During my nine years in Atlanta, Georgia, where interest in the War Between the States (or the War of Northern Aggression as it was sometimes called) is still current, I learned about the military term "friendly fire." Even now, visiting one of the densely forested battlefields, one can imagine how it might have happened. The trees and underbrush are so thick that at times the soldiers couldn't tell if the approaching figures were friend or foe. It was not unusual for soldiers wearing both blue and gray to panic and fire through the woods only to discover they had wounded or killed their own comrades--hence the term "friendly fire."

During recent military action in Afghanistan and Iraq, there have been documented incidents of "friendly fire"--our military personnel mistakenly downing our own planes, destroying our own tanks, and accidentally shooting Iraqi policemen wrongly suspected of being insurgents.

The other kind of friendly fire, more difficult to comprehend, is the tactical decision to fire on one's own troops, intentionally risking the loss of the few for the good of the many. In World War II when enemy troops were closely engaged with Allied soldiers on the front lines, a painful decision was sometimes made to lay down an artillery barrage on the attacking enemy, knowing some Allied troops would also die in the process.

As I reflect on the carnage of the past quarter century of denominational strife in our Baptist family and remember how many have suffered not at the hands of the enemy, but as a result of the actions of fellow Baptists, the term "friendly fire" comes to mind. Some of it has been accidental; some has been intentional. When asked about such "collateral damage," one prominent leader of the SBC takeover party rationalized, "We knew we would have to break both arms of the Convention in order to save it."

Most people use the term "controversy" (defined as "a discussion of questions in which opposing opinions clash") to describe our denominational battles. But what fragmented our Baptist fellowship was something far more serious than that. It was a self-destructive, contentious, one-sided feud that at times took on combative characteristics. One Baptist leader spoke of it as a "holy war." Nevertheless, the term "controversy" is the euphemistic expression popularly employed to describe what happened, so I will use it too.

The "controversy" in the Southern Baptist Convention erupted the year I accepted the presidency of Southwestern Seminary. So in a way, my tenure, 1978–1994, paralleled the tragic family fight. Baptist disputes are nothing new; in fact, one might say criticism and opposition are a natural and expected experience for anyone engaged in an important enterprise.

In 1980, Dr. Peter Flawn, president of the University of Texas, invited me to preach at the university's baccalaureate service in Austin, Texas. We had dinner in his home, and he pointed to a framed statement hanging on the wall. It was a quote by Edmund Burke, the eighteenth-century English statesman. Since I was in the early years of my term as president of Southwestern Seminary, he thought I should be prepared for Burke's warning:

That quote also found a place on my wall and in my experience at the seminary as well. But while this kind of opposition is to be expected, no one could have imagined that the initial harangues by a few outspoken fundamentalists in1978 about a supposed liberal drift in the SBC--particularly in the six Southern Baptist seminaries--would result in the fracturing of a great denomination. This controversy far exceeded any past disturbances both in extent, methodology, and outcome.

Concerns first surfaced at the news that a little-known Baptist judge named Paul Pressler and the head of a small Bible school named Paige Patterson, both Texans, were scheming to seize control of the denominational appointment process and ultimately the six seminaries and the entire Convention. Surely an effective denomination held together by the trust and voluntary cooperation of its 30,000 churches could not be so easily manipulated by two such unlikely individuals. And besides, experienced Baptists knew that the theological pendulum always seemed to return to the center after swinging back and forth between liberal views on the left and ultraconservative views on the right. There was an inherent natural corrective in our democratic structure that helped us avoid the ditches on either side of the road and kept our Convention centered where it belonged in the "radical middle."

But this assault on the Convention was different. The Patterson/Pressler coalition actually grabbed the free-swinging pendulum, forced it hard right, and held it there, disrupting the spontaneous corrective that had worked so effectively in the past. Admittedly, people dissatisfied with some action or trend would criticize, disrupt, and even boycott the Southern Baptist Convention, but no one had ever attempted--much less succeeded--in a takeover strategy to control its structure, organization, and operation.

Furthermore, the alarm clocks of concern went off at different times for different leaders, spreading out the effort to oppose the takeover and preventing a unified resistance. Looking back, had some of the tardy voices that eventually spoke out against the Patterson/Pressler league been raised earlier--in 1979 or 1980--the takeover could not have prevailed. I believe the mainstream majority, punctually aroused, would have turned back the assault in spite of all the underhanded political strategies the pair brazenly employed.

One of the depressing realizations of the early years of dissension was how many pastors, ministers, and lay leaders simply yearned to be on the winning side. Some lifted damp fingers into the air to detect which way the wind was blowing so they could safely go with the flow. For example, one pastor on the board at Southwestern Seminary rationalized to me his fundamentalist votes by saying, "I have to go along with them; they got me my church." If the tide had shifted away from the fundamentalists even once during the early years, these "go-with-the-winner-Baptists" (Pseudo-Baptists?) would have jumped quickly back to the majority side and assured victory for historic Baptists.

Another disappointment was the silence of some who disagreed with what was happening but were afraid to "stir up trouble" or risk losing friends or their church positions. As one religious reformer from the past said, "Silence is golden, but some silence is merely yellow."

U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy once warned Americans,

The closeness of the votes during the struggle for the SBC presidency supports the view that a few small variations could have made a difference and shifted the momentum back toward a traditional authentic Baptist Convention. For example, in 1988, when the Convention was held in San Antonio, fundamentalist Jerry Vines was elected over Richard Jackson by a slim majority of 692 votes out of 32,727 who attended. Only 347 messengers out of 32,000 shifting their votes would have defeated the takeover candidate. That same year, the SBC Woman's Missionary Union celebrated their one hundredth anniversary. They decided to hold their anniversary meeting in Richmond, Virginia, in May rather than during the Southern Baptist Convention in June when they typically met. Hundreds of women no doubt opted to go to Richmond and skip San Antonio that year. Since a large majority of the women in this mission organization would likely have voted for the traditional Baptist candidate, Richard Jackson, I believe the outcome would have been different.

That same year, when the vote was so close, I noticed that during the debates before the election of the president, several aggressive spokespeople representing the left of our Baptist spectrum made some contentious, intemperate remarks in support of women's ordination. The louder and longer they spoke, you could sense that some undecided messengers who were on the brink of voting against the takeover were frightened back across the line to vote for the fundamentalist candidate. If these overly zealous debaters had tempered the shock effect of their speeches, the vote might have been different.

Basically, Baptists are conservative in their theology and are fearful of anything that smacks of a liberal drift away from biblical principles. This hunger for maintaining sacred values probably caused some Baptists to vote for the fundamentalist agendas even though fundamentalism runs counter to their own ideals and interests.

It seemed that after the narrow defeat in 1988, opponents of the fundamentalist takeover began to lose heart, and never again were the votes that close. Eventually, "moderates," the uninspiring, gritless name sometimes given to those who resisted the Patterson/Pressler organization, either stopped attending the Convention meetings or gave up on organized efforts to defeat the takeover efforts.

One of the inevitable outcomes of the coarsening of our denominational meetings and the rude acrimony that has characterized our debates is the reluctance of sensitive well-mannered people to participate. Rather than getting sucked up in the rancorous wrangling, they quietly drop out, and the quality of the participation is thereby diminished. The discussions are left in the hands of mean-spirited extremists.

In many respects, the fundamentalist attack was not just against the structure and organization of the Convention; it was an attack on the spirit of our Baptist family, the positive spirit of fellowship, the spirit of trust, civility, and cooperation. Since the Southern Baptist Convention was held together by the fragile bond of voluntary cooperation, and since voluntary cooperation depends on trust, the destruction of that spirit spelled the eventual demise of voluntary cooperancy.

Since 1992, the fundamentalist candidates for SBC president have been basically unopposed, signaling the fact that the hardliners have achieved total "victory" by squelching any contrary voices and basically purging all disagreement. The great Southern Baptist Convention has been in the hands of "alien" Baptists and, in my opinion, will never return to its former glory.

How then, shall divided Baptists, as well as other Christian groups weighed down by a recent history of controversy, move forward, leaving unfortunate fractures behind, and press on to higher ground? The hymn expresses the prayer and aim of this book:

We must not dwell on the past twenty-five years, but neither should we carelessly discount them nor forget both the wrongdoings of those who assaulted the Convention and the sometimes embarrassing failures among those of us who opposed them. We need to reflect on the bad things and learn from them. Billy Sunday claimed that ignoring history and forgetting its lessons is dangerous. He warned that passing time has a way of erasing the seriousness of wrongdoing, quelling our sense of outrage, and encouraging apathy:

So the best way forward from this quarter century of strife is to let the past convict us and work to restore a gentler, kinder tone in our discourse and deliberations--in short--a return to Christian civility. That's the road to higher ground.

For example, looking back, we need to acknowledge the stinging indictment leveled at Baptists in the South by some of our critics. They accuse Baptists of being proud, self-sufficient, and even triumphalistic in our progress and growth. There is truth in that accusation. At times we Baptists boastfully considered ourselves not only the largest non-Roman Catholic denomination in the country, but the best. As one Alabama Baptist preacher expressed it, "Southern Baptists are God's last hope…His only hope for evangelizing this world."³ In more recent years, a former Southern Baptist Convention president, admitting that it sounded like megalomania, made a similar exaggerated claim,

Texas Baptists recently made a similar blunder in their bold claims about their mission outreach in the Minnesota-Wisconsin area, inaccurately boasting that we Texans "launched" Baptist work in those two states. The implication was that until Texas Baptists came to the rescue, Minnesota and Wisconsin were bereft of evangelical witness among a population that was "religious but with no personal experience with Christ."

Roger Olson, who joined the faculty at Baylor's Truett Seminary from Bethel Seminary in Minnesota, wrote the following correction in a letter to the Baptist Standard:

This tendency toward uncouth denominational smugness has sometimes made us impervious to corrective criticism. As Tocqueville warned, when one lives "in a state of perpetual self-adoration, only past experience is able to bring certain truths to our attention."⁶ Now, as a result of the controversy with its failures from both the right and the left, we've been brought down a notch. Our denominational effectiveness has been seriously eroded. Our best hope for redeeming that past is to learn from it. Patrick Henry said it well: "We have but one lamp by which our feet are guided; and that is the lamp of experience."⁷

The purpose of this book is not merely to point out what's wrong or to cast stones at expressions of incivility. In fact, each chapter offers a "higher ground" alternative. The book is an attempt to shine the lamp of experience on our history and let it guide Baptists and other believers to take the higher ground: a place defined as the gracious, restrained, and well-mannered disposition of Christian civility.

Order this book from
our online bookstore

Home | Books | Curriculum | Freebies | Contact Us