By Bill Leonard
On June 30, Daniel Vestal retired as coordinator of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, an organization established in 1991 from divisions in the Southern Baptist Convention. In many ways his ecclesiastical journey reflects transitions in multiple religious communions, evident in denominational conflict, division, renewal and elusive historical identity.
Vestal grew up on Fort Worth’s south side, the son of a full-time Baptist evangelist, a calling of considerable evangelical significance in the Lone Star State. Nurtured to faith in Gambrell Street Baptist Church where his mother remains an active member, Danny (I’ll call him Daniel later), grew up preaching. You can’t get more Texas Baptist than that.
I have known Danny Vestal since he and I (AKA Billy Leonard) and his spouse Earlene (AKA Earlene Black) were students at Rosemont Junior and Paschal Senior High Schools in Fort Worth. Danny was a ninth grader when Earlene and I were seventh graders.
I wouldn’t say that Rosemont was rough, but Danny and I were among the few guys without leather jackets and “duck tail” hair styles. If memory serves, we both carried big KJV Bibles, and not just to “witness for Christ;” they came in handy in a fight. Yearbook photos suggest we probably weighed around 100 pounds — combined.
Paschal High was and remains a great school. At Paschal, history teacher Miss Gwen Howell taught us the unforgettable formula for Henry VIII’s six wives: “Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived,” a rubric I’ve used every semester for over 30 years. Danny was in the Bible Club, an organization that endured until the Supreme Court and the Baptist Joint Committee shut it down.
Then it was off to Baylor. In those days, choosing a Texas college was not difficult. If you were cool and football-fevered you went to UT, Austin, or Texas Tech, Lubbock. Humorist Grady Nutt said that Texas mothers loved for their kids to go to Tech since west Texas is so flat you could stand on the back porch and see what your kids were doing. If you were Baptist, you went to Baylor, knowing that if you stayed long enough, sooner or later you’d surrender for something.
Danny put himself through Baylor preaching youth revivals, a summer staple in Texas churches. And could he preach; a gift he retains to this day. From Baylor he went to the Baptist seminary in Fort Worth, graduating with the M.Div. and Ph.D., moving to pastorates like First Baptist Church, Midland, an ecclesiastical center of west Texas, where he solidified a reputation for pulpit prowess, solid pastoral ministry, and personal integrity.
At Gambrell Street Church, Paschal, and Baylor he and Earlene found each other; she his best friend across the years.
We lost touch for a time, but reconnected, as I recall, at the 1985 SBC meeting in Dallas, at the height of the denomination’s conservative/moderate controversy. Some 45,000 “messengers” showed up for perhaps the largest gathering of Baptists ever held in this world, maybe even in the next.
Later, appointed to the infamous SBC “Peace Committee,” he sought me out to discuss Baptist history, noting, “I’ve been a Baptist all my life and this fighting just isn’t who we are or what we are about.” We talked of Baptist identity, and Danny turned to Daniel before my very eyes, struggling with faith, doctrine and familial loyalties in the denomination that “new-birthed” him.
In 1989/90, for conscience sake, he became a candidate for SBC president, the last of the “moderates” to make a run for it. And when it was time to go, Daniel offered leadership and strength of character to a new entity, the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, following Cecil Sherman as coordinator.
From there he helped fashion a vision of what it means to be Baptist in a faith tradition vulnerable to schism since founders Smyth and Helwys split over baptism in 1611. Amid a redemptively eccentric constituency, Daniel worked to move CBF beyond old controversy to new vision, working with persons and groups inside and outside the Baptist fold.
In the great western film “The Searchers,” a Swedish immigrant welcomes John Wayne back from a failed quest for his lost niece. The woman’s son died on the search and Wayne apologizes for losing him. Her husband responds: “It was this land that killed him.” To which the woman replies: “Now Lars, it just so happens we be Texicans, a Texican is nothing but a human man way out on a limb, this year and maybe for a hundred more, but I don’t think it’ll be forever.”
When a ragtag band of Baptists decided to start something new, Texican Daniel Vestal went “way out on a limb,” working to re-form Baptist identity one more time. Maybe a new, postmodern generation will crawl out on that limb too, for “this year … or a hundred more,” till we get this Believers’ Church thing right, or die trying.
Daniel’s still out there, directing the Baugh Center for Baptist Studies at Mercer University. So from seventh grade to this very moment, I’m glad Daniel Vestal is my friend, grateful for the gifts he continues to offer a bunch of (relatively) cooperative Baptists.