The longtime moderate leader and pastor of Trinity Baptist Church in San Antonio, suffered a major stroke in August.
Buckner Fanning, who retired in 2002 after 42 years as pastor of Trinity Baptist Church in San Antonio, Texas, has died at age 89.
Buckner Fanning
Fanning, long respected as pastor to the entire city because of a series of popular 30-second inspirational television spots and leadership in ecumenical affairs, suffered a major stroke in August.
“God has taken home His best Valentine’s Day present ever,” his son Steve Fanning posted Feb. 15 on Facebook. “Dad is finally face to face with Jesus Christ, our God and the man dad fervently proclaimed to our needy world.”
Born in Houston on March 13, 1926, Fanning graduated from high school in Dallas and enlisted in the Marine Corps on his 17th birthday in 1943. He was among the first U.S. troops to land in Nagasaki, Japan, after the atomic bomb fell there in 1945, and what he saw prompted him to renew a commitment to Christ he made earlier as a youth attending First Baptist Church in Dallas.
Fanning enrolled at Baylor University during the Youth Revival Movement of the 1940s and 1950s that produced a number of Southern Baptist Convention leaders in the 1970s and 1980s, many who migrated to the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship formed in 1991 following a decades-long controversy in the nation’s second-largest faith group commonly called the “conservative resurgence.”
After earning an English degree at Baylor, Fanning enrolled at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas. From there he rose to prominence as an evangelist compared to Billy Graham, his friend since 1951, making the cover of Newsweek at age 30 in January 1957.
Fanning accepted a call to be pastor of Trinity Baptist Church in 1959 at 33, growing the small congregation into a megachurch with 10,000 members on its rolls. In 1990 Fanning made headlines when he announced his church would cut back its financial support for the Southern Baptist Convention to $2,250 a year, the minimum to qualify for a maximum 10 messengers at the SBC annual meeting.
In 1995 Fanning was featured speaker at the annual breakfast for Texas Baptists Committed, an organization started originally to resist an SBC-style “fundamentalist takeover” of the Baptist General Convention of Texas. He wrote for Christian Ethics Today, a journal started by friends of Foy Valentine, longtime former head of the SBC Christian Life Commission.
After leaving Trinity he worked with the Buckner Fanning Christian School, now known as The School at Mission Springs, in San Antonio. He joined the Fellowship of San Antonio, a church aligned with the Baptist General Convention of Texas and the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship co-founded by his son Mike Fanning and former Trinity associate Ron Hill.
Fanning’s successor at Trinity, Charles Foster Johnson, is now executive director of Pastors for Texas Children. The current pastor, Les Hollon, came to Trinity Baptist Church in 2009.
Funeral arrangements for Fanning are pending.