My love for Logsdon Seminary and Hardin-Simmons
I never attended Hardin-Simmons or Logsdon, though I first set foot on campus over 60 years ago, when my sister enrolled as a freshman in 1958. In recent years, I’ve been on campus numerous times, most frequently in my role as a trustee of the T. B. Maston Foundation. Logsdon Seminary houses the T. B. Maston Chair of Christian Ethics, which is a partnership between the Maston Foundation and Hardin-Simmons/Logsdon.
I’ve attended the annual T. B. Maston Christian Ethics Lectures at Logsdon/HSU many times, even dating back to the early 2000s, well before my election to the Maston Foundation Board in 2008. As chair of the Maston Foundation from 2012-2016, I spoke regularly to the Young Maston Scholars at their annual Retreat, as well as the Maston Lectures luncheon with the faculty. I led the Maston Foundation Board to hold our annual trustee meeting at HSU three of those four years, the only times in the Foundation’s 40-year history that the Board has met outside of the DFW Metroplex.
As a Maston trustee and chair, I’ve had the privilege of getting to know many Logsdon/HSU faculty and administration members as friends. It was when I was chair that we worked closely with Lanny Hall, then HSU president, to complete the Maston Chair endowment, and I came to have great admiration and affection for Lanny. Don Williford, then Logsdon dean, became a great and trusted friend during that period as well, as has Bob Ellis in recent years. Though I never attended school there, I’ve come to feel at home every time I set foot on campus, such has been the warmth and collegiality of the students, faculty, and administration.
I’ve made it a point to spend time talking with ministry students, usually asking what they plan to do with their degrees, and have invariably come away impressed with their commitment to – in one way or another, as the Holy Spirit leads them – doing the Matthew 25 ministries that Jesus made a hallmark of faith in Him.
So this week’s news that HSU’s trustees had voted to shutter Logsdon’s windows and doors forever was like a death in the family.
Administration’s explanation greeted with suspicion & disdain
But it wasn’t a shock to me, for I had been hearing rumblings for at least a year that three tall-steeple BGCT pastors were plotting to shut down Logsdon. I was told last fall that there were concerns that a motion or resolution targeting Logsdon might be made at the 2019 BGCT Annual Meeting, and there was relief when that didn’t happen (but, as it turns out, only temporary relief).
That’s why the explanation from President Bruntmyer – that it was “solely a financial decision” – rang hollow. Since then, I’ve found that I’m far from alone. Many others had been hearing the same rumblings. Within hours of the announcement, a movement – Save Logsdon Seminary – sprang up on Facebook; in just a few days, over 400 (including yours truly) have joined that group.
The administration has responded with emails to its students and alumni, attempting to reiterate and reinforce its claim that finances were the only reason behind closing Logsdon. The result has been to pour salt on an open wound. One alum wrote on Facebook, “Anyone else feel these emails are constant digs in the wound?”
Decision marked with BGCT fingerprints
To be honest, it isn’t just the past year that I’ve feared something like this would happen. Let’s take a look back at 2015, when Don Williford was still dean of Logsdon Seminary, and I was still executive director of Texas Baptists Committed – the organization that fought Fundamentalism among Baptists in Texas for 30 years until we ceased operations in the summer of 2017.
On March 26, 2015, David Hardage – executive director of the Baptist General Convention of Texas (BGCT) – spoke, at the invitation of then-president Paige Patterson, at Southwestern Seminary’s Chapel service. Later that year, Hardage reciprocated the invitation by asking Patterson to speak to the BGCT staff during their weekly prayer gathering. If this had been simply a one-off, tit-for-tat, speaking invitation, maybe it wouldn’t have been such a bad thing, but it certainly raised some red flags, and I later learned from Hardage that it was part of an ongoing effort to build a “relationship” between the BGCT and Paige & Southwestern.
The apparent secrecy was particularly concerning. The leader of the BGCT had invited the co-architect of the Fundamentalist Takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) to speak to the staff of the BGCT, which Patterson had targeted for takeover as soon as the SBC conquest was complete in 1990; yet I would have never heard about it – even though I was leading the organization that, then under David Currie’s leadership, had doomed Patterson’s attempt at a Texas Takeover – except that Don Williford, Logsdon dean, notified me. I had – and still have – many friends among the BGCT staff, yet not one of them told me about it.
It’s always been curious to me that this event was kept so quiet. After Don notified me about it, I called Ken Camp at The Baptist Standard to ask what he knew about it. Ken had not been aware of it; believe me, if The Baptist Standard doesn’t know about such an event in Texas Baptist life, then there almost has to have been an orchestrated – or mandated – effort to keep it quiet. Don has shared with me that David Hardage wrote to him, “Dr. Patterson spoke in our morning Chapel service. We did not announce, promote, or publicize his coming.” Why? And how does a thing like this stay completely out of the news? Surely with as many people who worked in the Baptist Building in those days, at least a few of them, one or two anyway, would have mentioned it, and the news services would have picked it up and reported it. UNLESS the staff was given orders to keep it under wraps.
Don Williford has shared some pertinent information with me regarding events, conversations, and correspondence that may have led to last week’s decision to shut down Logsdon Seminary. Dr. Williford clearly stipulated to me that “these are my perceptions of events and conversations as I understand them, based on conversations with those present and involved in them.”
Don Williford, who retired as Logsdon dean at the end of the spring 2017 semester, writes,
“. . . shortly after my retirement, Dr. Hardage requested, and was granted, a meeting with President Bruntmyer. According to more than one Logsdon faculty member, Hardage told Eric that since the previous Dean had retired, he needed to take the helm of Logsdon Seminary and steer her to the right. I have been informed that Dr. Hardage subsequently visited with three key west Texas pastors, convincing all three that Logsdon seminary is Liberal and needs to move toward the theological right. I believe these pastors have strongly influenced President Bruntmyer.”
Dr. Williford goes on to explain that part of David Hardage’s motivation for asserting Logsdon’s “liberalism” was “my raising concerns about his actions in approaching Dr. Paige Patterson about reestablishing a relationship between the Baptist General Convention of Texas and Southwestern Seminary. . . . High among my many concerns was the stand Southwestern takes on women in ministry. . . . I am not willing to compromise and betray the God-called women who are preparing for ministry at Logsdon and Truett.”
I, too, ran into conflict with David Hardage over the Paige Patterson issue. From shortly after he became BGCT executive director in early 2012, through November 2015, I met with Dr. Hardage three or four times a year in my role as executive director of Texas Baptists Committed. Though he never followed my suggestions, he was unfailingly cordial – UNTIL I questioned his building a relationship with Paige Patterson and Southwestern Seminary. I had never before seen him respond in such a way. His back stiffened in his chair, and he said that he resented my questioning him about this matter. This was less than a week before the November 2015 BGCT Annual Meeting.
The following Monday, I was at our Texas Baptists Committed booth at the BGCT, when a member of our TBC Board walked up and told me that Steve Vernon, then associate executive director of the BGCT – and a good friend and former TBC Board member, had approached him with a warning from David Hardage. Steve told him to tell me: “If Bill mentions Paige Patterson at tomorrow’s TBC Breakfast, it will forever damage the relationship between the BGCT and TBC.”
That shows how little either David Hardage or Steve Vernon understood me. I had never made it a practice to publicly embarrass anyone, and I had no intention of mentioning Hardage’s overtures to Patterson at the Breakfast. However, I had told Hardage in our meeting the previous week that I considered his involvement with Patterson & Southwestern a “slap in the face” to our Texas Baptist schools that had been faithful to the BGCT and Baptist principles through the years. So what I did at the TBC Breakfast the next morning was to make an impassioned plea for greater financial support of our Texas Baptist schools & seminaries – Logsdon/HSU, Truett/Baylor, BUA, Howard Payne, DBU, and so forth.
As far as damaging TBC’s relationship with the BGCT, I felt that Hardage had already destroyed it with his warning conveyed through Steve Vernon. After that, I determined that it was of no use to TBC for me to meet any further with David Hardage. I continued to speak occasionally with Steve Vernon, who I still consider a friend. Steve was not to blame for David Hardage’s hostility . . . he was just the messenger. I stopped meeting with David Hardage, however.
Dr. Williford writes that another motivation for Hardage’s assertion that Logsdon was “liberal”
“was his anger over a letter a Logsdon faculty member wrote to the editor of the Baptist Standard expressing concern over a unilateral decision Dr. Hardage and the President of the Executive Board of the BGCT made prior to the BGCT Annual Meeting in Waco in 2016. . . . to withdraw fellowship from two Texas Baptist churches over their stance on homosexuality. . . . Dr. Hardage took the low road of broadly publicizing this decision both before and during the convention, thus publicly humiliating the leadership and membership of those two churches. Dr. Hardage and the Executive Board Chair then led the convention messengers to approve their prior action, thereby removing the appearance of exercising authority they should not have without prior approval of the convention messengers. . . . The letter from the Logsdon faculty member also expressed concern for a lack of love demonstrated by the public and emotional manner in which the leaders chose to handle the moral/theological disagreement between BGCT and the two churches with their members. As I understand it, Dr. Hardage used the letter of concern from that faculty member to malign Logsdon Seminary as supporting homosexuality and drifting to the theological left. Since that time, Hardage has enlisted key west Texas pastors to press his agenda toward Logsdon Seminary. . . . As a student of the New Testament, I personally believe engaging in homosexual acts to be contrary to God’s will. I am unaware of any faculty member during my deanship ever teaching that homosexuality is an acceptable choice for Christians.”
(Full disclosure: I, Bill Jones, was – and still am – a member of one of those two churches, Wilshire Baptist in Dallas, and voted in favor of the policy at issue, a vote which was announced only one day before the BGCT messengers voted to remove Wilshire from affiliation with the convention.)
Actually, the Baptist Standard published two articles by two Logsdon faculty members – Bob Ellis and Meredith Stone – the week before the fateful 2016 BGCT Annual Meeting. (Click their names to read the articles.) I’ve gone back and re-read both of them, and there is nothing faintly “liberal” in either one of them, unless you consider it liberal to disagree with the BGCT executive director. Ay, there’s the rub! Please be my guest and read them for yourselves. Those articles aren’t “liberal” by any stretch of the imagination (unless you’re a Fundamentalist), but they’re deeply Baptist and unashamedly Christian.
In February 2017, the BGCT Executive Board, after a plea by its chair to “follow the Bible and vote to approve this motion” (I was there and heard it for myself and considered it an unethical breach of protocol by the chair of a board just prior to a contentious vote), voted overwhelmingly – though not unanimously – to affirm the vote of the messengers (which had been a much closer vote). About a year later, I happened to be sitting next to that Executive Board chair at a meeting; I mentioned that he had helped facilitate my church’s removal from the BGCT. Never looking up from his laptop computer, he responded, “I was just following orders.” That says it all.
Back to the Future: the BGCT and the SBC, joined at the hip
Since David Hardage’s overtures to Paige Patterson in 2015, I’ve watched as he has steered the BGCT to the right, just as he reportedly urged Eric Bruntmyer to do to Logsdon Seminary. But I’m not so sure it’s conservatism that Hardage loves, as much as it is preserving the institution that pays his salary, even if it is at the expense of its soul. He once lamented to me that, if the BGCT were to “affirm homosexual behavior,” they would lose X number of churches. (No discussion of whether it was right or wrong, just the impact on the bottom line.)
David seems to like to answer questions that aren’t asked. When he was announced as executive director in 2012, the first thing he did was to tell The Baptist Standard that, on his watch, the BGCT would stand firm on opposing homosexual behavior, even though no one had asked him that question. When he made the statement to me about losing churches, I had to remind him that I hadn’t asked him to “affirm homosexual behavior”; I had merely asked him if he could recognize the rights of BGCT believers and churches – as Baptists – to interpret the pertinent scriptures for themselves. “Can’t you,” I asked, “just not make an issue of it?” His response? “I don’t know.”
But I think he did know . . . he knew that he was going to keep making an issue of it. After all, I was far from the only one to receive a warning from him. Several BGCT pastors have told me that they received a letter from David Hardage in 2014-15, telling them that, if they crossed the line on policy toward the LGBTQ community, he would see to it that they be removed from BGCT fellowship.
Fundamentalism is NOT a theology. Fundamentalism is authoritarianism, insisting on one way of doing things, one way of interpreting scripture, and threatening to remove anyone who refuses to bow to your demands. I fear this is the direction of today’s BGCT.
And Logsdon Seminary is only the latest victim. Mark my words. Next they’ll come for Truett, BUA . . . it never ends. We Moderates grow weary of the fight. That’s why Texas Baptists Committed doesn’t exist anymore. Moderates were tired of fighting, so they said, “the fight’s over. There’s no battle anymore.” And they stopped supporting the organization committed to fighting for Baptist freedom. But Fundamentalists, authoritarians . . . they NEVER stop fighting. They’re relentless in their quest for power and control.
Save Logsdon Seminary . . . a beacon of hope
But I’m still hopeful. I believe God is in this Save Logsdon Seminary movement. The Holy Spirit is at work here. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it will achieve its immediate goal . . . to save Logsdon Seminary. Moderates failed to save the SBC from Fundamentalist control. But the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship grew out of their passion to follow Christ as real Baptists, and what remarkable ministries and relationships have come from 30 years of CBF!
Who knows where this Save Logsdon Seminary movement will go? Only God knows . . . and that’s enough for now. These Logsdon alumni, students, and friends can use the support of real Baptists in Texas and beyond. Pray, give, and get involved in the next great thing God is going to do.