of outstanding faculty illustrated his ability to negotiate administrative if not relational difficulties. Those qualities were less beneficial for him when the “conservativemoderate controversy” descended on the SBC intensely in 1979. McCall retired as president of the seminary early in the controversy as conservatives were slowly gaining control of the Convention. He ran unsuccessfully for the denominational presidency, in those days the major frontline of conservative/moderate political conflicts and a major source for controlling appointments to SBC boards and agencies. That a person of his organizational stature lost to a conservative candidate was an indication that McCall’s style of institutional vision and maintenance was increasingly less viable. That style rested in what many have called the “conservative middle,” a traditionalist approach that reflected a broad spectrum of theological positions and ministry practices but which kept those at either end of the theological spectrum from dominating the denominational center. It was an approach by which boards and agencies were comprised of conservatives, moderates and even liberals (in the SBC sense of the term) but where one overarching ideological mandate did not dominate.

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Appendix 3. In Memory of Duke Kimbrough McCall

Thus progressives and conservative alike frequently criticized McCall for compromising prophetic principles or confessional orthodoxy for the sake of denominational stability. As that “grand compromise” collapsed, McCall’s lifelong approach became less sustainable—evident in the eventual departure or disengagement of moderates from SBC life. Curiously, McCall later suggested that had he remained as president of the seminary he would have sought to disengage the institution from denominational control, perhaps even making it the centerpiece of a new Baptist endeavor. Whether that approach would have been possible for him, or any other president in the volatility of those times, remains a great unknown. Duke McCall and Provost William Hull hired me at Southern Seminary in 1975, inviting me to the faculty as assistant professor of church history. On our mantle sits a photo of McCall presiding over the moment when I signed (with a quill pen) the seminary’s Abstract of Principles in a book that contained the signatures of generations of professors who participated in that ritual when granted tenure. Certain SBC conservatives would later suggest that McCall’s great fault was admitting my “type” of Baptist academic to the faculty. I recall with gratitude his consistent encouragement and the space he offered me to explore issues in Christian history and American religion with an amazing group of faculty and student colleagues. Throughout his long life and work, Duke McCall bridged multiple generations of Baptist life nationally and globally. In some ways he was the personification of the amazing organizational success and regional strength of Southern Baptists in much of the 20th century. In other ways he represented the last of the Baptist denominationalists, a leader who both shaped and was shaped by the cultural and spiritual solidarity of America’s largest denomination in a particular era. Controversial throughout, he contributed to a denominational breadth inside the SBC. He lived long enough to see that breadth diminish, but died hoping, if not believing, that it would someday return. Nonetheless, with his characteristic political and theological insight, there is little doubt McCall recognized that the denominational consciousness that powerfully informed his own Christian and Baptist identity no longer endures for liberal or conservative alike.

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CONTRIBUTORS MARK A. BOWDIDGE has the longest essay of any contributor in either Exiled: Voices or The Exiled Generations. Mark’s extraordinary story of fundamentalism in academia will become a classic case study of an underreported, virtually unknown saga in Baptist higher education. Mark earned the bachelor of science degree from William Jewell College in Liberty, Missouri, double majoring in music education and organ performance, and the master of music and doctor of music arts degrees in choral conducting from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas. Dr. Bowdidge has served in a variety of professional music ministry capacities in Baptist, Episcopal, Lutheran, Methodist and Presbyterian churches, has taught high school choral music in Texas, and served on the music faculties of Brewton-Parker College, Mount Vernon, Georgia, and Bethany College, Lindsborg, Kansas. Mark is Music Director: Lyric Singers, Children’s Choirs of Southwest Missouri, Springfield, Missouri. NATHAN BROWN is the son of renowned Oklahoma pastor (Norman, Okla-

homa), LaVonn Brown, who wrote for Exiled: Voices of the Southern Baptist Holy War. Nathan has published eight books, Karma Crisis: New and Selected Poems is just out on Mezcalia Press, Letters to the One-Armed Poet, his first memoir, and a previous collection of poetry, Two Tables Over, won the 2009 Oklahoma Book Award. The others are: My Sideways Heart, Not Exactly Job (a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award); Ashes over the Southwest; Suffer the Little Voices (a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award); and Hobson’s Choice. He’s also worked as a professional songwriter and musician for fifteen years in and around Oklahoma City, Nashville, and Austin. Nathan holds an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in creative and professional writing from the University of Oklahoma. He currently teaches for the Human Relations and Liberal Studies Departments at the University of Oklahoma and has also served as the Artistin-Residence at the University of Central Oklahoma, Lawton. GEOFF DAVIDSON is a third year student at Truett Seminary, Baylor University, Waco, Texas. Geoff is a product of First Baptist Church, Dothan, Alabama,

CONTRIBUTORS

a church where the war for the soul of the SBC came to the boiling point—a split in the church. Geoff’s choice of seminary and his response to a call to the ministry stem from his home church experience. MARTIN DAVIS is a freelance writer living in Fredericksburg, Virginia. His

professional career has taken him from seminary in California to graduate school at the University of Chicago, and from an academic position in South Carolina to a ten-plus year career in journalism and technology in Washington, D.C. His writings have appeared in the Washington Post, National Journal, New York Daily News, Congregations, and PGA Tour Magazine among other publications. He occasionally attends Chancellor Baptist Church, and shares a busy household with his wife of more than twenty-five years, Thelma; their three children Andrew, Austin, and Katie; a nosy lovable beagle, Tucker; and a uniquely named cat, Cherry Blueberry. DENISE LESTER DINKINS is the daughter of Andy Lester, who was Pro-

fessor of Pastoral Care, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, Kentucky from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. Denise received her MDiv from Brite Divinity School in 1999. She works with the youth at First Baptist Church, Oceanside, California; volunteers with the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit where her husband, David, is Chaplain. STEPHEN M. FOX is an independent Baptist scholar living in Collinsville,

Alabama. Stephen’s essay documents his difficult days with his home church as he attempted to provide a moderate voice for a broad spectrum of traditional Baptist views. He has written for the Christian Century and Baptists Today. Stephen is presently working on a screen adaptation of one of the twentieth century’s leading biblical scholar and a particular odyssey—Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s 1931 journey through Alabama. ELIZABETH EMERSON HANCOCK was born to a Southern Baptist minister

and choir soprano in Central Kentucky. She abandoned her Bluegrass roots to attend Harvard University, and in 1998, became the first-ever Miss Massachusetts with a southern accent. She earned her J.D. from Georgetown in 2005, and now practices law in Virginia. Her autobiography Trespassers will be Baptized: The Unordained Memoir of a Preacher’s Daughter is a must read! JAMES HILL JR . is pastor of Southwest Baptist Church, St. Louis, Missouri.

James’ father, Jim Hill, served as director, Missouri Baptist Convention (1998– 2001) as well as with the Home Mission Board (SBC) during the 1980s. James, a second generation Baptist, was influenced, as was his father, by the fundamentalist takeover of the SBC.

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R. KEVIN JOHNSON is a freelance author and Chaplain, Columbia University Medical Center/NYP, Micah Ministries. Kevin is a pastoral care resident with Columbia University Medical Center/NYP, New York City, New York. BRIAN KAYLOR is an assistant professor of communication studies at James Madison University where he teaches public speaking, political communication, advocacy studies, and rhetorical research methods. He also serves as the editorial assistant for Churchnet (formerly known as the Baptist General Convention of Missouri) and as a contributing editor for Ethics Daily (the news arm of the Baptist Center for Ethics). Kaylor is the author of two books: Presidential Campaign Rhetoric in an Age of Confessional Politics (2011) and For God’s Sake, Shut Up! (2007). Kaylor has authored more than two dozen studies published in academic journals and more than fifty papers presented at academic conferences. BILL LEONARD is James and Marilyn Dunn Professor of Church History and

Baptist Studies at the School of Divinity, Wake Forest University, WinstonSalem, North Carolina. He is the author of many books on religious history in general and the history of Baptists in particular. His latest books include The Challenge of Being Baptist: Owning a Scandalous Past and an Uncertain Future (2010) and Can I Get a Witness: Essays, Sermons, and Reflections (2013). MOLLY T. MARSHALL is President, and Professor of Theology and Spiritual Formation, Central Baptist Theological Seminary, Shawnee, Kansas. Dr. Marshall’s retrospective history is documented in Ms. Pamela Durso’s essay—Appendix 1. Additionally, Dr. Marshall is an opinion columnist for the Associated Baptist Press’s regular online news publication. DAVE MCNEELY is the minister to youth and college students, First Baptist

Church, Jefferson City, Tennessee; a church duly-aligned with the CBF and SBC. Dave graduated from Carson-Newman College, Jefferson City, Tennessee and the Baptist Theological Seminary, Richmond, Virginia where he studied with several SBC academics (exiles) who are featured in Exiled: Voices. BAILEY EDWARDS NELSON was senior pastor, Flat Rock Baptist Church,

Mount Airy, North Carolina. The county association of Southern Baptist Churches, Surry Association, voted out Flat Rock Baptist Church weeks after Rev. Nelson was called as senior pastor. Rev. Nelson was the only female pastor/contributor in Exiled: Voices of the Southern Baptist Convention Holy War and 1. The Exiled Generations. In early 2012, Bailey resigned as pastor, Flat Rock Baptist Church. Her future in the clergy is presently yet to be determined.

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MILLIE PATTERSON is the daughter of Emerson Cleveland ( E.C. ) Watson Jr. (Exiled: Voices). Millie’s father served on several boards and departments of the North Carolina and South Carolina Baptist Conventions. Today, Millie is a retired special education teacher currently employed by the Georgia Department of Education. She and her husband Bobby live in Lawrenceville, Georgia, and have two grown daughters, one in marketing in Atlanta and one who dances professionally in Chicago. R. SCOTT POLLARD is the son of a retired Southern Baptist pastor and cur-

rently works as an ICU nurse at Duke University Hospital. Prior to nursing school, he was a social worker who worked primarily with people living with HIV. He and his partner live in a rural area near Chapel Hill, North Carolina. KRISTEN REDFORD is working on a master of divinity at Boston Univer-

sity School of Theology. Kristen’s parents, raised Southern Baptists, left the SBC after the takeover. Kristen grew up in Baptist life as a non-SBC second generation exile. KEN SATTERFIELD has benefited from the lifelong support and encour-

agement of Baptists as well as his family. Originally from South Carolina, he attended the then Baptist-affiliated Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, and Southern Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, followed by more than twenty years of work with Baptist-related employment. Having experienced how faithful Baptist leaders were attacked, vilified and dismissed during the “conservative resurgence,” the story of his father, now deceased, was a firsthand opportunity to view this in the life of a family member away from the headlines. And, although, the events profoundly affected his parents, the end of the story—how God provides peace, hope and redemption through the dark valleys of life—is a testimony he feels his father would want to share as his legacy. Ken lives in Jefferson City, Missouri, with his wife and two sons. WESLEY SHOTWELL is Pastor, Ash Creek Baptist Church, Azle, Texas.

Wesley’s father, Larry Shotwell was a part of the leadership of the Sunday School Board, SBC, Nashville, Tennessee during the difficult years of the takeover. ELLEN WAVRO is the daughter of Kenneth Chafin. She lives in Austin, Texas. Ms. Wavro was kind enough to grant permission for the use of the two poems in REDUX. DON WILKEY JR . is pastor of the Onalaska First Baptist Church in Onalaska,

Texas, where he has served in that capacity for over thirty-three years. He enjoys antique furniture making, hunting, fishing, and gardening. The Wilkeys

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CONTRIBUTORS

have two grown daughters, and two grandchildren. Don is the only senior writer in this book, but because the story of the exilic journeys of Texas Baptists is so important to these two books, I commissioned him to write for The Exiled Generations. JAMES I. WILLIAMSON is the son of Eleanor Williamson, the first contributor

to write for Exiled: Voices of the Southern Baptist Convention Holy War. In like manner, James agreed to contribute his story. In tribute to “Ms. Eleanor,” her son’s story appears first in The Exiled Generations. James is living in Salinas, California where he is working with the California Department of Correction and Rehabilitation, Office of Correctional Education. He is a High School Instructor, Correctional Training Facility, Valley Adult School, Soledad, California.

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INDEX “A Rhythm for My Life,” xiii Against the Wind, 159 Alabama Baptist, 62, 65 Alabama, University of, 62–63 Allen, Catherine, 62–63 Alliance of Baptists, 5, 50, 141 Alliance Defense Fund, 151 American Association of University Professors (AAUP), 36 American Baptist Church, 71 American Baptists, 141 Americans United for Separation of Church and State, 148 Amish, 77 Anabaptist wing, 133 Anglican communities, 48 Anglican position, 121 Apple, Sam, 54 Associated Baptist Press, 28, 45, 166 Baggett, Mark, 62 Baptist Faith and Message, 7, 153 Baptist General Convention of Missouri (BGCM), 73–74, 79, 166 Baptist General Convention of Texas (BGCT), 12, 73–74, 79, 145–47, 152, 166 Baptist Holy War, 89 Baptist Joint Committee, 147 Baptist Press, 78, 82, 149 Baptist Student Union (BSU), 93 “Baptists in Babylon,” 16–17 Baptists Today, 64, 143n5, 165 Baptist World Alliance, 74 Barksdale, Martha, 62 Barabbas Generation, 31

Bartlett, E.M., 129 Barton, David, 67, 149, 151 Battle Hymn of the Republic, 94 Baylor University (TX), 28, 152, 163 Bellow, Saul, 33, 39n6 Bethany Baptist Church (Gaffney, SC), 61 Billy Graham Chair of Evangelism, xi Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, xi Binkley, Olin, 64 Birmingham Post Herald, 65 Black Baptist, 130 Black, Hugo, 67 Blue River Association (Kansas City, MO), 70 Boggs, Kelly, 150 Bold Mission Thrust, 11–12 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 68, 165 Brite Divinity School, 53, 55, 165 Broadway Baptist Church (Ft. Worth, TX), 151, 160 Brown, Don, 97 Brown, LaVonn, xix–xx, 29, 31, 163 Buckners Benevolences, 148 Buies Creek (NC), 49 Burgess, Marie, 36 Bush, George W. (President), 147–48 Camp Alkulana, 48 Camp, Ray, ix Campbell University (NC), 49 Campbell, Will, 64 Carey, William, 132 Carter, Jimmy (President), 152 Carter, Reverend Homer, 27 Catholic communities, 48

INDEX

Central Baptist Theological Seminary (MO), 29, 72–73, 132, 135, 141, 165 Chafin, Kenneth, iv–v, ix, xi–xiii, xvii, xxxi, 146, 159, 166 Chicago, University of, 165 Christian Century, 64 Christian church, 112, 122 Christian Life Commission, 153, 155 Churchnet, 81, 84, 165 Collinsville Baptist Church (AL), 61–63, 65 Conference on Sexuality and Covenant, 133 Conservative resurgence, 10–12, 17, 21, 59, 166 Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (CBF), xii, 3, 5, 16, 19, 34, 38, 42, 45, 72, 74, 88, 130–31, 141; pastoral residency program, 42; poverty and transformation ministries, 133 Corts, Tom, 65 Criswell, W.A., 12, 64 Currie, David, 62–63, 66

Fisher, Frank, 68 Flat Rock Baptist Church (NC), 43–46, 166 Flat Rock Baptist Church, xxxi, 43, 46, 166 Flynt, Wayne, 67 Frady, Marshall, 64 Frost, Robert, 121, 124 fundamentalism, 2, 15, 36, 66, 112n4, 113n6, 156–157 fundamentalists, xi, xxviii–xxix, xxi, 1–3, 9, 12, 18, 23, 28–29, 31, 36–37, 39n5, 47–48, 53, 55, 63–66, 70, 72–73, 111–13, 117, 119, 129–30, 139, 145–48, 150–56 Furman University (SC), 35–37, 39n4, 63, 160 Gantry, Elmer, 152 Glorieta Baptist Assembly (NM), 11, 30 “Goodwill” Baptists, 74 Gospel of John, 121, 124 Griffith, Andy, 43 Hancock, Gregory, 23 Haneke, Michael, 67 Harvest Baptist Church (Ft. Worth, TX), 38 Hate Crimes Bill, 151 Hauerwas, Stanley, 60 Hearn, Steven, 36 Helms, Jesse, 64 Hendricks, Bill, 154 Highlands Country Club (KY), 21 Home Mission Board, xi, 5, 62–63, 70, 154, 165 homosexuality, x, xxv–xxvi, xxix, 7–8, 49, 80, 146, 151–52, 158n31 Honeycutt, Roy, xii, 139 Houston, Sam, 156

Deason, Mel, 62 Dilday, Russell, 16, 37–38, 39n5 Douthat, Ross, 130, 134n2, 156–157 Durso, Pamela, 4, 8, 29, 135, 143, 165 Elder, Lloyd, 11 Elliot, Ralph, 64 Episcopal Church, 121–122 Epting, Jimmy, 35–36 ESPN 30 for 30, 65 Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, 147 Evensong, 102 Exiled, ii, x–xi, xix–xx, xxvii–xxviii, xxx– xxxi, 35, 127–28, 163, 165–67

Intelligent Design, 146, 157n1 In the Name of the Father, ix, 84n2

Falwell, Jerry (Moral Majority), 145, 149 Fee Fee Baptist Church (MO), 84 Festival of Lessons & Carols, 101 First Baptist Church, 3, 8; Auburn, AL, 63; Austin, TX, 9; Muskogee, OK, 129, 136; Norman, OK, 29; San Angelo, TX, 13; Springfield, MO, 1, 3–4, 93

John Birch Society, 64, 148 Johns, John, 36 Johnson, L.D., 64 Keith, David, 98–99 Kell and Camp, 76–77

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Kennedy, Bobby, 61 Kentucky Baptist Convention, 22 Kentucky Baptist Women, 21 Kingdom of God, 13, 122 King, Martin Luther, 64, 68 King, Rodney, 156 King’s College (Cambridge, England), 101 Kirkpatrick, Gracie, 48 Kurtz, Lester, 76–78, 80–83, 84n2, 85n5, 85n6, 85n8, 85n10, 85n11

Missouri, University of, 84 Mohler, R. Albert Jr., 139–141 Moon, Lottie, 62, 129, 134n1, 136 Moore, Judge Roy, 67 Moore, Russell, 149, 158n24 Morgan, David T., 63, 65 Morgen, Brett, 65 Mormon Tabernacle Choir, 94 Moyers, Bill, 64 Mysterium tremendium et fascinans, 57

Land, Richard, 67, 147, 150–51, 158n28 Latonia Baptist Church (Covington, KY), 21–22 Ledbetter, Gary, 148–52, 157n3, 157n4, 157n9, 157n12, 157n15, 158n19, 158n23, 158n25, 158n27, 158n29, 158n33, 158n39, 158n41 Lee, David, xix Letters of Paul 124 Lolley, Randall, 63–64 Lord’s Supper, 59 Lorence, Jordan, 151

Nashville Baptist Association, 13 New Deal, 152 Newman, Stewart, 64 New Mexico, University of, 13 Norris, Ed, 97 Norris, J. Frank, 152 North Carolina Baptist Convention, 38 North Greenville College (SC), 35–37 Northminster Baptist Church (Jackson, MS), 5–9

Mainstream Baptists, 62–63 Manchester, William, 61 “Manger Syndrome,” 22 Marney, Carlyle, 64 Marshall, Thurgood (Justice), 149 Marshall, Molly T., xxix, 65, 135–42, 143n3, 143n5–7, 143n11, 143n16, 143n18–19, 143n23, 144n26, 144n30 Master of Divinity, 9, 137, 167 Maston, T.B., 154 McAfee School of Theology, xxiv, 41–42 McCarthy, Joseph, 151–152 McDuffie, Rick, 34 McKissic, Dwight, 148 Mennonite, 84 Mercer University, 39n2 Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (MO), 70, 81 Mississippi School for the Blind, 6–7 Missouri Baptist Convention (MBC), 72–73, 75, 165 Missouri Synod Lutheran, 6

Obama administration, 150, 158n31 O’Brien, Delanna, 129 Oklahoma Observer, 31 Oklahoma Baptist University (Shawnee, OK), 129 Oklahoma, University of, 164 Olasky, Marvin, 150–151 Paige, Rod (Secretary of Education), 147 Parks, Keith, 154 Patterson, Dorothy, 152–153 Perry, Rick (TX Governor), 151 “Pig” church (the Piggly Wiggly church), 19, 34 Piland, Harry, 11 PK’s (preacher’s kids), 21–22, 29, 71 Powell, Colin, 149 Pressler, Paul, 148 Project 1000, 72–73 Providence Baptist Church (SC), 61 Psalms, 121 Pullen Memorial Baptist Church (Raleigh, NC), 49–50 Pyle, Gomer, 43

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INDEX

“Rage,” xiv-xvi Redford, Courts, 5 Redford, Robert, 65 religious right, 146–48, 151–52 Rice, Luther, 58 Richards, Jim, 148–49, 157n18 Richmond Baptist Association, 48 Ridgecrest Baptist Assembly (NC), 11, 15, 30 Roark, Frances, 21, 23, 27 Rogers, Adrian, xxi, 12, 153 Roman Catholic Church, 76, 83 Rosenberg, Ellen, 64, 66 Royal Ambassadors, 33, 93 Saint John of the Cross, 132–33 Satterfield, George, 19 Scarborough, Rick, 145 Schaefer, Francis, 67 Schiavo, Terri, 146 Sekulow, Jay, 148 separation of church and state, 3, 74, 148–49, 151–52, 156 Shotwell, Larry, 11 Siler, Mahan, 49 Simmons, Paul, 67 Singing Churchmen of Oklahoma, 74 Singleton, George, 61 Smyth and Helwys, 66 Smyth, John, 84 Sotomayer, Sonia (Justice), 150 Southern Baptist conservative takeover, xxvii, 6 Southern Baptist Convention (SBC): 1979 meeting, Houston, TX, 59, 153, 160; 1980 meeting, St. Louis, MO, 21, 145; 1985 meeting, Dallas, TX, 12; 1986 meeting, Atlanta, GA, 64; 1988 meeting, San Antonio, TX, 12, 65; 1990 meeting, New Orleans, LA, 1; affiliation/align with, 5, 7, 42–43, 136; changes within, 1–2, 15, 35; decline of, xxvii; Foreign Mission Board, 129; fragmentation of, 1, 4, 59; fundamentalists within, 3; history of, xi, 29, 72; Home Mission Board, 70;

new SBC, ix–x, xxi, 2; North American Mission Board, 5, 25; politics of, xii, 2, 6, 35, 47, 49, 58, 67, 70–72, 76–77, 80, 82, 145; Radio and Television Commission (SBCRTC), 94; SBC, xx, xxi-xxiv, xxx, 11, 13, 39, 47, 59, 61, 76, 94, 160; Sunday School Board, 11–13; takeover of, v, ix, xix, xxiv, xxxi-xxxii, 12, 17, 31–32, 36, 145, 159; traditions, xii, 12 Southern Baptist Mississippi College (Clinton, MS), 7 Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (SBTS), 14, 22, 37, 151 Southern Baptists of Texas, 146, 149, 156 South Carolina Baptist Convention (SCBC), 15, 36, 38 Southwest Baptist College (MO), 70 Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (SWBTS), xi, xiii, 12, 35, 37, 98–99, 153 Southwestern Baptist University (Bolivar, MO), 5 Starr, Kenneth, 152, 158n38 Sterk, Helen, xix Sundance Film Festival, 65 Supreme Court, 150 Surry Baptist Association, 44 Talmadge, Paul, 35 Texas Baptists Committed (TBC), 155 Texas Fundamentalist Baptists, 147 Tolkien, J.R.R., xxi Torah, 121 Travis, Al, 98 Truett, George, 64 Tucker, Pat, 22 Union Mound Baptist Church (MO), 77 United Church of Christ (UCC) Church, 9, 50 United Methodist Church (Duluth, GA), 16, 68 United Methodist tradition, 122 University Heights Baptist Church (Springfield, MO), 3

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vacation Bible school (VBS), 16, 88, 123 Valentine, Foy, 147 Vanderbilt University Divinity School (TN), 12 Virginia, University of 62, 67 Wade, Charles, xii, 145 Wagoner, Laura, xix Washburn, A.V., 11 West Columbia Baptist Fellowship (SC), 34 West, Harvey, 16 Westminster Presbyterian Church (Camden, NY), 54

Whitman, Walt, 123 William Jewell College (MO), 71–72, 97–98 William Jewell University (MO), 157, 195 Williams, Roger, 58–59 Willimon, Will, 68 Windermere Baptist Conference Center (MO), 76 Women’s Missionary Union (WMU), 2, 18 Word and Way, 76 Workman, Skeet, 148 World Changers, 87

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The Exiled Generations was designed and typeset by Kelly Gray. The body text is set in 9.25/13 Times with display type set in Times and Royal.