Baptists: 
Saving Logsdon Seminary . . . A “lost cause”? . . . they’re the only causes worth fighting for 
by Bill Jones,
Editor & Publisher, Weekly Baptist Roundup
Exec. Dir., retired, Texas Baptists Committed

Is the highest biblical principle “Don’t make waves”?

From some of the comments I’ve read on the Logsdon situation, you would think so.

Just a month ago, we observed Martin Luther King, Jr. Day on the 91st anniversary of his birth. This month, we’ve observed Black History Month. Throughout these celebrations, we’ve been reminded of Dr. King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, and particularly his admonition that it wasn’t the overt bigotry of his enemies that bothered him so much as the silence of his friends.

We also observed Holocaust Remembrance Day a few weeks ago. During that commemoration, we were reminded of the quote – the origin of which is uncertain – that “The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”

I’ve heard and read both of those admonitions cited over and over by Christians during the past month. It’s easy to mouth platitudes when there is no immediate concern beckoning us to carry them out.

So now we’re confronted with evil deeds being carried out by our own Baptist leaders in Texas, and some of our friends are counseling, “do nothing, keep silence, just move on,” or – as one friend advised me – “take the high road.”

I don’t understand that kind of thinking. For one thing, in reading the counsel of those who would have us just let this go and move on, I have yet to see any acknowledgement that some of us might know something that others need to know. I haven’t seen a caveat – “unless there is more behind this than we are being told.” The friend who advised me to “take the high road” apparently failed to think to first ask me, “Do you know something that we haven’t been told about the reasons for this decision?”

In many instances, “Take the high road” is a euphemism for “Keep the truth to yourself.”

Does truth mean nothing to us as followers of Christ?

One commenter suggested that the “Save Logsdon Seminary” group (of which I am a member) consider that “the likelihood of success” is small against the powerful people & institutions driving the attack on Logsdon.

Oh, did Jesus say, “You came to me when I was hungry . . . in prison . . . a stranger . . . and helped me defeat my oppressors and avoid that nasty cross”? I must have missed THAT Sunday School lesson! No, Jesus was never about winning. He was about ministering to the down and out.

When I spoke out at the 2016 TBC Breakfast at the BGCT Annual Meeting, saying that the BGCT leadership’s attempt to remove from its fellowship churches that decided to welcome LGBTQ people as full members of their churches was a violation of the Baptist principle of local church autonomy, I had no illusion that my remarks would change the vote that would take place during the business session later that morning. But after the breakfast, two young ministers came to me and thanked me for taking that stand. Later that day, and through the weeks following, numerous friends on the BGCT staff thanked me privately (though they couldn’t do so publicly) for standing against that decision. I had given encouragement to those who most needed it. That was enough for me. I wish we had won the vote; if we had, my church – Wilshire Baptist in Dallas – would still be a part of the BGCT family we so loved. But taking a stand on principle has nothing to do with winning.

One of my favorite movies of all time is the 1939 classic, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, starring Jimmy Stewart as an idealistic young man, Jefferson Smith, elected to the U.S. Senate. Jeff Smith has always looked up to the senior senator from his state, Senator Paine, who was a close friend of Jeff’s father. Ultimately, Jeff discovers that Paine is a tool of an unscrupulous businessman, and that Paine has played the junior senator for a patsy in his scheme to help his powerful patron. Senator Smith stages a filibuster aimed at resisting the unethical forces arrayed against him. In the late hours of that filibuster, he takes to the well of the Senate, walking over to Senator Paine’s desk as he addresses the senators and the packed gallery:

“I guess this is just another lost cause Mr. Paine. All you people don’t know about lost causes. Mr. Paine does. He said once they were the only causes worth fighting for and he fought for them once. For the only reason any man ever fights for them. Because of just one plain simple rule. Love thy neighbor.”

Lost causes . . . the only causes worth fighting for . . . Love thy neighbor.

I’ve fought for a lot of lost causes in my life. Along the way, I’ve discovered this: sometimes those “lost causes” aren’t as lost as they seem, if God is in them.

The purge of Logsdon Seminary and Hardin-Simmons University is being carried out as we speak . . . it’s not something that happened, and now we move on. It’s only going to get worse. This weekend, The Baptist Standard reported on additional cuts to HSU faculty and programs – death by a thousand (or more) cuts, if you will. A great seminary has been closed, and a great university is being destroyed. Stay silent, show “Christian grace,” some would call it, and the evildoers will continue doing their evil deeds until there is no Hardin-Simmons University, which – I fear – was their goal in the first place.

Show Christian grace to whom? Would Christ have us show grace to those in power who are abusing their power to harm and oppress those under their authority? We can’t show grace to BOTH the abusers and the abused. We have to make a choice.

Show grace to those in power – the abusers, and you deny grace to the abused. If you want to show grace to the abused, then you must deny grace to the abusers. The SBC has learned that lesson, painfully and belatedly, in dealing with their scandal of sexual abuse by SBC ministers.

For me, it’s a simple choice. Jesus sided with the disinherited, as Howard Thurman wrote, not with the powerful who oppressed them.

Those famous quotes I cited earlier – if there is ever a time in Baptist life to apply them, this is such a time. My question to those who counsel silence – So, if you had been pastoring a church or otherwise been in a position of Christian leadership during the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s & 1960s, would you have told African-Americans to just accept the injustices they suffered and “move on”?

The answer is obvious.

Either way we choose, we take a stand with someone. Either stay silent – and stand with the oppressors abusing their authority, or speak truth to power – and stand with those who are being abused.