There’s an old Irish drinking song that was repopularized in the 1960s about a young soldier who ran off to South Asia to join the British armies fighting the Kandian War in modern day Sri Lanka. The lyrics capture the response of a young woman (and the mother of his child) when she finds him armless, legless and begging for bread scraps along a roadside southwest of Dublin, grotesquely disfigured and blind.
In deep sorrow over the shattered life and deformed condition of this once vigorous and promising young man, the maiden repeats over and over the sorrowful lines, “Johnny, I hardly knew ye.”
Matthew Queen
When news broke this week of a guilty plea entered in federal court by Matthew B. Queen, a Southern Baptist pastor and onetime occupant of the legendary L.R. Scarborough Chair of Fire at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, that song stuck in my head like a earworm funeral dirge.
Matt Queen, old friend, we hardly knew ye.
Where we came from
I first met Matt Queen in the late 1990s when we both attended Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C. Back then, I had a much-deserved reputation as an overzealous prankster, a political ladder-climber, and a brilliant albeit dangerous young seminarian. Some people liked me; I get the sense many didn’t. But I’ve always sought to be a true friend.
I once was thrown out of class by my church history professor, Keith Harper, with whom I am still close and pray for as he battles cancer. The reason I was kicked out was for making a tasteless joke about immigrants during a lecture. I once was put on disciplinary probation by then Dean of Students N. Allen Moseley for publishing a satirical newsletter. We have not spoken in decades. I once was fired from my job as a campus trash collector for sniping at “liberal” holdovers from the days of Randall Lolley. I have a letter from Paul Pressler addressed to me at seminary, encouraging me to go carefully through Paige Patterson’s trash, given my new job on campus.
Matt Queen, on the other hand, was a quiet and gentle-spirited student, loved by professors and his classmates alike. While some of us were arguing the finer points of supralapsarianism and going door-to-door to help re-elect Sens. Jesse Helms and Lauch Faircloth, Matt Queen was studying to show himself approved and organizing a campus ministry called “Doulos” that sought to reach every home in the Wake Forest community with the gospel of Jesus Christ.
“Matt Queen was a quiet and gentle-spirited student, loved by professors and his classmates alike.”
My trajectory took me into three successive bivocational church pastorates and two megachurch jobs over a course of 12 years, including a few part-time stints as a commercial landscaper and bagel shop worker. I took other jobs as a coffee shop barista, a bookseller, a department store clerk and a seminary news writer. In 2009, I walked away from the pastoral office and accepted a series of increasingly high-profile jobs in Washington, D.C., as a congressional investigator, a political sharpshooter and a crisis media and management consultant.
Matt Queen, on the other hand, finished his master of divinity degree and Ph.D. work at Southeastern Seminary and accepted an appointment as a professor of evangelism in Fort Worth under his mentor, patron and then-president Paige Patterson. His classes were increasingly popular among students. He was a favored academic adviser for doctoral candidates both young and old, including now Southwestern Chancellor O.S. Hawkins, with whom Queen has co-authored a book on evangelistic preaching.
In 2018, when Patterson was fired and a number of administrative changes were made, Queen stayed on at Southwestern. By October 2022, he was named the seminary’s interim provost under appointment by Patterson’s replacement, once-removed, and the school’s current president, David Dockery. That appointment took effect in January 2023.
What happened next
What happened next is a matter of public record, seminary press releases, official statements and now Queen’s public confession.
Within three short weeks of Dockery’s announcement, the seminary’s long-tenured female professor, Terri Stovall, brought to campus police a student report of sexual assault. Incidentally, the campus police chief at the time, Kevin Collins, previously held the same job under R. Albert Mohler Jr., at Southern Seminary in Louisville, Ky. What Collins did with the report is uncertain, but we now know it took nearly three months for an arrest to happen. That delay, coupled with the entire chronology of events, has abuse survivors, seminary leaders and reporters still scratching their heads.
Yet according to reports by seminary officials, a hurried meeting about the arrest was convened by then-Chief of Staff Heath Woolman, who along with Stovall and Queen huddled after chapel in the final week of January 2023. At that meeting, Stovall alleges and now Queen confirms, Woolman told the group to make the matter “go away.”
“Stovall alleges and now Queen confirms, Woolman told the group to make the matter ‘go away.’”
Stunned by what she’d heard and scrupulously determined to abide by the seminary’s written policies and comply with a federal subpoena, Stovall made contemporaneous notes and provided them to seminary leaders. In early February, wanting to get to the bottom of things, Dockery brought in all affected and involved seminary employees for a fact-finding meeting. What happened in that meeting is a matter of legally privileged and confidential employment records.
For her part, Stovall maintains throughout it all that she’d heard the order to destroy evidence, sought to inform her supervisors as required by seminary policy, and refuted persistent accusations by Woolman, Queen and others that she was either misremembering events or outright lying. All the while, Queen and Woolman continued serving under Dockery’s appointment.
Heath Woolman
Until May 2023, that is, when Woolman accepted the pastorate of Fruit Cove Baptist Church in St. John’s, Fla., a job for which Dockery publicly endorsed him. That same month, Queen sat for interviews with federal investigators and gave testimony that sought to undermine Stovall’s narrative of events.
Days later, Queen mysteriously located a previously unreported journal entry from the January meeting with Woolman and Stovall and turned that over to seminary officials and the United States attorney. By his own now admission, these fictitious notes were created long after he originally claimed in his testimony and were hastily manufactured to provide fraudulent exculpatory evidence.
What compelled Queen to sit down one morning, produce a bogus document, and then hand it over to government prosecutors is hard to understand absent a robust and orthodox evangelical hamartiology. Even then, it’s hard to believe when you’ve known Matt Queen as a soft-spoken, earnest and passionate evangelist for nearly 30 years.
Whatever the case, Queen seemed to rest easy in his crime for a season. He prepared to represent the seminary at that summer’s annual Southern Baptist Convention in New Orleans and to team-teach a course on evangelistic preaching with the seminary’s chancellor the following semester.
“Queen lied not once but twice … as he desperately tried like Lady MacBeth to get the damn spot off his own hands before anybody managed to notice.”
But in late June 2023, Queen was summoned to New York to testify in person before a federal grand jury. It was then that his shield of dishonesty started to crack and his criminal scheme began to unravel. According to federal prosecutors, Queen lied not once but twice, changing his story in the same sitting as he desperately tried like Lady MacBeth to get the damn spot off his own hands before anybody managed to notice.
Not suited for this
Those who’ve known Matt Queen for decades confess he never was built for that sort of spotlight on the denominational stage. In truth, he probably never was well suited for the administrative positions to which three successive Southwestern presidents imprudently promoted him. Nevertheless, and as I’ve opined for decades, competence and character too often take the backseat to blind loyalty and uncritical obeisance when denominational posts are being handed out. And while I refrain from even hinting that Queen is an unscrupulous or incompetent beneficiary of a corrupt system of denominational spoils, there is no denying he has spent most of his adult and professional life under the supervision of some shady characters.
Which is, of course, not surprising for a career employee who must learn to thrive in a convention whose most prominent theologians and denominational powerbrokers routinely apply an over-bloated hermeneutic of authority and submission to everything from the inner operations of the eternal godhead to the meal planning and suitcase packing of twentysomething newlyweds.
Whatever the case, Queen was quietly removed from his interim appointment as provost within days of his grand jury appearance. He had his teaching load cancelled. Yet he remained on the seminary’s website as a professor of evangelism until early 2024. Whether he stayed on the seminary payroll that entire time is not a matter of public record.
In February 2024, Queen accepted the pastorate of Friendly Avenue Baptist Church in Greensboro, N.C., a position he held for a few months leading up to his indictment in a United States District Court. This week, Queen changed his original plea of innocence and entered a new plea agreement with the government that slates him for sentencing in February 2025, one year after he left Southwestern Seminary and two short years since his criminal scheme began.
Neither Woolman nor Collins have been charged to date, and the Department of Justice has not indicated whether Queen’s conviction is the beginning or end of the government’s efforts to bring charges related to the handling of abuse at Southern Baptist entities.
How did things get this way?
Queen’s indictment and his ultimate confession answer few questions about what has happened in Southern Baptist life. Southwestern’s public statements have added additional light to this dark and totally avoidable development.
“Why are the Matt Queens of the convention the fall guys for a denominational culture that has resisted nearly every effort to implement needed sex abuse reforms?”
But what many Southern Baptist churches, religion writers and abuse survivors still struggle to understand is how things got so far. How did the world’s once-largest seminary get in such a state of financial and administrative dissolution? How do convention entities and entity leaders, knowing full well that government investigators have zero tolerance for criminal cover-ups, so foolishly continue to treat women who report abuse as less trustworthy than their male supervisors and counterparts, and persist in quietly sidelining known liars while publicly endorsing them for new ministry leadership positions several states away?
And how did a young man who was hardly potty trained in 1979 and once known for hot-hearted evangelism, a faithful Christian witness and exemplary denominational servant, become the poster child for a convention’s serial mishandling of abuse?
To put it more bluntly, why are the Matt Queens of the convention the fall guys for a denominational culture that has resisted nearly every effort to implement needed sex abuse reforms, erected stained glass windows and named whole colleges and campus buildings after known abusers and their enablers, and still treats as heroes some of the leaders who nurtured the formation of and greatly profited from that corrupt culture and the benefits it affords?
Clearly, nobody made Matt Queen falsify records. Nobody induced him to lie to federal investigators. And nobody told him to subject yet another Southern Baptist church or institution to the trauma and tragedy of a failed ministry leader and a fallen preacher.
But until Southern Baptists — and Southern Baptist entity leaders — get more serious about telling the whole truth about these institutions, their assets and their activities than they are about protecting the legacies of the chief denominational offenders and their enablers, hapless souls like Matt Queen will continue to have their teeth set on edge by the bitter chicory their denominational forefathers have swilled since those midnight meetups at the Cafe du Monde.
Indeed, more than 40 years of denominational warfare has left enough tragic examples of our brightest and best returning from the theological “battles” their resurgence heroes dispatched them to fight year after year. To find them now begging and broken along the Baptist roadsides and spiritually marred, practically unrecognizable and probably disqualified from any future service.
Matt Queen, we wish we had warned ye.
Benjamin Cole
Benjamin S. Cole is a crisis communications consultant who lives in Plano, Texas, and tweets about SBC life under the pen name The Baptist Blogger. He is co-host with Mark Wingfield of BNG’s podcast, “Stuck in the Middle with You.” He is nearing completion of a 20-year writing project with the working title, The Fall of the Red Bishop.
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