In the preface to John Warburton’s autobiographical classic Mercies of a Covenant God, the famous nineteenth-century Baptist J. C. Philpot makes a classic statement about the miserable and painful experiences of Pastor Warburton’s life: “When dark clouds rested upon him in providence, when poverty and want knocked hard at his door, when little work and scanty wages, hard times and an increasing family plunged him into a sea of embarrassment and distress, he was still learning deep and blessed lessons...”

I first read Warburton in 1982 when I was a Baylor University student, and my appreciation for the goodness of divine providence, greatly deepened by reading his autobiography, hasn’t wavered since. God’s goodness, even in the midst of hard times, has sustained me when nothing else could. Though I have found it difficult to explain the circumstances in which I found myself during the years of 2005 through 2008, I have continued to learn deep and blessed lessons through the recounting of those events.

Since the inception of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) in 1845, a trustee serving on one of the dozen SBC agency boards had never been recommended for removal from service; that is, until January 2006, when a majority of the trustees of the SBC International Mission Board voted for my removal. In addition, the recorded minutes of all Southern Baptist agency proceedings, including the minutes of the Southern Baptist mission boards, seminary boards, literature board, and executive board, reflect that no sitting trustee had ever been censured—until a majority of the trustees of the SBC International Mission Board (IMB) voted officially to censure me in November 2007.

Southern Baptist trustees have been found guilty of criminal conduct by federal courts and sent to prison, arrested for soliciting homosexual prostitutes, ended their marriages by having adulterous affairs, and even, in one case, charged with murder, but never has a Southern Baptist trustee been recommended for removal or officially censured until I experienced both between 2005 and 2008. The aforementioned extraordinary steps were taken to discredit me in order to silence my public opposition to two new doctrinal policies that a majority of IMB trustees had voted to adopt in November 2005. I believed these policies exceeded the Baptist Faith and Message and disqualified hundreds of Southern Baptists who could not agree with them from serving on the mission field. It was initially difficult to overcome the shock of such strong-arm tactics by trustee leaders. I responded like any normal pastor would respond; I defended myself and looked to others, including some of my fellow trustees, to offer a vigorous defense on my behalf. Many, as you will read, took up that challenge with vigor.

My greatest personal tool of defense, however, became my blog (short for web log), which I began in fall 2005 to voice my public opposition to the two new doctrinal policies. A blog is a form of communication, via the Internet, where one can instantly make known what is happening in his or her life. It is like an autobiographical book, only one that is instantly published. What served as my defense also happened to be the greatest irritant for those who wished to silence me. What you will read in the pages that follow is supported by the blog posts I wrote months and even years ago. One of the advantages of writing a personal blog is that you have a record of what happened when it happened, and you are not required to rely solely upon your fading memory. Thanks to the written record, this book will portray as accurately as possible the events that transpired during the years 2005 through 2008 in the International Mission Board and the Southern Baptist Convention.

The blog served to hone my writing skills, and it allowed me to see with greater clarity my own frailties. I’ve reviewed most of the things I wrote in the beginning of the IMB controversy, and I see my concern for preserving my personal reputation. This may have been due to the initial shock of the unique circumstances in which I found myself in the SBC. It is not pleasant to be on the receiving end of tactics designed to destroy your ministry. When a pastor’s reputation is in danger, he faces the possibility of losing everything associated with his calling. For this reason, I sought to keep the record straight through an accurate accounting of events at the IMB on my blog.

Time and experience, however, have seasoned my understanding of what is important. I did not fully understand at the beginning of the controversy the extraordinary benefit of being pastor of the same church for fifteen years. The people of Emmanuel Baptist Church knew me. Nothing changed in terms of my ministry to them, though their pastor was now in the national news. I continued to pastor this great church. My family was both encouraging to me personally and supportive of my ongoing involvement in the SBC. For these reasons, my writings, both on my blog and in this book, have taken on new directions.

First, I now write for the sake of others, not myself. I have conversed with Southern Baptists over the past three years who have lost their denominational jobs for opposing the ideological philosophies and idiosyncrasies of the Fundamentalists. I have witnessed people in our convention literally cry in fear of losing their jobs because they have questioned authority. I have personally observed a pastor, whose wife was dying of cancer, become the recipient of a false rumor that he was having an affair, simply because this pastor opposed a certain viewpoint held by those who controlled the board on which he served. I have heard the pain expressed by another Southern Baptist leader over an intentional rumor that he had experienced a mental breakdown—a rumor spread in a concerted attempt to minimize his influence.

I have seen a female employee of one of our Southern Baptist agencies lose the job of her dreams, sell her blood to meet expenses, and face the humiliation of being called a tool of Satan, all because, according to a handful of Fundamentalists in control of the agency were she worked, she was a “woman in a position reserved for men.” I have met missionaries who lost their jobs overseas because they refused to bow to the political pressure of their superiors and submit to demands for conformity, and then sacrificed their children’s college education funds in an attempt to fulfill their divine call and stay on the mission field. I have met a number of Southern Baptists who have been abused, lied about, discriminated against, mistreated, and even terminated from jobs for being, quite simply, Baptists with a conscience. They are now fighting to right the ship of their lives. I wish to help them all, but if I help just one, I will have accomplished more by writing this book than by sitting idly by, as I have done in years past, and saying nothing. There is no valid reason to remain silent when fellow Southern Baptists are being destroyed by a political machine hiding behind a mask of spirituality.

I began to realize in 2005, to my horror, that the issue causing such pain in the Southern Baptist Convention was not a battle for a belief in the inspired, inerrant word of God. I discovered as a trustee of the IMB that we are battling a much worse problem in the SBC. That battle is Fundamentalism, or legalism, that threatens to destroy the fabric of our cooperation. Frankly, because of the way I have seen some Southern Baptists who hold to inerrancy treated by other Southern Baptists who also profess to hold to inerrancy, I now wonder if some actually believe and practice the Bible we call inerrant. I am now writing to help other Southern Baptists who have been burned by the fires of Fundamentalism and to keep others from becoming its victims.

Second, I now write with the desire to change the Southern Baptist Convention by quenching the fires of Fundamentalism. We need a “gospel resurgence.” Southern Baptist churches should focus on the primacy of the gospel. Our convention should awake to the damage done when we boycott Disney, rail against the sexually immoral, look down in disdain at other denominations, and boast of our own numbers, power, and cultural influence. We should only boast of Christ and show sinners his transforming power to change lives. When we Southern Baptists are more concerned with being identified with Christ and his people than we are with our “Baptist identity,” we will withstand the pressure to conform to autocratic decrees of denominational bureaucracies, particularly when those decrees violate both Scripture and conscience.

The Southern Baptist Convention, born in 1845, came of age during the Civil War. The eighteenth anniversary of the Southern Baptist Convention occurred during summer 1863, the same season in which the Battle of Gettysburg stemmed the high tide of Confederate aggression. Prior to Gettysburg, the South looked virtually invincible, but Gettysburg changed both the course of the war and the ultimate destiny of our country. By the end of the Civil War, federal authority had expanded to the point that citizens changed the way they referred to the United States of America. Prior to the war it was appropriate to say “The United States of America are,” but after 1865 the vast majority of people would refer to our country by saying “The United States of America is.”2 The states that comprised the United States of America had become a singular noun; the plurality of identity and purpose that characterized individual states prior to the Civil War had been lost.

It has taken nearly one hundred and fifty years of existence, but the churches of the Southern Baptist Convention are now undergoing a similar transformation. Southern Baptist Convention agencies like the IMB are now exerting a kind of federal authority, demanding that individual, autonomous churches comply with their authoritative, denominational decrees. An internal civil war is being waged within our convention. Some Southern Baptist churches and pastors are continuing to hold fiercely to local church autonomy, congregational authority, and a cooperative ministry among a plurality of churches with differing identities, while Fundamentalists in the SBC are emphasizing absolute conformity to denominational confessions, ecclesiastical hierarchies of authority, and a Baptist identity that goes far beyond our historic Baptist heritage. In other words, some are trying to turn the SBC into one big church, with a pope as her head and all members conforming to the bulls issued by our anointed leader.

Though it would cause old-time Southern Baptists to cringe if someone were ever to say “The churches of the Southern Baptist Convention is,” events of the past few years in my life have convinced me that some Southern Baptist leaders have desired, and have worked tirelessly toward, an absolute conformity within Southern Baptist churches on all things nonessential to genuine Christian faith. The idea of a cooperating convention of autonomous Baptist churches has been superseded by an authoritative denominational control that demands conformity to a specific ideology called Fundamentalism. Those who hold to Fundamental ideology seem willing to stop at nothing to see that their goal of a uniform Baptist identity arises. Of course, that identity is defined by them and their peculiar interpretations of the sacred text. Ironically, it is the demand for conformity on all things nonessential to the Christian faith, and a quiet submission to this demand, that is causing the historic nonconformist identity of Baptist people to be in jeopardy. Baptists have traditionally enjoyed the freedom that comes from defending liberty of conscience, soul competency, the priestly authority of every believer, and local church autonomy. I now write, joining the chorus of others who have written before me, to seek to restore those cherished Baptist ideals to the Southern Baptist Convention. Some Southern Baptist leaders who resist my call for greater cooperation will call me a “liberal,” but by the time you finish reading this book you will know that I am as conservative as Spurgeon, Gill, Boyce, Dagg and other Baptist forefathers when it comes to the essential doctrines of the faith. Those at war against cooperation commonly call those who view nonessentials differently than they “liberals.” It is a tactic that may have worked in the 1980s, but it won’t anymore. Likewise, I do not like the tag Fundamentalists, but as of yet I have found no better word to describe the ideology you will read about in this book. I have no problem with Fundamentalists being a part of our convention; but I have a huge problem with Fundamentalists demanding that everyone else share their interpretations of Scripture or be removed from convention leadership or cooperative missions ministry.

There may not be many Southern Baptists under the age of forty-five who understand the significance of Southern Baptist churches maintaining separate, autonomous identities. Sometimes Southern Baptists must be made to understand the importance of local church autonomy. It’s a little like pre-kindergarten students not caring much for reading, or third grade students for algebra, but at the end of their education, they would regret it if someone didn’t force them to care. The goal of this book is to help Southern Baptist Christians understand and cherish church autonomy, soul competency, and church liberty and thus resist the demands for doctrinal conformity on the nonessentials of the faith. Further, it is a call for Southern Baptists to see the importance of having multiple voices speak out, representing different positions on various issues, when some Southern Baptists are vigorously pushing to silence all dissent within our convention. The chorus of forced uniformity and unity that is being sung by some SBC leaders must be interrupted by the individual voices of reason that cannot be silenced.

Were I to write a tome on the above subject matter alone, it would be both unsold and unread. So I have decided to write a narrative that will help illuminate the problem. Preachers will tell you that the two things most people remember about a message are the stories and the illustrations. I remember hearing an elderly pastor calling illustrations “windows that give light to the soul.” I will illustrate for you the significance of the fight that Southern Baptists now face through the telling of stories that are designed to make you interested in the outcome of this ideological war.

The narrative of the events at the International Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention will read like fiction to most. Some of the stories are so bizarre that some will say, “There’s no way those things happened.” To be confronted in a threatening manner with a knife by a fellow sitting trustee, to overhear trustees collaborating on how to get rid of an IMB vice president because she is simply female, and to endure the illogical rants of a tobacco-tasting trustee as he turns purple with rage over my attempt to reconcile a relationship with him might prove more than the reader can comprehend. But be assured that everything I write is the truth from my perspective. I would never intentionally say something that I know or think to be untrue. Is it possible that my perspective may be skewed? Of course it is. That is one of the reasons I am grateful for my blog. It allows me to read what I wrote months ago, with added time removing the emotion of the moment, and to write with even more reflective objectivity. Hindsight, as they say, is 20/20.

Not everyone will like what I write. I will seek to illustrate how narrow Fundamentalism, Baptist identity radicalism, and ecclesiological dogmatism are destroying the fabric of our cooperative convention and harming people in the process. I will issue a caution to anyone who loses sight of the nature of true Christianity because the shadow of our denomination overtakes the centrality of Jesus Christ and his commandment to love one another. I initially thought I would not write this book, but a federal judge changed my mind in March 2008 when he granted the summary judgment of Southwestern Theological Seminary and dismissed the suit of Dr. Sheri Klouda. Dr. Klouda, a tenure track Hebrew professor at Southwestern who was denied the tenure process after Paige Patterson became the institution’s president, had sued her former employer for breach of contract due to gender discrimination. Leadership at Southwestern, under the direction of Paige Patterson, had informed Dr. Klouda that she “was a woman in a position reserved for men.” After her removal, Dr. Klouda moved her family to Indiana, taking a lower paying job at an evangelical college, and resorted to selling her own blood to pay for the medical expenses of her husband who had suffered a heart attack after her dismissal. In granting the summary judgment, United States District judge John McBryde ruled that the courts had no jurisdiction if a seminary professor were to be removed for gender reasons since a “church” was protected by the First Amendment. The judge then wrote the following:

"The court is satisfied from the summary judgment record that the decision of Patterson and other members of Seminary’s Board of Trustees to terminate plaintiff was religiously motivated. . . . [M]ere inquiry into those areas [by the court] would be an unconstitutional intrusion into the affairs of Seminary as a religious organization . . . . In the Baptist denomination, the Convention is formed to serve all participating local congregations . . . . [The] Seminary is principally supported and wholly controlled by the Convention..."

The judge convinced me to write this book. The federal courts, by constitution, should have nothing to do with regulating, supervising, or determining the just behavior of seminaries, agencies, or ministries of the Southern Baptist Convention. That is our job as Southern Baptists. It is up to the congregations of local churches and Southern Baptist pastors to change things. If we don’t like what we see happening within our convention, then we need to change it. This book is my small attempt to change the direction of the Southern Baptist Convention. Twenty-five years ago I joined the effort to stem what I had been told was a growing tide of liberalism within our convention. That tide, which may have been only a small current, has been stemmed. It’s now time to correct the current that is moving our convention too far to the right into Fundamentalism. It is time to restore us to our heritage of individual and church freedom and focus on the sharing of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

The Southern Baptist Convention has gone far enough. Those who believe it is time for a “gospel resurgence” need to speak up, speak out, and be prepared. I’ve discovered that sometimes the attempts to keep our convention focused on the gospel and evangelical cooperation is not as easy as it seems. There are many who want to play a rough-and-tumble game of hardball religion.

—Wade Burleson, January 2009