Willie McLaurin, Welcome to the Club

Willie McLaurin and I have something in common: We both have had to step down from leading a Southern Baptist Convention entity — he as interim president of the Executive Committee, I as president of Midwestern Seminary. He just resigned when they discovered he’d embellished his academic credentials; I was fired twenty-four years ago for “misappropriation of anger,” as I put it in my mea culpa. As my successor-once-removed put it graciously, “His military background undergirded a no-nonsense leadership style … However, Coppenger’s directness at times proved to be a bit much, putting him at odds with the seminary’s board of trustees and leading to his departure in 1999.” Yes, I’d “chewed out” a few folks, including a trustee, and, with his diligent help, they arrived at the conclusion that they’d had their elegant sufficiency of me after four years in office.  (READ MORE: Presbyterianism Lost Its Clout When It Embraced Modernism)

The seminary and the Lord have been very kind to me in the intervening decades. As for the school, I’ve spoken on campus a number of times (even taught a course), and they named the library after me. But I got banged around pretty thoroughly on the ramp up toward and down from the dismissal. A tough time for me and my dear wife and kids. And, to this day, it’s no fun to still see notice of that firing near the top of my Google listing (perhaps with the help of a zealous algorithm maven). So, with that background, I offer Willie some words of counsel and, yes, encouragement. But first, some context.

Aggie Minesweeper

My seminary appointment was in service to the “conservative resurgence” in the SBC. Though the denomination was in many respects healthy, liberalism had crept into the faculties of our theological schools, and we were going through the arduous task of replacing trustees who’d let this happen, or even sped it along. In those days, it was said that some of the profs on the payroll worked from a tacit bargain with “progressive” theologians — “We’ll call you Christians if you’ll call us scholars.” They were embarrassed by our Southern, “Bible thumping” image, so they wanted to demonstrate they could do Bultmann instead of Billy Graham. Examples abound, but I’ll just note the report I got from an alum in the Midwest, that a teacher had told the class the feeding of the 5,000 was a story of infectious love, not of Jesus’ miraculous division of a few loaves and fish to bless a crowd. By his account, the kid shared his lunch, and the people were moved to share theirs.

To the horror of the entrenched elites, the “deplorables” revolted and turned out en masse to elect presidents who’d use their appointment powers to turn things around. And yes, the SBC is a literal convention, with as many as a dozen folks from each church wanting representation. Some would cram into a van and drive hundreds of miles for that single vote and then hurry back home so they wouldn’t have to miss more than a day at their blue-collar jobs. And so, we’d see as many as 50,000 in attendance, rather than the regular 10,000.

And the inerrancy of the Bible wasn’t the only issue. Our ethics agency had found the Roe decision agreeable, but we changed that. (And we enjoyed snubbing a Planned Parenthood boycott campaign by choosing Salt Lake City for an annual meeting; PP was trying to sink a Winter Olympics bid since Utah was denying state funds for abortion, and we crossed their picket line.) A couple of churches in North Carolina affirmed homosexuality, and we amended our bylaws to exclude them. The Masons were into secrecy, blood oaths, and flirtation with syncretism, and we denounced them, to the consternation of some Southern Baptists whose association with lodges seemed more innocuously Rotarian than tricky. We withdrew funding from an inter-denominational group at peace with the 1992 Weisman decision, whereby the Supreme Court (thanks to Justices Blackmun, O’Connor, Stevens, Kennedy, and Souter) drew on the First Amendment to disallow invited prayers for public school events. (The case in question concerned an “illicit,” non-sectarian prayer by Rabbi Gutterman at a Rhode Island middle school commencement.)

We weren’t lifting wet fingers into the wind to see which direction we should go. We were just trying to get things right, come what may. Some would say we were like an Aggie minesweeper, hands over our ears, stomping out through the (cultural) field before us. And I can attest to the explosions, in that I was the VP for Convention Relations for the Executive Committee in the early 1990s. Our clippings service dumped angry editorials from across the land on my desk; Masons flooded our offices with fill-in-the-blank form letters from one rite or another; “moderates” howled as local associations disfellowshipped churches with women pastors, and the Danvers Statement (with a complementarian take on biblical manhood and womanhood) gained purchase throughout the Convention’s entities. I went on Chicago public television to say that yes, we believed in hell and that a bunch of us Americans were headed to it. (By the way, the studio audience calmed down a bit when I quoted one of our new seminary presidents: “There’s one thing worse than being lost; it’s being lost and nobody’s looking for you.”)

Ingratiationism

Fast forward to recent years when a new transaction is in play amongst us: “We’ll call the culture cool if it calls us cool.” I call it “Ingratiationism.” The notion is that we mustn’t turn off those we are trying to reach, that requires sensitivity to triggering words and deeds in society, and even self-abasement is essential to our witness and spiritual health. So, our leaders have pressed us to be more winsome, in effect responsive to the Overton Window, which identifies what’s socially repugnant or outrageous at a given time on both sides of an issue. Problem is, our nation’s cultural road bends left, and, with the encouragement of some luminaries and gurus within the EIC (Evangelical Industrial Complex), a fair number of our pastors and bloggers seem eager to follow along round the bend. Alas, in the drive to stay charming, we end up hugging our detractors on the left while shunning or punching old-timey alarmists on the right. (READ MORE: Evangelical Elites Betray American Patriotism)

When we took a stand against the homosexual agenda back in the 1990s, some in our fellowship would cry, “Oh, no! This is a public relations disaster!” Well, yes, the church can humiliate itself by misdeeds. But such Nervous Nellies need to be reminded that, when the church is hitting on all cylinders, it just is a public relations disaster to much of the citizenry. That’s the New Testament counsel and demonstration.

The current marketing strategy manifests itself in many ways. We scarcely hear of willful “sin,” yet much of passive “brokenness.” The biblical notion of shame-ridden “repentance” has fallen on hard times, and the “fear of God” is too off-putting to mention in our songs, most of which lack the heft of John Newton’s 1779 hymn, “Amazing Grace,” the one in which the sinner calls himself a “wretch” and whose second verse starts, “’Twas grace that taught my heart to fear, And grace my fears relieved.”

In our 2019 convention in Birmingham, the resolutions committee trotted out a statement of appreciation for the “analytical” usefulness of critical race theory and a focus on intersectionality. With the vast majority of amiable messengers voting without a clue, and with only a lonely word of caution at the mic (from the head of a Calvinistic ministry within the family), it passed. Not long afterwards, backlash ensued as folks woke up to the resolution’s toxicity, and leaders who should have spoken against the proposal chimed in with their concerns. (For the cause, I pitched in an American Spectator piece on “racialist craniometers.”) Then, when a vastly-endorsed counter-resolution surfaced at the next convention, the committee chairman explained their innocuously broad response by warning us that “the world is watching.”

In similar fashion, we’ve jumped on the #MeToo movement, and some of our leaders have, in my fallible opinion, acted like Democrats taking advantage of COVID to enhance their position at the ballot box. They now present themselves as paladins of a new era of concern, dispensing millions of mission dollars received from innocent churches to put out others’ fires, a number of which are of questionable provenance. Of course, sexual abuse is horrible. But I object to the way that a Texas newspaper made us crazy by a report that identified just over two hundred church members (not just staffers but laymen of any stripe) who’d been convicted of such crimes in the opening two decades of this century. I did the math and found that we’d had twenty-eight million members at one time or another during that span — meaning a criminal incidence in the thousandth-of-a-per cent range. I’d be surprised if there weren’t many more not found out, but you’d have to have many, many, many more to justify the paroxysms our leaders have visited upon us. Of course, we wouldn’t dream of defending the honor of our denomination by daring to pour some cold water on our critics’ glee. Better to fan the gratifying flames of owned-disgrace before a “watching world.” (RELATED: Progressives Don’t Seem to Care about Sexual Assault Victims)

With this enlightened approach supplanting the awkward, unsavory work of our forebears, we elected a president who urged us to practice “pronoun courtesy” toward “non-binary” folks, and another who excused yet another’s sermon plagiarism. Our ethics spokesmen are saying “Shush. Cool it!” to those who question the conceit that every woman who seeks an abortion (baby homicide) is a victim.

In this milieu, it’s not surprising that Willie McLaurin garnered extra support for his appointment since he was black. Had the “interim” label been removed, his service as CEO would have been even more “historic.” And perhaps a little more of our denominational “stain” would have been removed, given that we split with Northern Baptists in 1845 over the question of whether a  missionary could go out from a slaveholding family. Besides, he’s proven to be quite congenially disposed toward the “Hope and Change” agenda of the folks now in power.

(A postscript to these phenomena: To the astonishment of many, messengers to the 2022 meeting in Anaheim voted at near 90 percent to expel Rick Warren’s massive Saddleback Church for employing and designating women as pastors. Perhaps we’re witnessing a re-resurgence of the deplorables.)

Credentials

Just a quick word on “upgrading” academic credentials on one’s resume. Some unhealthy pressure works to encourage this. It’s one thing to pursue a doctorate or other hotshot degrees for what amounts to licensure, gaining the assent of accreditors of one sort or another to teach. And yes, more study can be a great thing for personal growth and for learned, incisive contributions to discourse in the public square. But the drive to burnish one’s look to be more fetching across the board is unhealthful. Besides, even earned CV ornaments can signal trouble. Back when our seminaries were less wholesome, one explanation for the relative weakness of downtown First Baptist Churches was their insistence that the pastor be a “Doctor,” which often meant that he’d been compromised by long exposure to liberalizing influences. In this connection, I recall a story Billy Graham deployed in his message to the SBC back in 1995. He spoke of a man who’d come South every year to do some bird hunting in league with a favorite dog who lived down that way. But one year, the hound let him down, and the visitor asked about it. They explained, “Well, we changed his name to ‘Doctor,’ and he hasn’t been much use ever since.”

Be careful what you wish for, especially when the wish drives you to embellishments.

The Biggest Picture

That being said, let me offer Willie (a fellow disappointment), some words that blessed me in the days before my firing. My academic dean counseled, “They can’t kill you if you’re dead,” meaning that, if you’re “dead to self,” your future spiritual health and eternal prospects are assured, whatever the circumstances. Rest in God, submissive to his Word, stripped of pride, trusting in his sovereignty and providence, and you’ll have the grace you need each day to go on till he takes you home.

Then I fielded a call from the head of our International Mission Board. He told me about a little bird that flew into a badminton game. The players mistook him for a shuttlecock and knocked the soup of him. A year or so later, some old bird friends saw him walking along the ground, and they flew down to ask him how he was doing. He responded cheerfully, “Well, I don’t fly so high anymore, but it’s ever so sweet when I manage to get off the ground at all.”

Years later, I heard a report from my younger son’s chapel address at the same seminary. He was now my pastor, and he related to the students that my reaction to the firing — not spiraling down into crippling bitterness or spiritual indifference — encouraged him down the road toward his own conversion. (In this vein, as I left the building in 1999 when I’d been dismissed, I told the Kansas City Star reporter waiting for me in the parking lot, “God is good. I’ll be cheering from the sidelines.”) I had no idea that my continued walk, freshly disciplined, would have this impact. But if I had, I would have gone to the gallows if necessary to encourage this outcome.

So, Willie, I look forward to the day we might well meet in heaven and rehearse God’s goodness throughout our self-inflicted trials. That is, if we remember them at all.

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