Mark Terry Recalls Conservative Resurgence and Reforms at Southern Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky

Most Baptist historians date the Conservative Resurgence in the Southern Baptist Convention to 1979, when messengers at the annual meeting elected conservative pastor Adrian Rogers as SBC president. According to Dr. Mark Terry, the election was the result of careful planning by Paul Pressler and Paige Patterson, who in the years before 1979 developed a strategy to take control of the convention. The key element was to elect conservatives to the presidency for many consecutive years, which they pursued by mobilizing conservative churches to send messengers to the annual meeting.

Terry explains that the presidency mattered because of how the SBC’s nominating structure works. Each year the president appoints the Committee on Committees, which chooses the Committee on Nominations, which nominates trustees for the mission boards, seminaries and other agencies. Messengers almost always approve the nominated slate, so conservatives reasoned that consecutive conservative presidents could gradually fill the boards with conservative trustees.

The conservative faction focused much of its frustration on the Christian Life Commission, now the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, and on Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, which conservatives regarded as bastions of liberalism. Terry notes that many Southern Baptists were not alive in 1979 and that many wonder whether the resurgence was necessary. He writes that he will explain, in his own opinion, why Southern Seminary needed change.

Terry describes his own early view. He graduated with a Master of Divinity from Southwestern Baptist Seminary in 1975 and then served as an SBC missionary in the Philippines, where he learned about the resurgence mainly from state Baptist papers. He says those papers generally viewed the resurgence as unnecessary, and he tended to agree because he had encountered no problems at Southwestern. His view changed after a fellow missionary studied at Southern Seminary during a furlough. That colleague reported that he was the only one of ten students in a doctoral New Testament seminar who believed in the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ, and that the professor himself did not. Terry says the report stunned him and made him rethink his position.

Terry explains that trustees normally serve two terms of several years, so conservatives took time to gain majorities on the boards. By the early 1990s, conservative trustees held a majority at Southern Seminary and began pressing for reforms, which brought them into open conflict with the faculty and administration. The dispute grew so intense that trustees and faculty agreed to bring in a mediator. The resulting agreement was called “the peace treaty,” and one provision required the administration to hire conservative faculty to “balance” the faculty. Terry was one of three conservative professors hired under that provision. He arrived on campus in July 1993, the same month Dr. Al Mohler arrived as the new conservative president. Terry says the trustees gave Mohler a mandate to reform the seminary while the older liberal faculty resisted change. The agreement that ended the standoff is a concrete example of reconciliation pursued through negotiation (2 Corinthians 5:18).

Terry recounts several early experiences. In his first class, on theology of evangelism, he asked students to open their Bibles to Genesis 3, and half the class laughed out loud. He says the conservative and liberal students sat on opposite sides of the room. He also reports that faculty meetings, which normally last 60 to 90 minutes, ran three or four hours during the first three years of Mohler’s administration, and that a group of professors once discussed a no-confidence motion against the president. Terry says he warned them the trustees would respond by firing and rehiring, and the motion was not made that afternoon. At a faculty Christmas party for the Billy Graham School of Missions and Evangelism, professors who had studied at Southern in the 1980s shared recollections, including one student’s count of a professor’s profanity in class, another professor striking his Bible on the lectern, and a view that many faculty were universalists. Terry also reports that one ethics professor spoke at abortion rights rallies and made pro-abortion statements on local television. These are Terry’s accounts of what colleagues said, not findings by any outside body.

Students also opposed Mohler’s changes. Terry says there were protests at graduations for the first three years, many students refused to shake the president’s hand when receiving diplomas, and students staged a sit-in in the hallway outside his office. He reports that Mohler ordered pizza delivered to them and they ate it. In the third year, the trustees offered the faculty an early retirement arrangement, and many older faculty accepted, so the faculty changed considerably within a few months. Terry writes that the campus atmosphere “changed like someone had flipped a switch.” When a friend asked him at a meeting how things were at Southern, he answered that the people who were happy before were unhappy now, and the people who were unhappy were happy. Terry says he believes the reforms were absolutely necessary.

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