Twenty years ago today, August 29, 2004, Joanna and I walked the aisle and, in traditional Baptist terms, “moved our letter” from the Plano church where we had been members since 1987 to become members of Wilshire Baptist Church in Dallas. We picked a good day to join, as Wilshire was celebrating George Mason’s 15th anniversary as senior pastor.
Last month, I blogged about our first visit to Wilshire on July 4, 2004, sharing about the stark contrast between that worship service and the services we had experienced for years on patriotic holidays at the church in Plano.
I’ve often written about what Wilshire has meant to us, and the great blessing that our Epiphany Sunday School class – which we joined only weeks after we joined Wilshire – has been in our lives.
I’ve also written occasionally about the frustrations that ultimately drove us to look for a new church home in 2004, but I want to share about that in greater detail on this significant anniversary. Over these past 20 years – as Joanna and I heard and read stories shared by friends at Wilshire, presenters at Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (CBF) assemblies, writers of news and opinion articles in progressive Baptist news sources such as Baptist News Global and Good Faith Media (among others) – it became obvious to us that we were far from unique. In fact, I would say that most of us Baptists who have wound up on the progressive/moderate side of Baptist life have spent a season (a LONG season, in some cases) in churches that preached and practiced a toxic theology.
When we left the church in Plano, we didn’t want to hurt anyone. There were people at that church who we loved, and with whom we had many positive, joyful experiences. So, in explaining why we were leaving, I downplayed the anger and hurt that we felt as a result of the attitudes we had endured there for so many years.
But as I continue to read news reports of SBC churches, 20 years after Joanna and I cut all ties with the SBC by joining a church that had left the SBC four years earlier, I find that the same toxic theology, attitudes, and practices that hurt and alienated us back then are still prevalent in SBC life today, and I worry about the Bills and Joannas who are still having to endure what we escaped 20 years ago.
Twenty years after Joanna and I joined Wilshire, the experience has never lost its freshness. I still feel a deep satisfaction in seeing women serve as deacons, women preach from the Wilshire pulpit, and a woman serving as one of three associate pastors. I still thrill at the idea of preparing young ministers for the pastorate, including women. I have found it exciting to be challenged from the pulpit to more fully and authentically live out the gospel of Christ, and to actually LEARN from sermons and Sunday School class discussions.
Joanna and I have been changed at Wilshire.
- In the early 2010s, we voted with the majority to accept baptisms from other denominations. I would have never been able to accept that in the past, but George Mason helped me to understand that someone else’s baptism wasn’t mine to question . . . but to affirm.
- In 2012, Joanna and I went to Israel with a group of 45 from Wilshire and 45 from Temple Emanu-El, a Reform Jewish congregation. In our discussions with those people from Temple Emanu-El, who became our friends, I came to realize that their relationship with God was just as real as was mine.
- In 2015-16, we heard experts from various fields teach us about homosexuality, and Joanna and I wound up voting – with the approximately 60% majority – to treat people identifying as gay as fully equal church members with no restrictions. A little later, we heard a transgender woman share her experience and came to accept her experience as authentic, realizing that she deserved our acceptance, love, and respect.
Joanna and I changed; to put it another way, after 17 years of stagnating in our faith at our former church, we GREW in our faith, our understanding of God grew deeper and wider.
But we never forgot where we came from. Joanna went to be with Jesus in February 2021. But I’m still here, and I still carry “baggage” from our former church. I still carry the pain and frustration of that experience, and I guess I always will.
That pain is even more acute when I read of churches that are, in 2024, still where that church was in 2004 (how or whether it has changed, I have no idea).
So I think it’s worth taking a look at some of the more disturbing moments from our 17 years at that church. They may be “old news” to me, but the same things are happening in churches throughout this country – SBC and otherwise – in 2024.
First, though, I should address the question of why, if we were so unhappy there, it took us so long to leave:
- We made friends there, and it’s hard to leave your friends behind.
- As our kids got older, they had friends there, and it’s hard to explain to your kids why they have to say goodbye to their friends.
- I became very involved in the music ministry, not only singing in the choir, but – from 1995 on – both directing and singing in a mixed choral ensemble. I enjoyed that group, I enjoyed the challenge of preparing them for performance, I enjoyed singing with them . . . and I didn’t want to give that up.
- As far as I knew, this whole Dallas area, especially Collin County where we lived, was very conservative religiously, and I doubted that we could find a church where we could really feel comfortable.
We had moved from Colorado to Plano in August 1987. A month or so later – without considering any other churches – we joined this one, which was just a few miles from our house.
From early on, however, Joanna and I began to feel a bit uncomfortable, like we didn’t quite fit in. It didn’t take long to figure out that we were in a church that celebrated an ultraconservative politics that we didn’t feel reflected the teachings of Jesus. More than that, as the fundamentalists cemented their takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1990, it became obvious that we were in a church that celebrated the fundamentalists’ ascension – with their emphasis on biblical “inerrancy,” their patriarchy both in the pulpit and the family, their insistence on a literal interpretation of scripture, and their blatant denial and violation of historic Baptist principles, including:
- Religious liberty for all people and its corollary, the separation of church and state
- Soul competency
- Priesthood of every believer
- Local church autonomy
Perhaps my greatest frustration at that church was the absolute futility of my attempts, through the years, to educate people – usually in the context of Sunday School class discussions – about historic Baptist principles, why I considered them critical to faithfully following Jesus, and how the new leadership of the SBC was violating them.
For 17 years, when I brought up these matters, I got nothing but blank stares – with one exception. There was one morning in Sunday School when a young woman said that America is a “Christian nation.” I’m afraid that I began firing with both barrels, explaining that it not only was NOT a Christian nation but it was never intended to be one. For once, I got not a blank stare but an old-fashioned donnybrook of an argument. Truth be told, it was refreshing, to see my adversary actually say what was on her mind instead of leaving me to wonder as they usually did.
Otherwise, though . . . blank stares. Those folks were what I call willfully ignorant. They either didn’t know Baptist principles or had forgotten them, and they didn’t want anyone reminding them. They were happy going with the status quo, following those who were now in power, and didn’t want to do the hard work of thinking and taking a stand.
So Joanna and I quietly seethed. Our conversations on the way home from church often centered around these frustrations.
In April 1989, there was a movement against the pastor, all based on what Joanna and I considered petty complaints. We supported him, but he got a lackluster “vote of confidence” from the congregation and decided to resign.
In November, a candidate came “in view of call,” as we Baptists say, and members were given the opportunity, during a session in Fellowship Hall, to ask questions of him.
At this time, the Fundamentalists were on the verge of completing their takeover of the SBC. Their candidates had won 11 successive presidential elections, beginning in 1979 with Adrian Rogers. All they needed was to win again in 1990, and they would be able to – using the appointive powers of the presidency – finally achieve a majority on boards of all SBC agencies, boards that would then “clean out” those agencies of any personnel who were not sympathetic to their cause.
The first question posed to the prospective pastor that evening was: “Where do you stand on the SBC controversy between fundamentalists and moderates?”
He gave what seemed, to Joanna and me, an encouraging response: “I consider myself theologically conservative, but I usually vote for the moderate candidate for SBC president, because they tend to be the better convention person, leading their churches to give generously to the Cooperative Program.”
It’s still hard to believe that the church called him after hearing his answer to that question, but they did. However, it eventually became clear to Joanna and me that he had learned where the sympathies of most members lay, and that he had decided to defer to them by switching his loyalty to those who had seized power in the SBC.
1992 – Grand Old Pulpit . . . meet the Grand Old Party
In the summer of 1992, barely over 2½ years after stating that he usually supported moderates for SBC president, the pastor boasted – during a Sunday morning sermon – of receiving a phone call earlier that week. “My secretary said, ‘Adrian Rogers is on the line,’ and I said, ‘By all means, put him through!'” Rogers had been the first fundamentalist elected president of the SBC, back in 1979.
The pastor was practically drooling. It turned out to be a conference call, and most of the fundamentalist SBC leaders – Paige Patterson, Jimmy Draper, and others – were on the line, asking him to help facilitate an upcoming campaign appearance in Dallas for President George H. W. Bush, then running for reelection against Bill Clinton and Ross Perot.
From the pulpit, he had just effectively endorsed a candidate for president – an egregious misuse of God’s house for partisan political purposes. At that moment, I realized that he had surrendered his conscience to the majority of that church who wanted to worship a Jesus who would give them power over their perceived “enemies” rather than a Jesus who refused such power when Satan tempted him with it.
Over the next decade-plus, there continued to be incidents that troubled Joanna and me.
1995 – “America’s Godly Heritage”
In an evening worship service, a video entitled “America’s Godly Heritage” is shown. It featured Fort Worth evangelist – and self-styled “historian” (he’s not) – David Barton, leader of a group calling itself “Wallbuilders.” Barton tells one lie after another about America’s Founding Fathers, their religious faith, and their intentions for America, including the big lie that they intended America to be a “Christian nation.”
When it concluded, I walked out so angry that I didn’t even stop to talk with anyone. Mercifully, for Joanna, she stayed home that night and was spared this ordeal (except for listening to me rant about it after I got home).
The next day, I called the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs (now BJC for Religious Liberty) in Washington, DC, to ask whether they were familiar with this video. Yes, they had already prepared a written response, which they mailed to me. It took Barton’s lies apart, one by one, documenting that every point he made was false. Years later, when I met Brent Walker, I discovered that he – as BJC general counsel at the time – had authored that response.
2001 – “Don’t teach this!”
In 2001, I had attended a training session conducted by the Texas Baptist Laity Institute. The training was for those interested in teaching the Laity Institute’s courses to small groups in Texas Baptist churches.
One of the requirements for certification as a Laity Institute “mentor” (teacher) was to obtain written recommendations from two leaders, preferably ministers, in one’s home church. So I asked the pastor and the music minister, and both of them agreed to give me a recommendation.
However, the pastor wanted to see the kind of courses I would be teaching. The course I most wanted to teach was the one on Baptist Distinctives, so I brought the course syllabus – written by Dr. Bill Pinson, who had recently stepped down as executive director of the state convention – for the pastor to see. Thumbing through the syllabus, he stopped at the chapter covering the “SBC controversy” that had culminated in the hostile takeover by the fundamentalist faction.
He said, “I don’t want you teaching this part of the course. Leave it out.”
You see, it wasn’t only that the church members were willfully ignorant . . . their pastor wanted them KEPT that way. He had purposefully avoided this subject for years; he knew that if they learned just how the fundamentalists had gained power, the false sense of unity in the church body might be threatened.
Then and there, I decided I would never teach a Laity Institute course in that church. If I couldn’t teach it all, I wouldn’t teach AT all. I didn’t teach my first course until after we joined Wilshire over 2 years later.
March 2003 – “Hollywood liberals are stupid!”
In a Sunday morning sermon on the eve of the Iraq War, the pastor launched an angry diatribe against critics of President George W. Bush. Listing several “Hollywood liberals” who had – according to him – called George W. Bush “stupid,” he compared their academic degrees with those of Bush. In every instance, Bush’s degrees were higher, which the pastor interpreted – of course – as evidencing greater academic achievement and, thus, higher intelligence.
He put an exclamation point to this litany by proclaiming, “George W. Bush isn’t stupid. It’s these critics of his who are stupid!”
In my 73 years in Baptist churches, from cradle roll to toddler to children’s Sunday School to baptized believer to youth choir to adult to skeptical adult to, eventually, senior adult, I have never experienced a moment like that one. It was demonic!
It was the congregation’s response that made it the very worst moment I’ve ever experienced in church. That large, practically full sanctuary – God’s house – erupted in amens and applause the likes of which I’ve never witnessed before or since.
Not for Jesus. Not for worship of God. No, for affirmation of their political idols AND – and this is the demonic part – hatred of anyone who thought differently than them. The hatred was palpable, and people who thought like Joanna and me were the targets.
I was sitting in the choir. To this day, I regret that I didn’t walk down from that choir loft, go find Joanna in the pew, take her by the hand, and walk out together, never to return. And believe me, she would have gladly gone with me. Joanna was ready to leave that church long before I was.
This wasn’t about us being Democrats and them being Republicans. It was about our reverence for God’s house as a place where partisan politics should never intrude on the worship of God . . . a place where we could put our political disagreements aside, respecting and loving others – even Hollywood liberals with whom we might disagree . . . a place where the hatred we felt raining down on us that morning should not be welcome. But there was no mistaking it – it was hatred for anyone who believed differently than they did, and that meant Joanna and me. Hatred raining down in God’s house – that didn’t come from the spirit of Jesus, it came from the one who tempted Jesus, in the desert, to destroy his enemies. It was THAT spirit – it was demonic!
It wasn’t only partisan politics that had intruded on the worship of God in that place – it was nationalism, the worship of country, the worship of one’s “tribe.”
Think I’m exaggerating? In 2001, that church had moved into a brand-new sanctuary. Its highlight was a strikingly beautiful floor-to-ceiling stained-glass window on a level above and behind the choir loft. So, sitting in the pew in a worship service, you could see, well above and behind the pulpit, this stained-glass window, featuring numerous depictions of biblical figures and stories, all pointing to Jesus at the very center of it all. Yes, it was a metaphor – Jesus at the center of our worship, Jesus in the center of our lives.
Yet, during services on patriotic holidays, that stained-glass window – and Jesus at the center – was hidden from view. Jesus was hidden by a floor-to-ceiling American flag. That, too, was a metaphor – worship of country took priority over worship of Jesus. Oh, Jesus was fine on most Lord’s Days – but when it was time to celebrate our nationalist pride, country came first, and Jesus didn’t rate at all.
September 2003 – “Women, you’re fired!”
During a Sunday morning sermon, the pastor issued an edict that women would no longer be “allowed” to teach men in Sunday School. Over a recent three-day period, God had revealed to him that women teaching men in church was a violation of biblical teaching.
Now let’s take a look at this. He had been pastor of this church for almost 14 years. Throughout that period, three faithful female Christian servants had taught Sunday School classes consisting of both women and men, and the pastor had seen nothing wrong with this.
Why, if this was wrong, did God wait 14 years to “reveal” it to the pastor? And why did God choose to “reveal” it only to the pastor rather than to the three women or to the women and men who had willingly sat under their teaching for all those years?
The pastor immediately “fired” those three women from their teaching positions. He added that, if any member of the church disagreed with his stance and his actions, God would “prune” that member from the church. Hmmm . . . did that apply to the pastor himself, who – before that pivotal three-day period – had disagreed with the very stance on which he was now staking his ministry? The priesthood of every believer and soul competency had been usurped by a new principle: the infallibility of the pastor!
When Joanna and I joined in August 2004, Wilshire had barely begun its Pathways to Ministry pastoral residency program. Wilshire now had its second and third pastoral residents, Ann Bell and Jake Hall. When Ann preached, and when George Mason – as he did frequently – advocated from the pulpit for equality of women and men in both the pulpit and the home, I would, with tears in my eyes, reach over and squeeze Joanna’s hand, because we both remembered, all too well, the misogynistic church environment that we had left behind only months earlier. Twenty years later, that feeling is still deep within me every time I hear a woman preach.
November 2003 – “CBF yes? CBF no! And local church autonomy be damned!”
I had personally supported Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (CBF) since its founding in 1991. CBF was founded by Baptists – like Joanna and me – who no longer felt at home in the fundamentalist-controlled Southern Baptist Convention (SBC).
Our church, however, had remained a solidly SBC church, and most members preferred to remain blissfully ignorant of the circumstances surrounding the Takeover.
I recall a conversation, in 1989, during our weekly meeting of Sunday School teachers and officers. I expressed, to one of my fellow teachers, my concern over the actions of the fundamentalist faction in their efforts to take over the SBC. His response? “It doesn’t affect me.”
This attitude was typical of members of that church. They didn’t consider it worth their time and effort to defend Baptist principles. When I pointed out that it DID affect him as a teacher, because a fundamentalist takeover would bring about drastic changes in the SBC literature from which he would be teaching, he said he didn’t care.
So I was a CBF supporter in an SBC church that wasn’t so much hostile to CBF as simply preferring to ignore it. Yet in the early 2000s, as I began to openly challenge the pastor on these matters, he became aware that I wanted to create a space at the church for members to learn about CBF and have the opportunity to support it.
In the early fall of 2003, the pastor stopped me in the hallway one day to advise me of upcoming changes to the church’s annual World Missions Conference. This was a three-week affair featuring special services revolving around missions, in which we had the opportunity to hear from missionaries stationed around the globe. The purpose was to increase our support, financial and otherwise, of global mission efforts.
He told me that, effective with the following year’s conference, church members would have the opportunity to host, in their homes, representatives of a mission agency or effort for which they had a particular passion, and invite church members to hear them speak and get involved in supporting them. He then said, “So, for example, you and Joanna could host someone from CBF.”
I thought this was encouraging. He was actually open to letting members of that church hear from CBF field personnel and even give their money to support CBF global mission efforts!
But my euphoria had a very short shelf life. In November, I was meeting with the pastor and the chair of the Committee on Committees regarding some changes to the church by-laws. Because I was a writer and editor by trade, the pastor had engaged my services in proofreading the changes he was proposing to the by-laws and providing any edits needed.
During this meeting, he casually mentioned that he had met, the previous week, with the leadership of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary about our church partnering with them to start a seminary in Russia. Then he dropped the bomb: “Of course, you realize that if we partner with New Orleans Seminary, we will never be able to have anything to do with CBF.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because it’s in the charter of all SBC seminaries that anyone who partners with them can have nothing to do with CBF.”
Not just any parachurch organization, you’ll note. No, CBF alone was specifically targeted.
I was incredulous. I had seen this pastor violate Baptist – and, dare I say, Christian – principles on several occasions. However, I never thought he would violate the sacred Baptist distinctive of local church autonomy.
So I looked at him, wide-eyed I’m sure, and said, “And you’re comfortable with that?”
In the most flippant manner he could summon, he said, “Sure.”
I still couldn’t believe what I was hearing, so I said, a little more emphatically, “As a BAPTIST, you’re comfortable with that?”
“Sure.”
Until then, I had clung to the illusion that I could have an influence on that pastor and that church. (Maybe I was the one who was being “willfully ignorant” – I mean, after years and years of “blank stares” and egregious violations of bedrock Baptist principles, my head was seriously dented from banging it against the four walls of that church!)
But this was the last straw. I went home and told Joanna, “The battle is lost. Let’s start planning our departure and our search for a new church home.”
For almost 400 years, in Baptist life, authority had flowed from the bottom up – from the believer to the local church to the local association to the state convention to the national convention to the global alliance. Each was autonomous in its own sphere but derived its authority from the smaller entity, beginning with the autonomous Baptist believer.
Yet now this pastor was ceding the autonomy and authority of his church – to decide with whom it would partner – to the larger entity, the SBC. He had decided he would let his church take orders from the SBC. This is why Joanna and I had long since ceased regarding ourselves as Southern Baptists – because we knew the fundamentalists who had taken control would use their authority to control the churches and believers who chose to cast their lot with the SBC. And our pastor had just given a prime example to support our case.
Since 1995, I had directed a mixed choral ensemble that was already well into rehearsals on the music I had chosen that summer. Because I didn’t want to leave the music minister and the ensemble in the lurch, Joanna and I delayed our departure until the ensemble’s final performance, on June 13, 2004, before its annual summer break.
But mentally and emotionally, we were already gone in November 2003. The die had been cast.
THE SUMMING UP – NO MATTER HOW HARD I TRIED, I COULDN’T ‘CONVERT’ THAT PASTOR!
Until March 2000, I had never confronted the pastor with my concerns over his and the church’s violations of Baptist principles. We were not close, so I felt that he did not know me well enough to understand what was behind my concerns. For the first 10+ years of his pastorate, I limited my comments on such issues to Sunday School class discussions – but only when the subject matter lent itself to such issues – and, occasionally, one-on-one discussions with friends with whom I felt comfortable engaging such matters.
Then, in March 2000, the pastor wrote a letter to the church body that I took – rightly or wrongly – to be an effort to move the church in a fundamentalist direction. So I wrote the essay that I had put off for years – a five-page detailed statement of my position on the conflict between fundamentalists and moderates in the SBC. To this statement I attached a two-page letter to the pastor, in which I expressed my specific concerns about his letter to the church. I mailed it with no small feeling of trepidation. As I said earlier, he and I had never been particularly close, and I had no idea how he might perceive, or react to, my letter and statement.
The next afternoon, he called me, said that he had received and read my seven pages, and asked if I would like to come in and discuss my concerns with him. We made an appointment, and I went to his office the following week. We had an amicable discussion, and he asked me to serve on the task force that he was appointing to deal with the matter that was the subject of his letter to the church.
For the next four years, I continued to challenge him on matters that concerned me. Contrary to the amicable way in which he had responded to my March 2000 letter and statement, he was by turns flippant, condescending, or downright defensive and hostile.
As you’ve seen by the recounting of several disturbing incidents here, by May 2003, our frustration was approaching the boiling point. That month, I met with Foy Valentine, former head of the SBC Christian Life Commission and one of the moderate leaders who had been pushed out by the fundamentalists as they gained control. In 1963, Foy had been the only messenger at the SBC annual meeting in Kansas City to vote against adoption of the 1963 Baptist Faith and Message confessional statement, warning that such statements always wind up being used as creeds to divide the “ins” from the “outs.” Foy was prescient, for that’s just what happened once the Fundamentalists took over.
Foy and I met over lunch at Chuck’s, a hamburger joint near his house in Dallas. I wanted to meet with Foy to share with him what was going on at our church, and the frustrations that Joanna and I felt. I’m sure I shared with him some of the incidents I’ve shared in this post.
After hearing me out, Foy shook his finger in my face, exclaiming, “You’ll never convert that preacher!”
Within months, Joanna and I had decided that Foy was right, as usual, and we began to chart a new course.
Twenty years ago today, that course led us to Wilshire. Thanks be to God!