Click for AUDIO; Click for PART 7, 2004: Joanna and I find Wilshire – thanks be to God!
Link in this post: Bill Jones, “Walking as Jesus Walked – In Our Neighbor’s Shoes,” Christian Ethics Today, February 2004
2001-2004 at our church in Plano: The beginning of the end
After my initial confrontation with the pastor in March 2000, we continued to clash – from time to time – over the next 4 years.
He could be very gracious most of the time. When challenged, however, he could be, in turn, flippant, defensive, dismissive, and downright rude.
After attending the Texas Baptist Laity Institute (TBLI) training at Wilshire in October 2001, I sought to be certified as a mentor. Certification required recommendations from two ministers, so I asked the pastor and the minister of music at our church, and both graciously provided the recommendation I needed.
Then the rubber met the road. I wanted to teach the Baptist Distinctives course. I took the syllabus to the pastor for his perusal. He began flipping through the pages until he came to a section covering the changes that took place in the SBC from 1979-1990, what some of us call the fundamentalist takeover. He said he didn’t want me teaching that section at our church; he saw it as potentially divisive.
I hadn’t expected that reaction from him. It took some time for me to think it through, but ultimately I decided that, if I couldn’t teach it all – in accordance with my own convictions, I wouldn’t teach it at all. So I didn’t teach any Laity Institute courses at that church. This had been the thrust of my efforts through the years – to educate that church on Baptist history and principles, and how those principles were being shredded by the “new” Southern Baptist Convention. Now the pastor was laying down an edict to me that flew in the face of all of that. It suddenly became clear that the ignorance of that church regarding Baptist history and principles was no accident. It was intentional on the part of their pastor. He wanted them ignorant . . . he saw an educated laity as a threat to his authority as pastor.
In March 2003, on the eve of the Iraq War, during a Sunday morning sermon, he launched an emotional and hateful diatribe against “Hollywood liberals” who had criticized George W. Bush’s intelligence. He compared their academic credentials with those of Bush, who came out on top every time. Then he brought the house down with his emphatic declaration that “George W. Bush isn’t stupid. It’s his critics who are stupid!”
In my 50+ years in Baptist churches (to that point), I had never heard such thunderous amens and applause as I heard for this political condemnation of a Republican president’s liberal critics. I was in the choir loft that morning. One of the greatest regrets of my life is that I didn’t get up, walk down from that choir loft, go find Joanna in the congregation, and walk out of that church with her, never to return. (Joanna, I should add, was ready to leave that church long before I was!) Instead, I sat stone-faced in the choir, to the point that a friend sitting next to me said, “Are you okay?”
No, I wasn’t okay. It had nothing to do with my being a Democrat. It had everything to do with my being a follower of Jesus Christ and having seen His holy house desecrated for the sake of politics. More than that, though, was the hatred I felt surrounding me at that moment – hatred for anyone who thought differently than them. Honestly, it felt evil . . . it felt satanic!
I shouldn’t have been surprised. In 2001, the church had built a new sanctuary. On a level above and behind the choir loft was a beautiful floor-to-ceiling stained-glass window, at the center of which was Jesus. That was the point of the window – that Jesus was to be at the center of our worship, the center of our lives. Yet on patriotic holidays, Jesus was nowhere to be found. A floor-to-ceiling U.S. flag completely covered that stained-glass window. On those patriotic holidays, only the most obtuse person (of whom there were many in that congregation) could fail to see the symbolism – that worship of country took priority over worship of Jesus.
Now the pastor added to worship of country a new idol – the Republican president and, by extension, his war to destroy people in a far-off land, in whom God had lovingly placed His image. Where God saw His own image, this pastor could only see the devil’s.
A few weeks after the pastor’s hateful diatribe, I drove down to Austin, picked up Daddy, and we drove to Abilene together for the annual T. B. Maston Foundation Lectures in Christian Ethics at Hardin-Simmons University (HSU). Daddy’s old friend and fellow Maston student, Foy Valentine – former director of the SBC’s Christian Life Commission – was the lecturer in the Chapel of HSU’s Logsdon Seminary. I had first met Foy in November 1987, when he received the very first T. B. Maston Christian Ethics Award at the Foundation’s initial biennial Award Dinner.
Following this lecture in April 2003, I told Foy of my frustration with my church in Plano and asked whether we could meet for lunch sometime to discuss it. We met in May at Chuck’s, Foy’s favorite hamburger joint near his home in Dallas. After I shared what was going on in the church and my attempts to confront the pastor and turn things around, Foy – who never pulled his punches – declared, “You’ll never convert that preacher!” Foy, as usual, was right. He knew that I was banging my head against a wall that would never give way.
By the way, Jimmy Allen, the last moderate president of the SBC, and with whom I served on the Maston board beginning in 2008, once told me of sitting with Foy at the 1963 SBC annual meeting in Kansas City during the vote on the 1963 revision of the Baptist Faith and Message. Jimmy told me that Foy was the only one in that convention hall who voted against approving it. Foy explained his concern that any such document would ultimately be used as a creed to require compliance with its statements. That came to pass in the 1990s after the fundamentalists took over the SBC. They acted to narrow the beliefs set forth in the Baptist Faith and Message, then required seminary personnel and staff, and ultimately even missionaries, to affirm – with their signatures – agreement with every jot and tittle of it. As usual, Foy had been right!
In September 2003, the pastor – in a Sunday morning sermon – announced a new policy concerning women teaching men in Sunday School. God had spoken to him, he claimed, over a three-day period. Before that, he saw nothing unbiblical or ungodly about women teaching men in Sunday School. However, during that three-day period, God had changed his (the pastor’s presumably, not God’s) mind, and now he was unilaterally issuing an edict that women would no longer be permitted to teach men in Sunday School at our church. In connection with his new policy, he had fired three long-time faithful female Sunday School teachers.
I used the word “unilaterally” to describe the issuance of his edict against women Sunday School teachers. Over the previous year or two, the pastor had been preparing revisions to the church’s by-laws; I assume these would ultimately be presented to the church body for its approval. At that time, I was in the midst of a 20-year career as a technical writer and editor in the corporate world. In that role, he had enlisted my assistance with these by-laws changes. He had started emailing them to me, piecemeal, for me to apply my editing touch to them – mainly grammar, spelling, etc.
As time went on, I became increasingly uncomfortable with the changes I was sent; I had begun to discern a troubling pattern and had become suspicious that the pastor was attempting, piece by piece, to consolidate control in the hands of the pastor. Maybe I was wrong, but I thought I had reason to be suspicious. His unilateral firing of the three female Sunday School teachers further fed my suspicion.
One morning in November 2003, I met with the pastor and the chair of the Committee on Committees at a local pancake house to discuss the by-laws changes. At this point, I have to back up just a little to give context to this meeting. The pastor had long known of my desire to promote the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship – and its missions and ministries – at our church.
Only weeks before this November 2003 meeting at the pancake house, he had stopped me in the hallway at the church one day and informed me that a change would be coming to the church’s annual three-week World Missions Conference, not this year but next. Beginning with the November 2004 World Missions Conference, church members would have the opportunity to host representatives of a favorite missions organization in their home and invite other church members to come meet them, hear their “pitch,” sign-up to receive their materials, give to them, etc. He then said, “So, for example, you and Joanna could invite a CBF missionary or representative to your home and invite other church members to come hear them speak.” Yes, he specified CBF, because he knew of our support of CBF.
Back to that November meeting at the pancake house a few weeks later. He shared with me that he had been at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary the previous week, discussing partnering with them to open a seminary in Russia. Then he dropped the bombshell: “Of course, you realize that if we do decide to partner with New Orleans Seminary, we will never be able to be involved with CBF.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because no church that partners with a Southern Baptist Convention seminary may be involved with CBF in any way.”
I was incredulous. I’m sure my jaw dropped, betraying my shock.
“You’re comfortable with that?” I asked.
“Sure,” he flippantly replied.
I still couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Though I had seen him violate other Baptist principles, I never imagined that he would compromise the autonomy of the local church, OUR church!
So let’s try one more time. “As a Baptist, you’re comfortable with that?”
“Sure.” Yet another treasured Baptist distinctive – local church autonomy – flippantly disposed of as yesterday’s garbage!
After 16 years of frustration at that church, this was the final straw. I went home that morning and told Joanna that it was time for us to go. However, I didn’t want to leave the minister of music and the members of my ensemble in the lurch, so we determined to wait until the ensemble took our usual break the following summer. I wanted him to have time to choose a new director for the ensemble before it reconvened in the fall. We had our final performance on June 13, and I went the next day to tell the minister of music – who had become my closest friend in that church – that Joanna and I were leaving immediately. (Oh, by the way, I did leave the pastor in the lurch with my edits to the by-laws changes uncompleted. Didn’t feel bad about that at all!)
I told the minister of music that, at the same time that God was guiding Joanna and me to leave our church of almost 17 years, God was also leading me to change my focus of service. I had sung in church choirs, with barely a break, since I was a child. As an older teenager in the late 1960s at Bethany Baptist in KC, MO, I sang in both the Youth and Adult Choirs. College choirs while I was at OBU, followed by adult choirs at various churches through the years. At Ken Caryl Baptist in Littleton, CO, from 1985-1987, I even filled in for the music minister whenever he was gone; after all, my degree from OBU was Bachelor of Music Education, with a major in Voice. At the church in Plano, as I mentioned earlier, I not only sang in the choir but, for those last nine years (1995-2004), I had directed – and sung in – a mixed choral ensemble known as Soul Purpose.
But, as I told him, God was leading me to change my focus. Wherever Joanna and I would wind up in church – it was still an open question at this point – I did not plan to join the choir or be otherwise involved in the music ministry. I believed that God was leading me to focus on my writing. How and where did God want to use my writing? I had no idea. As it turned out, God’s imagination covered more ways than I could possibly fathom! God was doing more than simply leading Joanna and me to a new church; God was leading us to new opportunities and new challenges.
I also shared with him another reason for not wanting to join the choir at our next church, but I’ll get to that in a moment, because I first need to mention something that may well have been part of my thought process in discerning God’s desire for me to focus on my writing.
Daddy visited us in Plano for Christmas 2002 (Mother had passed away in 1997). On Friday evening of Christmas week, Daddy and I sat down and watched two of my favorite movies together on TV: Driving Miss Daisy (1989) and The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1968). I had first seen The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter when it was shown during Christian Focus Week at OBU in the spring of 1970, my freshman year, and had loved it ever since.
The morning after Daddy and I watched these two movies together, I woke up troubled by one scene from each movie, and I went to my study and began writing as I believed the Lord had impressed me. Earlier that month, Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, the incoming majority leader, had praised Strom Thurmond on the occasion of his 100th birthday, expressing his wish that Thurmond had won the presidency in 1948, when he ran as a staunch segregationist on the ticket of the States’ Rights Democrat Party, aka Dixiecrats. I wrote an article tying Lott’s statement to the troubling scenes from the two movies.
I emailed my article to my friend Joe Trull, then editor of the Christian Ethics Today journal, the first week of January 2003. Joe called me later that day to say that he had read my article and definitely wanted to publish it, though it might have to wait awhile, because he already had material planned for the next few issues. He eventually published it in the February 2004 issue – the first article of mine to appear in a major Christian publication. My article was titled Walking as Jesus Walked – In Our Neighbor’s Shoes. I’m sure that article was on my mind as I discerned that God wanted me to focus on my writing.
I also shared with the music minister another – and just as important – reason for not wanting to be involved in the music ministry at our new church. After all those years of sitting in choir lofts during worship while Joanna sat in a pew, I wanted to finally be able to worship next to my wife, share a hymnal with her, put my arm around her, hold her hand, just be with her.
I’m so glad I made that decision. For 15½ years at Wilshire, before COVID hit in the spring of 2020, resulting in worship via YouTube for the next year, we did just that, and now – as I sit in those Wilshire pews week after week – I still “hold her hand” by rubbing the silver pendant that bears her thumbprint (and contains a few of her body’s ashes) and savor the memories of those years in those very same pews, where we shared a hymnal, held hands, and I put my arm around her. Sweet memories.