SBCOutpost

(Since my post has taken so long to finish, it has become quite lengthy. I will, therefore, publish it in two parts. The first, today. The second, tomorrow.)

General Observations

The 2008 annual session of the Southern Baptist Convention proved to be the anticlimactic end to the very long roller coaster ride I have enjoyed for more than a decade. When I first started attending the convention as a young assistant to Judge Paul Pressler – who graciously paid my way for a number of years – I was overwhelmed by the gathering of thousands of Baptists to conduct what seemed to me to be the most important business on the planet. Now, having just entered my 33rd year, I am bored with Baptists.

In 1995, I would not miss one session. I sat in the Georgia Dome and listened to every sermon preached in the Pastor’s Conference. I took notes during the Executive Committee Report. I studied the bylaws of the convention, and carefully memorized parliamentary procedure. I even sat through the WMU report, and the American Bible Society.

In those early years, I met men like Miles Seaborn, Carroll Karkalits, Ted Tedder, and Russell Kaemmerling. I sat at lunch with Rudy Hernandez and Olin Collins and Neal Griffin. Many of those men who shaped the direction of the conservative movement are now retired, or dead, or out of the ministry for one reason or another. I was privileged to see the SBC in the halcyon days of resurgent euphoria. I listened to the stories about liberals and how the convention was “saved.” I memorized names and dates, places and events. At times, I felt like I was born ten years too late. Like I had come of age only to see the dust of conflict settle.

This year, the convention was a dud. As everyone settles into the fact that the conservative shift didn’t produce the beatific vision it was prophesied to have accomplished, only a few stalwarts remain who voluntarily drink the old elixir of Pattersonian pathos. Like the stubby, ruddy architect who led the takeover, the convention has become grayer, slower, and fatter.

In the next few paragraphs, I will offer my observations – biased and brazen as they are – in what shall be my final post-convention analysis. In a subsequent post entitled “Exit Strategy” I will ruminate publicly on my four year plan that has now matured to fruition. Until then, here are my thoughts:

Pastors Conference

I have not attended an entire session of the SBC Pastor’s Conference for several years. The canned voices, the scripted applause lines, the hubris of it all became as distasteful to me as my blogging has become to so many others. It’s the same song, sung over and over again. We need revival. We need to be relevant. We need to preach expository sermons. We need this or that. While the SBC Pastor’s Conference used to be a campaign tour bus for conservative candidates, it is now something of a broken down jalopy along the denominational highway. This year I did not hear a single sermon. I did not join in a single anthem. I did not enter the hall whatsoever during the gathering. And I feel quite good about it.

I’m sure there were motivational moments or tear-jerking tales. I’m sure some people were moved or challenged or changed. My skepticism has not carried me to a point where I doubt the power of the proclaimed Word to accomplish a sovereign purpose. For those who find the Pastor’s Conference a blessing, I’m thankful. For the growing numbers who find it superfluous, expensive, and predictable, I echo their benign disinterest.

Presidential Election

The election of the Southern Baptist Convention president was bizarre. Six candidates, only three of whom had any hope of winning, vied for the coveted position of leading a tired and waning flock of convention-goers for the next two years. Never again will the convention president represent “16 Million Southern Baptists.” The two party system of “liberals” and “fundamentalists” has given way to a Balkanized convention where Calvinists, and Revivalists, and Progressives, and Bureaucrats, and Bloggers, and Anti-bloggers, and every other competing interest under the sun has entrenched themselves on a few issues with very little prospect of intramural collaboration.

I had very different thoughts about the candidates. Johnny Hunt is a passionate man who often comes across as angry. Frank Cox looks the presidential part, though his regional appeal never seemed enough to turn out the vote. Avery Willis is too old to fire up the base of “missional leaders” who might have otherwise been a factor in the election. Wiley Drake should have taken his 2nd Vice Presidency and been satisfied. Les Puryear had a good issue – increased participation of small churches – though he himself knew the uphill battle before him. Bill Wagner’s odd campaign for the presidency, and his students in the trenches distributing fliers with the intensity of SoulForce, never stood a chance.

For me, honestly, I had no idea how I would vote until I heard the nomination speeches. My pastor and friend, Wade Burleson, had determined to nominate Bill Wagner for reasons that I understood but were insufficient to garner my support. Wade is an articulate speaker, and there is little doubt that most of the 400 votes that Wager received owe more to Burleson’s nomination than to Wagner’s popular appeal.

Wiley’s nominator – whoever he was – did a superb job making a speech for a candidate who hadn’t a chance. It was clear and careful, highlighting Wiley’s accomplishments and capturing some of his hopes for the SBC. Listening to it I thought it was something like hearing a nomination speech for Ron Paul and the Republican National Convention.

Dwight McKissic would have been a great nominator for Les Puryear, and I regret that my friend’s health kept him from attending the SBC. Dwight’s associate, Alan Stoddard, is a prince of a man with a huge heart and a genuine enthusiasm for reaching lost souls. When I see men like him at the convention, my single prayer is that they get out as fast as possible before the denominational nonsense creates the inevitable disillusionment. Churches who have staff members like Alan Stoddard should forbid them from attending denominational meetings or reading denominational news. They are too great an asset to the Kingdom to get entangled with convention business.

John Marshall is a great leader in Missouri, and his balanced and peaceable demeanor has done as much as anything else to retrieve the Missouri Baptist Convention from the partisan precipice toward which Roger Moran et al have been driving it. His nomination of Avery Willis was good, but not great. He stared into the camera like he was reading a teleprompter. The speech came off as memorized, which it probably was. In truth, John Marshall would have been a better candidate and Avery a better nominator. But hindsight is 20/20. Look for Avery Willis to fade from the scene, and John Marshall to rise as a new generation of leaders in the SBC.

Junior Hill, the much-beloved evangelist, was looking gaunt and pale when he assayed the platform to offer one of the most half-hearted nomination speeches I’ve ever heard in my life. Basically, Hill suffered a moment of divided loyalty between Frank Cox and Johnny Hunt. Rather than trumpet the virtues of his candidate with unqualified endorsement, Hill threw Frank Cox under the bus. Many of us were disappointed that Junior Hill took the course he did, though no person doubts that he sincerely struggled through a personal commitment to two friends running for the same convention office. Frank Cox should have known the dilemma Hill faced, and offered him an exit in order to solicit a more passionate and unambiguous nominator in Hill’s place.

And then there is Ted Traylor’s puckered-face nomination of Johnny Hunt. I felt that Traylor’s speech contained too many potentially deceptive “truths” about Hunt’s qualification for office. Not only did Traylor slip in an intentionally unclear reference to Hunt’s Cooperative Program support, he also fudged the number of pastors who have been mentored by Hunt. If Hunt has mentored more than 25,000 pastors through his Timothy Barnabas conferences, then he has single handedly trained more than half the pastors in the SBC. I know of some pastors who have attended these conferences four or five times, which means that they have probably been counted four or five times. This is not to undermine the degree to which Hunt has taken a personal interest in the ministries of young pastors, but only to highlight the degree to which his nomination provides another example of Southern Baptists inability to present accurate numbers when denominational grandstanding.

I think what bothered me most about Johnny Hunt’s candidacy is that I have known of his personal assurance to Frank Cox of both his unambiguous decision not to run this year, and of his personal support. I’m always willing to let a man change his mind, but it seems to me that honor was at stake. I had opportunities before Indianapolis to raise questions about Hunt’s nomination. There were some who wanted me to profile the excerpts from Spending God’s Money that chronicle Johnny Hunt’s receipt of $92,000 from Bob Reccord’s slush fund at NAMB. Questions about his honorary doctorates were raised. I refused, however, to crank up the machine to oppose Hunt’s candidacy – if for no other reason that I wasn’t certain myself whether or not I would vote for him.

After the convention, I was called by several reporters for a comment about Hunt’s election. My comment was the same to them all: Johnny Hunt is a passionate catalyst and a hero to many Southern Baptist pastors. When interviewed by a major national newspaper about Hunt’s suspect academic credentials, I did my part to kill the story. “No Southern Baptists in Indianapolis thought we were voting for a theologian or a college professor when we voted for Johnny Hunt. We know he’s not a doctor. But we also know he’s not a fraud.”

I’m not enthusiastic about Johnny Hunt’s presidency. But I don’t think anybody is enthusiastic about very much in the SBC these days. If Hunt uses his passionate, energetic hortatory gifts to mobilize Southern Baptists toward ends more eternally significant than teetotaling campaigns, Calvinist-mongering, Emergent church paranoia, or Republican initiatives, then it will be a good thing. If he gives in to a fundamentalist impulse, Southern Baptists will reap more of what they have sown.

I distinctly remember sitting with Paige Patterson a few years ago outside his Wake Forest office and talking about the line up of future SBC presidential contenders. James Merritt would succeed him, and then probably Jack Graham and Johnny Hunt. He never foresaw Bobby Welch, and he certainly overlooked Frank Page. When I asked Paige what he thought about Johnny Hunt’s ability to lead the convention, he told me that he would do well but would need “theological supervision.” “The problem with so many of Hunt’s generation is that they came through the seminaries during liberal administrations,” Paige explained. Their hearts were hot for conservatism, but their heads lacked the theological grounding to understand all the issues. They were nursed on Bultmann and Barth, rather than Broadus and Boyce, so to speak. They were faithful lieutenants, but they seldom made good generals.

Whatever the case, time will tell whether or not Johnny Hunt will eschew the fundamentalist fringe and get the Southern Baptist Convention back in the hands of the churches rather than charismatic megachurch pastors and overpaid bureaucratic clowns.

One final thought about the election of SBC President. The day cannot hasten soon enough that John Sullivan is no longer a platform personality with so immense a responsibility as clock-watcher and shoulder-patter. Frank Page did a remarkable job as convention president. He could have done us one additional favor by refusing to appoint Sullivan to the team of parliamentarians.

To be continued . . .

For an explanation of this photo, please await the convention summary.

Two years ago the convention met in Greensboro, NC, to observe the perfect storm wherein a relatively unknown pastor from a previously low profile church trounced two rival nominees to be elected president of the Southern Baptist Convention on the first ballot. I say it was a perfect storm because it is highly unlikely that a similar sequence of events could cause the chain reaction of the sort that propelled him to the national spotlight.

The convention was in a stalemate regarding the Cooperative Program as the Executive Committee squared off with megachurch pastors over the 10% clause. Entity heads were lining up behind candidates and issuing endorsements, while other entity heads publicly criticized the appearance of partisanship by convention employees. Bloggers were gripping the convention by the throat, and we had done our part to severely cripple the other nominees with an endless barrage of posts about things that really didn’t matter but served a politically useful purpose. “Younger leaders” were engaged, whoever they were.

Johnny Hunt, a man whose Ross Perot-like candidacy (he’s in . . . he’s out . . . he’s back in) did his own part to help elect Frank Page by offering a weak nomination speech for Ronnie Floyd. Similarly, Calvin Whitman nominated Jerry Sutton of Two Rivers in Nashville with a speech that was as forgettable as the nominator himself.

(To prove my point, I’ve asked a number of 2008 convention messengers if they remember who nominated Jerry Sutton. Nobody. Not one person in ten could recall.)

And then there was Forrest Pollock, whose speech to nominate Frank Page was delivered so flawlessly and with such finesse as to make it immediately apparent to most in the convention hall that Page was going to be elected by a considerable margin. We could literally hear the chad popping in greater numbers as Frank Page’s name was read by Registration Secretary Jim Wells.

Had the Lord not taken him home to a greater reward, it is very likely that Forrest Pollock would have become president of the convention within two years. His great service to the Southern Baptist Convention will be remembered by all of us who were there. It is to him, as much as any human factor, that Page’s presidency is owed.

Today I sit looking back over the last two years of convention life, and realize what a terrible burden leading us must have been for Frank Page. He’s had to deal with sniping from his alma mater, Southwestern Seminary. He’s had to deal with rumor mongering about his theological commitments. He’s had to deal with the fallout of moral compromise in the convention, and he’s had the frustration of having to present a positive appeal to an international audience predisposed to think of Southern Baptists as backwards, bickering, culture crusaders with neither the sincerity nor the sanctity of the Christ whose ambassador they would purport to be.

At every turn Frank Page has been gracious. He has been courteous to his critics and loyal to his friends. He’s had the courage to tell the IMB trustees that the infamous policies were foolish, and he’s had the audacity to confront bloggers — even those who supported him — about their attitudes and rancorous strife.

To be honest, he has set the bar high for convention president. In an election year of historic proportion, he has maintained a neutrality becoming his office. He’s been prophetic with the priestly class when they’ve needed their ears pinned back. He’s been compassionate when the circumstance necessitated a tender hand. He has, in my estimation, both admonished the unruly and encouraged the fainthearted.

His wife hasn’t marched into convention hotels and demanded a certain kind of table linen or tea service or floral arrangement. We’ve hardly known she was there at all. Quietly, in his shadow, she has been a true First Lady. She alone has heard his prayers at night. She alone has seen his tears and held his hand and walked beside him all the way.

As I look over the appointments that have come thus far from Frank Page’s tenure, I see balance. He committed to leading all Southern Baptists, and he has brought us all along. One is hard pressed to find anybody with anything unflattering to say about Frank Page’s two terms at the SBC helm.

Thirty years after the Conservative Resurgence began, you can still find messengers who were there in Houston on that historic day when Adrian Rogers was elected to the position that started the processes of change in a convention that was staring death in the face. They get a little teary eyed when they recount the stories of that year, and to this day they think of Adrian Rogers as the face and the voice of the movement he launched.

Thirty years from now, if any of us are still Southern Baptists, I imagine we will look back to Greensboro 2006 and Frank Page with a similarly fond nostalgia. He was our candidate. He became our president. He remains the standard by which we will judge his successors.

When he was elected, Frank Page told us that he was conservative but he wasn’t angry about it. Through two years of incredible pressure and conflict, he’s as solidly conservative as he was the day he was elected. And he’s still not angry. Not at the people who opposed him — either secretly or publicly. And not at those of us who by our support gave him more headaches than he ever deserved.

Seeing as how most of us are in Christian ministry one would think that the time to be honest would be…well…just about any and every time, though in these days being honest may get you branded a malevolent spirit being. But I digress.

Friday morning, May 2nd, Dr. Steve Lemke, Provost at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, sent an e-mail encouraging various faculty and staff to consider the Barber/Yarnell Resolution on Integrity in Church Membership. He certainly did not suggest that they should sign their names to it. He simply stated his own support and offered it to them for their own support if they might be so inclined.

Of course, Tom Ascol has proposed a similar resolution for the past two years and it has been rejected both times. The arguments against Ascol’s resolution have been quite stellar. In Greensboro the official stance of the Resolutions Committee was that we should keep unregenerate people on our church rolls for their prospect value. And a majority of the messengers in session said: “Amen.” Undeterred Ascol submitted his resolution again at last year’s meeting in San Antonio. There it was argued before the messengers that to adopt such a resolution would infringe upon the local church’s autonomy. And a majority of the messengers in sessions said: “Amen.” Read the rest of this entry »

Judge McBryde has granted Defendant Patterson’s motion for summary judgment. He has issued a lengthy opinion in the case and issued an order for Defendant Patterson to recover court fees from Sheri Klouda. (Of course, I predict that Patterson will be magnanimous and decline to pursue those costs from Klouda.)

The documents follow:

Judge McBryde’s Opinion Pt. 1

Judge McBryde’s Opinion Pt. 2

Judgment for Defendant Patterson

After the Turkey is gone…

Editor’s Note: Today we reveal part two of our three part Thanksgiving, Southwestern-style. With appreciation for the new homemaking laboratory at SWBTS, we offer you an easy-t0-follow instructional guide for stuffing and roasting your very own Turkey.

Editor’s Note: As a service to our readers, SBCOutpost.com has compiled a three part Thanksgiving extravaganza video series. With a little help from our big-game-hunting friends at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, we will guide our readers through the turkey hunt. And we’ll finish the series with some footage from the SWBTS Homemaking Kitchen that is sure to help all SBCOutpost.com readers stuff and roast the best bird your Cooperative Program dollars can buy.

So without further ado, we bring you Part One: Bagging Your Bird with Big Daddy.

Public confession of sin takes many forms. It is never easy to watch a man evade his own culpability or obfuscate the gravity of his offense. What do these videos say about the right way and the wrong way to confess sin? Is there any difference in how politicians and preachers deal with the fallout of their publicized vice?

Earlier this week, I announced that SBCOutpost.com would post my analysis of the executive salary and benefit summaries I have received from SBC agencies.  Today, I received a letter from one of the last remaining institutions, and I have chosen to withhold my post to include the information received from that letter.  Expect the final post this week…