Two new podcast episodes tell the stories of changing pastoral ministry

Fifty years ago, O.S. Hawkins and George Mason were not estranged in their affiliation with the Southern Baptist Convention. Both men attended Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, and went on to become well-known pastors in large Baptist churches.

But a fork placed in the road in 1979 sent them down different paths — eventually as pastors of tall-steeple churches in the same city.

In two new episodes of our “Stuck in the Middle with You” podcast, we offer individual hour-long interviews with Mason, now retired after 33 years as pastor of Wilshire Baptist Church in Dallas, and Hawkins, at one point pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas — along with other significant pastorates and then heading the SBC’s Guidestone financial services.

In these interviews, we wanted to focus on changes these two men have witnessed in pastoral ministry across their lifetimes. Our intent was not to rehash the politics of the so-called “conservative resurgence,” although those realities necessarily pop up in the conversation. Neither pastor can speak of the last five decades of ministry without acknowledging the realities of a Baptist civil war.

Hawkins, who came to Christian faith as a high school senior in Fort Worth, remains fully supportive of the conservative movement that swept the SBC beginning in 1979. He considers himself a biblical inerrantist and believes the pastorate is for men only, according to scriptural mandate. One thing that separates him from other SBC conservatives is he’s never been mad about any of this. He has been and remains congenial to a fault.

Mason, who grew up in another Christian tradition in New York, became a Southern Baptist while playing football for the University of Miami in Florida. That led him to Southwestern, where he earned both a master of divinity degree and a Ph.D. He just missed overlapping with Hawkins, who completed a master of divinity degree there six years earlier. Hawkins later returned to Southwestern to earn a Ph.D. Both men are prodigious authors and respected as Baptist historians and theologians across an ecumenical spectrum.

Both educated in the same seminary by the same professors, yet it is their divergent ministry trajectories that we hope provides a helpful prism to understand how nearly five decades of Baptist holy wars influenced pastors whose shared fields of service might have had them close friends in generations past.

While Hawkins always served churches that remained in the SBC, Mason led his Dallas congregation to become a founding member of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and then formally broke all ties with the SBC in 2000. Wilshire began ordaining women as deacons and ministers in 1991 and in 2016 voted to become fully affirming of LGBTQ Christians.

These things all figure into their individual stories, but there are some interesting background connections the average listener might not know.

For example, the founding pastor at Wilshire in 1951 was Huber Drumwright, who at the time was a doctoral student at Southwestern. He went on to become dean of the School of Theology there and his brother-in-law, Ralph Pulley, campaigned for Drumwright to succeed Robert Naylor as president of Southwestern in 1978. Instead, trustees hired Russell Dilday, another native Texan with deep Southwestern ties.

Pulley, a Dallas attorney, was a longtime prominent member of First Baptist Dallas. He served four terms as a Southwestern trustee and held a longtime grudge against Dilday. During his second stint as Southwestern’s trustee chairman, Pulley was the single person most responsible for Dilday’s abrupt firing in April 1994. That firing, which Mason opposed and Hawkins supported, likely drove the final wedge of discord in the Texas Baptist family.

Understandably, First Baptist Dallas fell on the side of supporting the trustee firing of Dilday, who by then had identified as a “moderate” in the battle, and Wilshire fell on the side of supporting Dilday.

Thus, within the DNA of both First Baptist Dallas and Wilshire Baptist — led by two men on diverging theological paths — were planted seeds of the controversy that haunts the Fort Worth seminary to this day.

We’re releasing the two podcasts as a two-part series, beginning with the Hawkins interview today. We’ll follow that on Monday with the Mason interview.

In these interviews, you will hear commonalities in how church life has changed in half a century and differences in how the political landscape has played a role in those changes. You’ll also get an intimate look into the friendships we share with both men, the ways we disagree and keep those friendships, and how we all find ourselves at times stuck in the middle trying to live faithfully our shared commitments as Baptists, albeit from very different camps.

We hope you enjoy listening to these interviews as much as we’ve enjoyed recording them.

 

Benjamin Cole and Mark Wingfield are co-hosts of the BNG podcast “Stuck in the Middle with You.” Mark serves as executive director and publisher of Baptist News Global. Ben is a crisis communications consultant who blogs under the name “Baptist Blogger.”