Beauty, ashes and the Southern Baptist Convention

Attending the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention is, in a word, exhausting.

Why any Baptist — pastor or layman — would take several days of vacation time, travel at significant expense, read all the printed reports, participate in all the official sessions, plus attend the ancillary events like seminary luncheons, fellowship breakfasts, affinity group panel discussions, exhibit hall meet-ups, press conferences and entity-sponsored rallies on about four hours of nightly sleep is beyond me.

And yet, that’s what I’ve been doing now for almost 30 years. There was a season when I gave it up and turned my focus to Washington politics, congressional investigations and K Street lobbying. But that seven-year hiatus never took me so far that every June my attention could not turn to the business of nation’s largest deliberative ecclesiastic assembly.

Even in the summer heat of Washington, D.C., with oversight hearings in full swing, lobbying activities swirling to meet legislative deadlines and 24/7 campaign fundraising, I often was found at my Capitol Hill desk with headphones on and the SBC streaming video minimized in the corner of my desktop monitor.

On the flight home to Texas this Wednesday night, I found myself asking again, “Why, Ben, do you do this? Why do you care what happens to the SBC?”

“I love Southern Baptists. I love our biblical preaching, our corporate worship, our missionary priorities and, yes, I love the parliamentary machinations that make it all possible.”

The short answer is, I love Southern Baptists. I love our biblical preaching, our corporate worship, our missionary priorities and, yes, I love the parliamentary machinations that make it all possible. Al Mohler once told me in his office that the SBC is like a bumblebee: It shouldn’t be able to fly, but somehow it does. On paper, it defies the normal laws of physics. In motion, there is a mesmerizing, simple beauty to its humming labors.

And that’s how I want to first reflect on this year’s meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention. There will be time enough to reflect on the strange events, the platform antics, the peculiar personalities, parliamentary snafus and triumphant egos that were on full display in Orlando. In time, I shall do just that. But my first reflections are about the inspiring beauty I saw during the 168th session of the SBC’s 181st year.

Fraternity

First, there was beauty in convention fraternity.

When you walk around the halls of the SBC annual meeting, it is clear that people are generally happy to be there and joyful to see one another. Whether reuniting with old seminary classmates or reconnecting with associational partners from prior fields of ministry service, Southern Baptists really do love each other. For the most part.

Now, I readily admit there are some people I never have liked and probably never will like this side of the celestial city. Walking at full tilt through the convention halls, I am ever aware that some people don’t like me either. A few years ago, I stopped a Southern Baptist leader with whom I’ve traded some harsh words in print and online. He’s been through employment losses, as I have, and while we had “patched things up” over a lunch years ago, there never seemed to be real reconciliation.

“Southern Baptists really do love each other. For the most part.”

So when I stopped him at the 2023 convention in New Orleans, I went intentionally overboard. I shook his hand furiously. I lavished on him all sorts of words of affection. I acted as if we were long lost brothers, now reunited.

It took him aback. I told him, “You should know that from now on, I am going to greet you with this same kind of exuberant and physically overwhelming enthusiasm. Every single time.”

Since that encounter four years ago, each and every time our paths cross there is a wry smile that curls around our faces. We stop what we are doing, interrupt whatever conversations we are having, and hug it out all over again. And now, I actually look for him at these meetings.

Somehow, in God’s gracious way, we have become brothers at peace; and it is both good and pleasant.

There was another great example of this on display in Orlando in how the two presidential contenders, Josh Powell and Willy Rice, treated one another both in public and private. At several points throughout the week, Josh and Willy found themselves in the same room or standing in the same flow of convention traffic.

And if you watched social media, people were snapping photos of them both, side by side, smiling and laughing together. Throughout their long campaigns, these two men demonstrated to their churches — and to all Southern Baptists — how to behave as Christian leaders. It never got nasty. They never swapped barbs. Their authentic courtesy, deference and benefit-of-doubt for one another was exemplary. One can hope it is also infectious. It was certainly inspiring.

Fidelity

Second, there was beauty in convention fidelity.

Over the years, I’ve offered plenty of criticism of convention leaders. At times, it has probably seemed that’s all I ever see: The failures, the missteps and, at times, the outright deceit and fraud. And yet, the SBC is served by men who are faithful.

There was David Dockery, for instance, and O.S. Hawkins. Together these two men have led Southwestern Seminary to emerge from nearly two decades of scandal, financial mismanagement and enrollment declines. This week, the seminary reported not only a complete financial turnaround but a clean bill of health from its accreditors.

There were former presidents like James Merritt and Bryant Wright and Bart Barber, each of whom have stayed the course, faithful and full of joy. All these men led the convention well. Each of them has experienced different family sadness behind the scenes, yet their faithfulness — to their spouses, to their churches, to their convention, and to their Lord — keeps their smiles enduring in a way that encourages other pastors at every turn.

Walking the halls were men like New Orleans Seminary President Jamie Dew and Midwestern Seminary President Jason Allen. Both men inherited schools that were on the ropes. In Kansas City, the school had been through back-to-back presidential dismissals and was routinely the subject of convention chatter. Fifteen years ago, people openly speculated that Southern Baptists would eventually close the seminary entirely.

And yet, the past 14 years have seen Midwestern emerge from the intensive care unit of higher education to become the fastest-growing of the convention’s six seminaries. The school’s motto — “For the Church” — has resonated with Southern Baptists, and they are sending their preacher boys to train for ministry at a school that beats that drum consistently and with winsome determination.

Likewise, when the Dew family arrived at NOBTS, the school never had fully recovered from Hurricane Katrina or from decades of eccentric leadership. The deferred maintenance was immense. The chapel was in shambles. The campus looked and smelled more like a funeral parlor than a vibrant, mission-focused and family-friendly center of ministry formation.

I’ve known Jamie Dew for nearly a quarter century. Our ministry paths intersected at my first full-time pastorate in Fayetteville, N.C. When he first got to New Orleans, I had clients in the Crescent City and we had frequent opportunities to enjoy meals, talk about our shared loves of hunting and even walk the campus and daydream about the possibilities before him.

When Jamie got to New Orleans, his four young children and his wife, Tara, were the first presidential family to step on campus in at least four generations. Seven years ago, the Dew children were barely riding bicycles. This year, all four teenage children were working the seminary booth, attending business meetings and serving alongside their parents. Jamie and Tara Dew and their kids were exactly what New Orleans needed, and the beautiful example they are setting for future ministry families is Southern Baptist leadership at its finest.

Frailty

Third, there is beauty in convention frailty.

There’s really no other way to say it. The Baptist leaders I grew up watching 30 years ago — if they haven’t already died — are showing the signs of age and infirmity.

Thirty years ago at my first annual meeting, I sat alone in an upper tier of the Georgia Dome and watched in awe as Mohler preached his convention sermon, “What Mean These Stones.”  Then, he was a trim, young, bookish man whose command of history, theology, philosophy and ethics exceeded that of any man his age and most men twice his age.

This year, Mohler has experienced very public episodes of frail health. At the convention, he spoke from the floor microphone reserved for use by disabled messengers. He’s visibly aging beyond his years. He does not look well. What hair remains has turned white. His eyes have dimmed. His shoulders have bent. His swollen frame is worrisome.

There were moments when I looked at Mohler in the convention hall, on the platform or on the giant screens hovering over the messenger seating, and I thought of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Nobody alive today was voting age when FDR was first elected in 1932. And few voting then knew how frail the New York governor’s health had become.

Through clever photography, the masterful use of mass media, and sheer determination, Roosevelt led a nation out of its darkest financial days and guided what has become known as our greatest generation. Yet behind the scenes, the president was suffering immensely.

When you see photos of FDR at Yalta, the 63-year-old president looks to be well into his 80s. Within two months of that historic photograph sitting between Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin, Roosevelt was dead from a massive cerebral hemorrhage. The years had taken their toll. The war had robbed him of sleep and health and life, and it showed.

But I also thought about Churchill; specifically (since that’s the word we are now using in Southern Baptist life), I thought about what Richard Nixon wrote of Churchill in his book, Leaders: Profiles and Reminiscences of Men Who Have Shaped the Modern World. In that book, Nixon describes his last meeting with Churchill in 1958:

“At the arranged time I went to Churchill’s house at Hyde Park Gate. When I was ushered into his room, I was shocked to see how his physical condition had deteriorated. He was in a reclining chair with his eyes half-closed. He looked almost like a zombie. His greeting was barely audible. He weakly held out his hand. He asked his aide for a glass of brandy and, when it arrived, drank it in one swallow. Then he almost miraculously came to life. The light came back into his eyes, his speech was clear, and he became interested in what was going on around him.”

In a similar way, Mohler’s obvious aging and declining health are almost miraculously overcome when the microphone comes on and the house lights are raised. On camera — and there is no really good camera angle for anyone speaking from the convention floor — Mohler’s frail condition is eclipsed by the power of his influence. His voice rumbles and his words flow, almost effortlessly. His hand chops the air with confidence. His gaze is penetrating.

For a moment in Orlando, it was like watching the man I’d seen three decades ago at that first convention in Atlanta. And in that moment, despite my determination to vote against his proposed amendment, my enduring affection for him overcame my ephemeral opposition to his floor action.

And, truly, there was something beautiful about seeing Mohler visibly aging but still in command.

Frail? Definitely. Feeble? Not in the least.

Similarly, Richard Land and Paige Patterson — both in attendance — are now using mobility scooters like the late registration secretary Lee Porter used when he sped through the convention halls a generation ago. Over the past years, I’ve been sent multiple pictures of both men from well-meaning messengers who want me to know they are on site. Some of my messenger friends admittedly wish they would just go away.

But, in a weird way, there is still something beautiful about seeing them there. Like me, they both love Southern Baptists. Like me, they’ve given the best years of their life to a cause they truly believe in. I would not deny them the joy of coming home every year, of sitting and talking to rising generations about old battles fought and won. In truth, I want them there, and I am able to trace through my own well-documented criticisms a sense of how the beauty that an enduring commitment to their Baptist family — to our Baptist family — is a reflection of God’s goodness to us all.

Which brings me to my final point.

Family

There is beauty in the convention family.

My favorite moment from this year’s annual meeting came late in the day on Tuesday afternoon.  A messenger — a young pastor attending with his young family — sought recognition on a point of personal privilege.

Now, ordinarily I wince as messengers attempt to use the specific language of Roberts Rules of Order when addressing the convention. More often than not, they do not know what they are saying or the particular rule they are invoking.

But this young father rightly exerted his messenger privilege.

There were not, he stated, sufficient spaces reserved for young families with strollers. Amid cheers from all over the hall, this young pastor asked that in later sessions more room would be made for families with infant children.

And were there ever strollers. Of all sizes and some holding as many as three kids at a time. Whatever else distressing may grab headlines about Southern Baptists, there are clear signs of hope and life and renewal.

TS Eliot’s poem “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock” has this wonderful couplet: “I have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons; I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”

Unlike Prufock, you could count the manifold blessings of Southern Baptist life this year, not in the banality of coffee spoons during seminary luncheons but in the ubiquity of baby strollers. Between every session and in every corridor, armies of them would cut through the mass migration of messengers like ancient Israelites walking through the Red Sea.

More than once, as a single man without children, I realized how much I have missed. It’s a recurring sense of loss I’ve grown accustomed to, particularly during hunting season when my friends are bringing their sons along for a first time on the “men’s trip.” For those few weeks in the fall, sitting around fireplaces with cigars and bourbon or enjoying communal dinners of roasted venison with generations of fathers and sons, I am often wistful for the life I did not choose, the family I did not have and the blessings I have thus been denied.

And yet, God in his kindness lets me have a front row seat to the joy of family life that so many of my friends have known and so generously invite me to share with them from time to time. And in those moments, up close and personal, I see the beauty of the Lord’s gift of family.

In a weird way — or maybe not so weird after all — the SBC in its faithful but frail leaders, its pastors, both young and old and their families, and its every day messengers with all their eccentricities and ecclesiastic quibbling — remind me every year who my family is, of the work we were put on earth to do, and of the glory of exalting together a Lord who lets us fuss and fight, laugh and cry, and sing and serve like the true people of God.

And that, to me, is truly beautiful.

 

Benjamin Cole is a crisis communications consultant who also is a former Southern Baptist pastor. He writes online as The Baptist Blogger and is co-host with Mark Wingfield of BNG’s podcast “Stuck in the Middle with You.”