A Summary of the SBC Controversy: 1979-1994
by: Paul Kenley,
Pastor, Baptist Temple, Houston

Editor's Note: In May 1994, we published the following article by Paul Kenley written to state as briefly as possible a summary of the SBC controversy. An update to this article covering 1995 to 2000 is also online in this issue.

A Presupposition

This account begins with a basic presupposition: the Southern Baptist Convention, as we have known and loved-no longer exists. We must accept this fact in our own minds from the outset of this discussion. The SBC is now Baptist in name only. Historical Baptist heritage, polity, and principles are not believed in nor practiced by the current SBC leadership. As a result many of our most familiar terms can no longer be used as we have spoken of them previously. To say you are a "Southern Baptist" is likely to say something about you that is no longer accurate. To speak of the "Cooperative Program" no longer means the same thing that it once did when we spoke of it out of a love for missions. What has happened to so radically alter the makeup of our beloved convention?

A Brief History

Initial Objections

Southern Baptists were enjoying a boom period in the 1950s. Church growth was at its apex, and the denomination as a whole was attuned to its missions' enterprises. But one of Baptists' great attributes, their toleration of great diversity, ironically provided the environment for a takeover.

The champion of fundamentalism in the first half of the 20th century was J. Frank Norris, the fiery pastor of First Baptist Church, Fort Worth. His attitude and spirit were one of blatant contempt for Southern Baptists in general and for Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in particular. He was known to send boxes of rotten fruit as Christmas gifts to seminary professors!

Because of Norris's well-publicized hot temper and his brash boldness in criticizing other evangelicals, most of those who agreed with him in his fundamentalist views shunned any identity or association with him publicly. He always had his followers within the SBC, but they remained in the closet until someone could legitimize their cause in a more public forum.

That opportunity came in the 1960s when Norris's charges of liberalism in Baptist schools found a more sympathetic ear among grassroots Southern Baptists. A few well-publicized, but isolated instances of what many considered to be blatant liberalism on SBC school faculties set the stage for fundamentalists to come out of the closet and make their case. Rather than cleansing the schools doctrinally, they took advantage of the unrest caused by the few disturbing cases, to wrest control of the SBC away from those in charge.

A Strategist for the Cause

In the late 1960s, Paul Pressler, a state appeals' court judge in Houston, began to look into the inner organizational structure of the SBC. He was seeking a way for one group to assert its will on the convention by taking over key positions of leadership.

He discovered that all power is vested in the president, who controls the makeup of the various boards and agencies through the appointment process. (see diagram on this page)

On a now famous audio tape entitled Firestorm Chats, Pressler proudly describes his discovery of how the convention's own structural make-up provided the only procedure necessary to effect a complete takeover of every board and institution. Once he had learned how to bring about the takeover, he just needed an inroad to the pastors of the 36,000+ SBC churches and a theological red flag to alarm the grassroots Baptist people.

The Pressler-Patterson Coalition

Pressler and Paige Patterson, then president of the Criswell Bible College, Dallas, met to plan their strategy at the Cafe du Mond in New Orleans in the early 1970s. Patterson, who had demonstrated an affinity for classical fundamentalism from his college days at Hardin-Simmons, took to pulpits across the convention as a conservative theologian.

He expressed his viewpoint that convention leaders in general, and seminary professors in particular, no longer believed that the Bible was the inerrant Word of God. He challenged Bible believers to join their cause claiming they would return the SBC to its true conservative roots. Patterson and Pressler made numerous visits to every major state convention during the months prior to the SBC annual meeting in June 1979 at Houston. They continued to do the same during the early 1980s as their movement gained strength. That year, fundamentalists elected Adrian Rogers of Tennessee, their first president.

Ironically, that same year, Southern Baptists adopted Bold Missions Thrust, a plan for spreading the gospel over the whole earth by the year 2000. Since then, presidents sympathetic to the fundamentalist agenda have been elected at all succeeding annual meetings: Bailey Smith, 1980-81; Jimmy Draper, 1982-83; Charles Stanley, 1984-85; Adrian Rogers, again 1986-87; Jerry Vines, 1988-89; Morris Chapman, 1990-91, and Ed Young, 1992-93.

Much deception has marked the movement. Sometimes it included an outright manipulation of the ballot box to protect the plan's momentum. At the 1985 convention, as in other annual meetings, parents registered small children as messengers and then cast the children's ballets for them.

Annually, busloads of messengers would arrive for the convention, vote in a block with their bus captain and then leave. Many made the trip just to vote for president. Some convention meetings have required an early adjournment for lack of a quorum because thousands of messengers would arrive on busses on Tuesday morning, vote in the presidential election that afternoon, and then leave.

At San Antonio in 1988, many well-meaning messengers stood outside the convention center long before the doors were open to get a seat in the main hall, only to find that busloads of fundamentalist sympathetic messengers had been brought in through the back way and already occupied all the seats near the platform area. At the 1985 Dallas convention, the vote for president was so close that many suspect that a fallacious tabulation was announced, insuring that the takeover was not derailed.

The 1990 convention in New Orleans is viewed by many as the completion of the takeover. Moderate-conservatives made one, last-gasp effort to regain control of the presidency. But the platform was totally inaccessible, positioned in isolation in the center of the Superdome floor.

Well-meaning speakers voicing valid concerns were silenced in mid-sentence as their microphones were turned off. Daniel Vestal, then a pastor in Dunwoody, Georgia, was defeated by Morris Chapman in the presidential race.

And through it all, Pressler was firmly ensconced on the platform, delighting in the success of his now complete takeover plan.

But how could great preachers, many of whom were well meaning, fall prey to such devious tactics of outright lies and manipulation?

Many had believed that the problem was a single people split into two factions, each trying to gain power over the other. But while power and control was a driving force, it was not the whole issue. Over the years, obvious philosophical and theological issues began to surface, hearkening back to the Norris movement decades before.

Some Tenets of Fundamentalism Counter to Traditional Baptist Principles

"The End Justifies the Means"

Fundamentalist religious causes from time immemorial have operated by this misguided principle. Conducting holy wars in the name of religion has inflicted tremendous injustices on humanity. This principle was used to justify ballot manipulation at various SBC meetings to insure control of the outcome.

Trampling and besmirching reputations and destroying careers of many Southern Baptist key leaders became the name of the game. Fundamentalist control of the media resulted in the firing from Baptist Press of Al Shackleford, director and Dan Martin, news editor. The ouster of Lloyd Elder, president of the Sunday School Board, quickly followed. Pressured resignations grabbed Randall Lolley, president of Southeastern Seminary, Keith Parks, president of the Foreign Mission Board, and most recently, the outright firing of Russell Dilday as the president of Southwestern Seminary. These men were fired or forced into early retirement not because they were liberal in their theology, but because they refused to bow to the demands of the political agenda first set out by Pressler and Patterson in the 1970s.

The Definition of a Liberal

To a fundamentalist, a liberal is anyone who does not agree with him. For instance, a basic tenet of fundamentalism is a premillenialist view of the return of Christ- a view which, while held by many Southern Baptists, is subject to varied interpretation. If one happens not to accept this basic fundamentalist interpretation, then his whole faith and experience are called into question.

Classic liberalism denies the virgin birth of Christ, His vicarious death, His bodily resurrection and His imminent return. By these standards, there was not a true liberal leader in the entire SBC!

The Matter of Inerrancy

The fundamentalist claims to be an inerrantist, in that he believes that every word of the Scripture- - one word following the next- is inspired, and thus penned by men under the direction of God. Most any evangelical will accept a fully inspirational view of Scripture, but the question arises, "What version of the Word is inerrant?"

Patterson has set a standard for the fundamentalists by saying that the original manuscripts or autographs were inerrant. The only problem with that is we have no original autographs! The bottom line is you are not an inerrantist unless you fall in line with certain prescribed interpretations of the Scripture.

Since no original autographs are extant, the King James Version, for most fundamentalists, has been substituted for the originals! All this has the effect of turning the scripture into a creed and rules out individual interpretation.

The Priesthood of the Believer and Religious Liberty

Baptists have always believed that each individual Christian can discover the truth of God's Word under the leadership of His illuminating Holy Spirit. The fundamentalist, however, believes that the pastor-preacher is to be the sole authority of God's revelation to His people.

The fundamentalist agenda in its purest form discounts the separation of church and state, shuns a free press, and seeks to elevate its own brand of doctrinal and religious bent to the status of the law of the land.

It is interwoven into the very fabric of the Religious Right on today's political scene, and is bosom buddies with independent right-wing religious/political leaders such as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. Six prominent SBC leaders serve on the Board of Trustees of Falwell's Liberty University. Falwell has endorsed all that has happened in the SBC in the past 15 years.

The Pastor as Ruler of the Church

If the pastor is the sole channel through which God conveys His truth, then he obviously is to be the final authority in all matters of faith and practice. This is perhaps the most "non-Baptist" belief of them all. Fundamentalist Baptist churches tend not to have business meetings and many of them have abolished all committees in favor of pastoral rule.

 A Basic Difference in How We Do Missions

Under fundamentalist control, our Foreign Mission Board has departed from traditional approaches to mission work overseas in two basic areas:

1. Centralized Control

Traditionally, many decisions were made by the missionaries in the field because they know best the local culture and the needs of their particular assignments. The new philosophy is to have headquarters in Richmond make more of these decisions and more closely supervise missionaries. More decisions, therefore, are made by people who have less knowledge of local conditions.

2. The Missionary as Evangelist

Baptist philosophy has been that local people can witness to their neighbors better than an outsider can. As churches were started, pastors from that area or country were found, and churches were encouraged to start other churches.

In foreign countries, seminaries were established to educate leadership. The churches in foreign countries formed their own conventions and played an active role in spreading the Gospel. The new SBC leadership emphasizes the missionaries as evangelists, spreading the gospel by means of mass media, crusades, etc., thereby de-emphasizing local churches, conventions and seminaries.

This sends the subtle message to the local people that they are not considered capable of the task. Consequently, the SBC chose to totally defund Ruschlikon Seminary in Switzerland just at the time when the fall of the Berlin Wall signaled a new openness to the Gospel in Europe.

These two key changes in direction, coupled with the replacement of our best mind in foreign missions' leadership, Keith Parks, must lead thinking Baptists to question the motivation of the Foreign Mission Board trustees who are the source of all these changes both functional and philosophical.

A Sad, But Challenging Conclusion

The SBC has departed so radically from traditional roots that many of us have been led to confess that while we are still Baptists and proud of it, we can no longer be called Southern Baptists in terms of denominational affiliation.

Tragically, we have allowed the election of leaders who have been willing to instantly surrender principles bought with the blood of our Baptist forefathers, many of whom came to this continent to freely exercise their faith.

For years we tried to defeat the takeover with our ballots at the conventions. We were unwilling, however, to use the fundamentalists' own political tactics so we failed to rescue the convention from its irreversible course toward a calamity.

May 2000