Southern Baptist Convention Conservative Resurgence - Controversy Chronology

Controversy Chronology

1976. Paul Pressler, a Houston judge, and Paige Patterson, then president of Criswell College in Dallas, met in New Orleans and planned the political strategy to elect like-minded conservative/fundamentalist convention presidents and in turn members of SBC boards. The strategy was extremely successful.

1978. W. A. Criswell and Adrian Rogers (both now deceased), along with Judge Pressler and Paige Patterson, met with a group of determined pastors and laymen at a hotel near the Atlanta airport to launch the resurgence/takeover. They understood William Powell's contention that electing the president of the Southern Baptist Convention was the key to redirecting the entirety of the denomination. The Atlanta group determined to elect Adrian Rogers, pastor of Bellevue Baptist Church in Memphis, Tennessee, as the first Conservative Resurgence president of the convention.

1979 Houston convention. The 1979 SBC meeting in Houston, Texas, produced two important developments:

1. The concept of Inerrancy. Southern Baptists applied a new word, "inerrancy, " to their understanding of Scripture. Since 1650 the adjective most used by Baptists to describe their view of the Bible had been "infallible"; however, the term "inerrancy" had been implied in the 1833 New Hampshire Baptist Confession of Faith ("truth without any mixture of error") in wording that, by this time, had already been incorporated into the 1925 and 1963 editions of the Baptist Faith and Message. The word "inerrancy" was also used by the prominent Southern Baptist scholar A. T. Robertson in the late nineteenth century. Some reformed theologians in Europe had utilized the term "inerrancy" in the same way that North American theologians used "infallibility." Many conservative leaders championed the word "inerrancy" in this phase of the ongoing controversy—a phase that would later become known as the "inerrancy controversy."
2. Orchestration from the sky boxes. Also coming out of the 1979 Houston Convention was a well-organized political campaign, using precinct style politics, to wrest control of the SBC. Such tactics were not completely unprecedented; Jimmy Allen had openly campaigned for the office just two years earlier. Judge Pressler and theologian Patterson were accused of directing the affairs of the 1979 meeting from sky boxes high above The Summit where the SBC was meeting. Pressler said such accusations were false. The election on the first ballot of the more conservative pastor Adrian Rogers began the ten-year process. Ever since that meeting, the right wing of the denomination has prevailed in the SBC elections. There has been an unbroken succession of conservative-fundamentalist presidents. Each has appointed more conservative individuals, who in turn appointed others, who nominated the trustees, who elected the agency heads and institutional presidents, including those of the seminaries. Throughout the 1980s, Conservative Resurgence advocates gained control over the SBC leadership at every level from the administration to key faculty at their seminaries and slowly turned the SBC towards more conservative positions on many social issues. By early 1989 nearly every one of the SBC boards had a majority of takeover people on it. The book entitled The Fundamentalist Takeover in the Southern Baptist Convention cites the following as further key events in the resurgence:

1981: Cecil Sherman, a leader of the moderate faction of Southern Baptists declared in a debate with Paige Patterson, that he did not believe in an inerrant Bible but in “...a ‘dynamical’ view of the Bible’s inspiration and then pointed to what he saw as contradictions in the biblical text.

1984: The SBC voted in Kansas City to adopt a strongly worded resolution against women in the pastorate. The rationale cited was that "man was first in creation and the woman was first in the Edenic fall."

1987: W. Randall Lolley, the president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, North Carolina, resigned after the trustees voted to hire only faculty members who follow the Baptist Faith and Message.

1987: The SBC voted in St. Louis to adopt a report from "The Peace Committee" that had been set up in 1985. The report identified the roots of the controversy as primarily theological, and called on Baptist seminaries to teach in accordance with the Bible.

1988: At the SBC Convention in San Antonio, a resolution was passed critical of the liberal interpretation of the "priesthood of the believer" and "soul competency." Moderates and liberals accused conservatives of elevating the pastor to the position of authority in the church he serves.

1990: Roy Honeycutt, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, was accused by a new trustee of "not believing the Bible." The trustee cited some of Honeycutt's own writings as evidence. This same trustee would later become chairman of the seminary board shortly after resurgency leader Al Mohler became president in 1993.

1990: Al Shackleford and Dan Martin of the Baptist Press, the official news service of the SBC, were fired for perceived bias against conservatives in their news coverage. The Associated Baptist Press was established to offer the moderate-liberal perspective.

1990: After the SBC had elected 12 straight conservative convention presidents, who then used their position to appoint conservative educators and administrators, a group of moderates broke away in 1990 to form the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship(CBF).

1991: At their October meeting, the Foreign Mission Board trustees voted to defund the Baptist Theological Seminary in Rüschlikon, Switzerland.

1992: Keith Parks, president of the Foreign Mission Board, retired. In his thirteen years as president, missionaries entered forty new countries with a total of 3,918 missionaries.

1991: Lloyd Elder, president of the Sunday School Board, resigned under pressure and was replaced by former SBC president Jimmy Draper, a staunch conservative. A total of 159 employees retired (voluntarily or involuntarily) in November 1991.

1993: Al Mohler was appointed president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1993 and "and hailed as a hero of SBC fundamentalism."

1994: Russell Dilday, president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth for fifteen years, was fired abruptly and trustees changed the locks on the president's office immediately, thus denying him access. The day before, these same trustees gave Dilday a favorable job performance evaluation. These trustees sent letters to pastors and directors of missions to explain their reason for firing Dilday, saying he failed to support the resurgence at the convention and that he held liberal views of the scripture. The Seminary faculty disputed these charges. In a March 22 statement, the seminary's theology faculty claimed that Dilday was an "excellent administrator" who led Southwestern in a "highly effective and successful manner" and "with a spirit of Christlikeness." Dilday, the statement said, also kept the school doctrinally sound.

During his administration, his doctrinal stance was completely consistent with the Baptist Faith and Message statement, which is the seminary's article of faith. The theology faculty affirms Russell H. Dilday for leading the seminary with a spirit of Christlikeness and a desire to be inclusive with regard to the finest theological and biblical perspectives represented in the Southern Baptist Convention. We deeply regret his firing as president of the seminary."

1997: In October a forty-year staff member was fired at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary for writing a private letter to the President of the SBC disagreeing with a statement he had made while speaking in chapel. Also in October 1997, a professor of systematic theology at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary was relieved of his teaching duties because he "voiced dissent about actions of the administration of the institution."

1998: In June, Paige Patterson was elected president of the SBC without opposition. The man who helped plan the conservative resurgence of the Southern Baptist Convention was now its leader. Jerry Falwell, who had criticized Southern Baptists in the days of moderate-liberal rule, attended his first SBC Convention as a messenger along with others from his church in Lynchburg, Virginia. Also the SBC amended the Baptist Faith and Message by adding a complementarian statement about male-priority gender roles in marriage, including an adverbial modifier to the verb "submit": a wife is to "submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband," followed by a lengthy description of a husband's duty to "love his wife unconditionally."

2000: The SBC adopted a new Baptist Faith and Message statement. Baptist historian Dr. Walter Shurden says this 2000 version, used as a creedal statement by SBC agencies, elevates the Bible to a position above that of Jesus himself and downplays the doctrines of priesthood of each believer and local church autonomy. Conservatives contend that the statement accurately reflects the beliefs of most Southern Baptists.

2002: Jerry Rankin and the IMB trustees began requiring missionaries to sign their assent to the 2000 Baptist Faith and Message. Many missionaries resigned, and the requirement was said to "undermine missionary morale."

2004: The Southern Baptist Convention withdrew as a member of the Baptist World Alliance (BWA).

2005: The Baptist World Alliance celebrated its 100th Anniversary in Birmingham, England, with 13,000 Baptists from throughout the world. Absent was its former largest member group, the Southern Baptist Convention. BWA leaders prayed “that unity may one day be restored.”