When Baylor University first redefined its relationship with the Baptist General Convention of Texas (BGCT), I saw it as a breach of trust.
I remember a conversation with a member of my congregation in Shamrock, Texas, who was a true Baylor loyalist and on the search committee that brought me to the church. She believed the university could do no wrong.
I was more of a “there is a process, and everyone should follow it” type of person. Baylor, along with the university’s board, proved to be more insightful than I, and in the end, did the right thing.
At the time, Texas Baptists were still “big tent” Baptists, and I loved the diversity and open conversations that happened at the conventions and conferences I attended. I made it a point to attend all the evangelism and Christian Life Commission conferences. Generally, they weren’t the same crowd, but I loved being at both.
Baylor saw what was coming sooner than I did. Although we did so much to keep the fundamentalists at bay, that effort worked until it didn’t.
I left the pastorate quite suddenly in 2008, which was a shock to the congregation and my friends around the state. It was simply the right thing to do. My wife Anna’s remaining family was navigating her mother’s stroke and Alzheimer’s, and the earlier murder of Anna’s two brothers left her in Abilene and her sister Sandy in Livingston as the primary caregivers.
For 15 years, I had been more active in the BGCT than at any other time in my life, and I felt my work was vital to the survival of the state convention I had come to love.
The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) had already fallen to the fundamentalists. Their lack of understanding of our structure was the reason they had only a partially successful strategy, which ultimately failed in Texas. I say they lacked understanding because the steady stream of fundamentalists who pushed the “conservative resurgence” were so marginally connected to Baptist life that they ended up winning the battle but not the war.
In Southern Baptist life before the takeover, an alliance existed from local churches to what was called an “association,” then to the state conventions, and finally to the SBC. What Paige Patterson and Paul Pressler didn’t know about this system left them with results that were less than they had expected.
I once had supper with Pressler in Weatherford, Texas, and heard his railing against Baylor and its liberalism. In fact, that was the entire pitch of the fundamentalist takeover: the SBC was drifting into liberalism, and it needed to be stopped.
I rode to the meeting with another pastor from Mineral Wells, and when he dropped me off at home, we parted with very different perceptions of Pressler’s presentation. I was not a fan.
Their plan misunderstood Southern Baptist life, its institutions, and its churches because of their marginal relationship to it.
If you look back at the leaders swept into power, you’ll notice big-name megachurch pastors whose dominion in their own churches was unquestioned. They had little interest in being connected to broader Baptist life; they were too busy and too important to be bothered. Their affiliation was as thin as parchment paper.
As the plan was implemented, they took the national convention but had no power over the state conventions or the institutions connected to them. The SBC had six seminaries and a couple of retreat centers, Glorieta and Ridgecrest, and massive agencies like the International Mission Board and the Home Mission Board (which later became the North American Mission Board).
More importantly, Cooperative Program funds—which originated in the local church—were sent to the state conventions for processing and accounting. From those receipts, the state conventions drew their budgets and distributed funds through the states.
State conventions had control over most of the institutions; Texas alone had about 26. Of those, nine were universities or colleges.
At some point, fundamentalists took possession of “the SBC Tent,” but everything inside was under the control and governance of state conventions. The takeover “worked,” but it didn’t really. So the war moved to take over the state conventions themselves.
Pressler may have savored his victory until he realized that Baylor was still out of his grasp.
I am proud to say the Texas convention managed to remain a big tent for a little while. We set new visions, assessed the education of our seminaries, cut funding to them, and poured more money into Baylor’s Truett Seminary and helped start Logsdon Seminary in Abilene.
I became proud of Baylor. Until now.
From my vantage point, the Baylor administration’s recent decision to return a significant gift from the Baugh family has the putrid smell of fear. A university that had set its sights on becoming a research institution shamed itself by turning away an understudied population in the United States and the larger world.
The vitriol and hatred directed at the LGBTQ+ community only underscores the ignorance that surrounds this demographic. Politicians are listening to the haters, and preachers are doing what they have always done: pawning off their interpretation of the Bible with the disingenuous phrase, “The Bible says.”
No, the Bible, when reverently and prayerfully studied, becomes a table where we meet the Holy Spirit, who reveals God’s Word to a person’s open heart.
When any preacher stands in a Christian pulpit, they are asking the gathered listeners to trust that they have been with Jesus through the Holy Spirit. The message is, literally, the sense the preacher makes of that encounter. It is a shared interpretation.
It is not “what the Bible says,” but rather, “what the Bible said to my waiting heart.” Nothing more, nothing less.
Our marginalization of the LGBTQ+ community is stitched together from verses taken out of context, stripped of the cultures of their time, and frankly, rooted in meanness and fear.
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A private practice counselor working with veterans and survivors of trauma. Previously, Chancellor served four churches in Texas for 33 years, then ran a Mental Health Department of Alan B. Polunsky Maximum Security prison which houses death row.
