Time Traveling: Inheriting Southern Seminary’s Past

I am a time traveler.

I learned how from my great aunts, two sisters named Emmie and Minnie who lived in a home without electricity or indoor plumbing, built before the Civil War.

On thin pillows and under thinner blankets, those two living oracles told me stories from their childhood.

Aunt Minnie spun folktales.

Aunt Emmie taught me about “my people.” From her, I know that my great-grandmother pronounced “bread” as “braid.”

Their words fueled my dreams, making the past shimmer like a sequin dress.

Over time, those stories became my stories, and I saw the power they held.

I’ve been about the business of collecting stories ever since.

A story about cornbread showed me I could taste a dish I thought had died with my grandmother.

A story over Indian food led me to the book Brother to a Dragonfly. That story changed the direction of my life.

And then there are the stories that found me more than I found them. The kind that gave me an outline, but didn’t paint the whole picture.

Stories about the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, fell into this category.

A Mythical Place

Southern Seminary is a place I’ve never been, and likely never will. Yet, I have felt drawn to it with a force as strong as gravity—a place I tend to think of in the same vein as El Dorado, Atlantis, Shangri-La.

I caught pieces of its story from professors at Campbell University. I heard more when I began loafing around with salt-and-pepper-haired preachers and misfit ministers.

They told me about a place whose time had run out, but which had once housed some of the brightest minds, caused some of the biggest controversies, and led the way in theological and religious education.

Listening to them, I felt like I was standing on the campus inside Norton Hall. My feet gracing hallways once walked by E.Y. Mullins, Clarence Jordan, Karen Smith, Wayne Oates, A.T. Robertson, Frank Stagg, and Molly Marshall.

Stories so vivid that I found myself transported to the stacks of the James P. Boyce Centennial Library, where I brought books to my face and caught hints of mold and vanilla.

You might call me a liar, but on a few occasions, I swear I heard the Aeolian-Skinner pipe organ calling out to me from Alumni Chapel.

I got all that from my storytellers. The highs, the lows, that which made them proud and that which embarrassed them.

I heard a range of stories, but all of them told me about a time when the seminary was still a seminary.

A time before the Fundamentalist Takeover.

I was intrigued and wanted to know more. I wanted answers. I found them where I always have: in books.

Barry Hankins’s Uneasy in Babylon.

Grady Cothern’s The New SBC and What Happened to the Southern Baptist Convention.

Nancy Ammerman’s Baptist Battles.

Walter Shurden’s The Struggle for the Soul of the SBC.

I read how power-promising architects like Paige Patterson and Paul Pressler led the charge to replace committee chairs and seminary presidents within the SBC with conservative autocrats.

I learned they succeeded. Leaving a denomination’s integrity to crumble like the walls of Jericho.

My findings left me with a distrust for anything touted as correct doctrine. Orthodoxy became a highly overused term, often replacing the Gospel for those in the Conservative Resurgence.

I discovered those not on board with the new administration were told to gather what they could and start over.

This included any woman who thought God had called them to stand behind a pulpit and Baptists who were tired of signing documents proving their unwavering support of the institution.

Many left—some willingly, some kicking and screaming, all of them carrying precious memories and scars along the way. 

I’ve heard their stories.

And just as the tales told by my aunt Emmie and Minnie became my own, the stories from students and faculty of Southern Seminary did the same.

Inheriting Southern

I started to see myself in Southern’s story.

I attended universities and divinity schools that emerged out of the split. North Carolina produced four. I earned degrees from two of them. I earned another from one in Georgia.

I studied under professors who had attended Southern for their MDivs and PhDs. A few even taught there for a time. Some were on the last chopper out. 

I sat in their classrooms and hoped proximity guaranteed me an honorary degree.

Still, there was an irritating itch—did I miss something by not experiencing it firsthand?

I felt the same when my father used to talk about Muhammad Ali.

“Tyson is hell, son. De La Hoya is fun to watch. But you never saw Ali in his day. You never saw the real thing,” he told me.

So I grunted and groaned and lifted Southern upon a pedestal.

It was my academic idol until I found myself sitting on a stone wall in the North Carolina mountains beside Mark Jensen. Jensen taught Pastoral Care and Pastoral Theology at Wake Forest School of Divinity, from where I would soon graduate.

At this retreat, we shared stories about our lives and how we ended up where we did. Jensen’s presence and expertise in pausing our conversation at just the right moments, allowing our dialogue to breathe, had me convinced that no other soul on the planet embodied pastoral care better.

“So you were at Southern before the takeover, right?” I asked.

He nodded, saying a few things about his time there.

“Man, you were there during the Camelot years. I mean, my God, it was a murderers’ row of the who’s who of Baptists. That must have been something?” I said.

Another well-placed pause.

And then he ruined my perception of Southern in the best of ways:

“Yeah, Justin, it really was something. I had such an enriching experience there. Great professors, good peers. But you know, looking back on it, I realize that there weren’t a lot of people who looked different than me there. Sure, there were some women, but not enough in the classroom. We did have some male students come over from Africa, but not many African American students. So even Camelot wasn’t perfect.”

I felt a chill running down the back of my neck and realized it was my bubble bursting.

“You know,” he went on, “I look out at the classes here (Wake Divinity), the students in them, the teachers who teach them, and it really is something. Different people from different faith traditions. You and your classmates get a more diverse education than I ever did. I’m envious of what you’re getting. I wish I could have gotten an experience like that.”

I never forgot his words. Another story worth saving. I took a cue from Mary, the mother of Jesus, and kept them all in my heart.

There they stayed. Working like a fulcrum when the weight of aspiration and appreciation got to be too much on either side.

“Old Southern” Reunites

I needed this balance, this centering, especially when I received an unlikely invitation last month. Wake Forest University was opening its campus to Southern Seminary alumni and hosting a reunion.

I read the names of those planning to attend on social media and knew I had to go.

I wanted to hear their stories.

And so, my wife Lauren and I gathered with some 80 fellow dissenters. Former students and faculty of Southern, who have been called heroes by some and heretics by others.

I watched as voices laced with pride and slight pangs of sadness stood and shared what they had taken away from Southern. Their accents dripped heavy with nostalgia.

Every table there, a time machine. The task of riding them all impossible, like trying to scan a radio for the clearest channel with a bent antenna.

I fared better the following morning during a panel discussion with former Southern professors, Dr. Bill Leonard and Dr. Linda McKinnish Bridges and the current Dean of Wake Forest School of Divinity, Dr. Corey Walker.

I listened as Dr. McKinnish Bridges shared her story about coming to Southern. She told the audience about her father, a whooping and hollering preacher who possessed a polity as deep as the mountains he called home.

She went to him once as a child after seeing a Bill Gothard diagram on the order of creation where women rested near the bottom.

“Do you believe that, Daddy?” she asked.

He told her it was helpful in the ordering of things, like having stop signs on the road.

“I carried that with me for many years,” she said. “And then one day I was driving and came to my first roundabout.”

With no stop sign in sight, the room erupted with applause.

Later, I heard the rest of the story. How her father, Harold McKinnish, would have a roundabout moment himself. Scales fell from his eyes, and he blessed the call of God on his daughter’s life. Showing up at her Ph.D. graduation and later helping her pack when it became apparent that she was no longer welcome at Southern.

Bill Leonard delivered more profundity-laced sentences than most ministers will in a lifetime. And like Jesus, I suppose if every one of them were written down, the whole world would not have room for the books he could fill.

I wrote down many of them that day, but the one I’ll remember was simple and sincere.

“The Gospel is all we got left,” he said.

While not attending SBTS, Dr. Corey Walker discussed the impact the school had on the landscape of faith in the United States and why it serves as a clear example of how organized religion can cling desperately to the status quo.

He pointed to leaders and panderers who would use religion to their advantage while imploring those with ears to hear to call out the bullshit when presented with the opportunity, which was growing by the day.

“What we are seeing now in this country is an aggressive form of inhumanity,” Walker said.

Each panelist made it clear that what had taken place on the campus of Southern Seminary was happening again, this time on a much larger scale.

After lunch, Dr. Bill Leonard approached the pulpit in Davis Chapel. Standing there, all of five feet and change, every inch a giant. For many in the room, he’s been God’s last and only hope for the people called Baptists. 

He preached Luke’s Jesus. He talked of division, at Southern Seminary and in our country. He explained that it was at Southern where the spirit of dissent came alive in him. He shared a story about Phillip Berrigan. He proclaimed to us that God’s grace is double-gauged.

Afterwards, we broke bread. Drank real wine. Promised each other we’d do so again soon.

And then the benediction swept us out the door and away from each other.

Keeping the Story Alive

I left that gathering feeling full. 

Full of stories that connected me with the past of others who shaped me. A seed of this was planted long-ago on summer nights with my great-aunts. It continues to grow thanks to the unconventional roads of dissenting Baptists.

They are the voices teaching me that the story of Southern Seminary doesn’t really belong to anyone. Still, by grace or providence, I have become part of it. 

And that’s what makes a good story, isn’t it? You want to hear more, you demand one more chapter, or you ask the teller to start over again from the beginning.

I believe it’s worth getting in a time machine for.

It’s worth becoming one too, to keep the story alive. 

The “old” Southern Seminary is still speaking to us.

I hope we’re still listening.

I pray we’re brave enough to keep telling it.